Date   : Mon, 22 Aug 1994 10:35:49 +0100
From   : jfid@... (James Fidell)
Subject: Re: xbeeb updated on ftp.pipex.net

Stephen Quan wrote:

> > I've fixed a few problems and put xbeeb-0.1.1.tar.gz in incoming/xbeeb
> > on ftp.pipex.net.
> > 
> > Hopefully this will resolve most of the problems found so far...
> 
> This is a list of problems I have found (I hope you don't mind!).
> I tried loading and running xbeeb on a UNIX system configured as
> 
>     sparc 2 running SunOS 4.1.3 but with X11R5 extensions.

I'll see what I can do...

> * tar xvf gave me a problem.  directories in the tar file were
>   extracted as an empty file.  i worked around this my removing
>   the empty file and creating the directory and repeating the
>   tar command.  (must be an incompatibility between implementations
>   of tar)

I think that there's an incompatibility between SVR4 tar and SunOS 4.
GNU tar might solve your problems if you can use that.  Alternatively,
I could e-mail the shar files to you.

> * xmkmf worked fine!  first X application to do this for me!  :)

I'm flattered.

> * UNIX compiler didn't follow ANSI syntax, had to switch cc to gcc
>   in Makefile.

Yes.  I forgot to say that it's all written in ANSI C.

> * after running; ReadWordAtPC() crashes program.  Don't know why as
>   the debugger returns a value without crashing, must be a limitation
>   of my GNU compiler.  Fixed by commenting LITTLE_ENDIAN out define.

Hmmm.  Not sure about this one.

> * package starts up but then bails out with X error.  Corrected by
>   substituting the font names in the program with
> 
>      -adobe-courier-bold-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1
> 
>   not sure what you'll do in future, but maybe you could put
>   constants such as font names in your Screen.h file.  then again
>   your code in Screen.c is very neat!

How you get things to work depends on your system and which release of
X is running.  From the main directory, for X11R5, I'd do :

       $ cd fonts
       $ touch fonts.alias
       $ for i in *.bdf
       > do
       > bdftopcf $i < `basename $i .bdf`.pcf
       > done
       $ mkfontdir `pwd`
       $ xset fp+ `pwd`
       $ xset fp rehash

If you're still having problems, let me know.  I'd say that the fonts
should be correctly set up if the emulator is to run properly.

> After all of the above the application compiles and runs, but then :
> 
> * x applications grabs all my colour map; i have a 8 bit plane and
>   not many x-clients except for a few xterms.  i am not sure how your
>   application is implemented, but i should not think you need more
>   than 8 colours.

That's what I thought, too.  However, there are some problems which are
a little awkward to get around without having a separate colour map.  I
do intend to look at sorting this out in the future.

> * i tried writing a short basic program, and occasionally queer
>   behaviour occurs :
> 
>     * misses keys (sparc runs slower than your system)

This is quite possible.

>     * key repeats forever (happened only once, and it was the '6' key!)

I've never seen this happen -- perhaps some of the debug output might
help to see what's happening.  I'd imagine that it is because xbeeb
missed a KeyRelease event somewhere along the line.

>     * underline not in correct position (maybe my choice of font)

Definitely.  There are other things that won't be right, too.

>     * after a while impossible to type in a line longer than 4-8 characters?

This seems very odd, too.  I've not seen this problem either.

> Overall not bad!  How do you go about creating the ttext font??

See the above comments about getting the fonts installed.

> BTW, the doc and font subdirectories (on extraction) turned out to
> be empty, is this ok???

Definitely not.

James.

-- 
 "Yield to temptation --             |
  it may not pass your way again"    |     jfid@...        
                                     |
        - Lazarus Long               |              James Fidell