Date   : Tue, 29 May 2001 19:59:51 +0000
From   : "W.H.Scholten" <wouter.scholten@...>
Subject: Re: Tape reading/writing

Thomas Harte wrote:
> 
> >  No, my comment was about the format being a year old and not being used
> >  much by emulators nor noticed in other ways. That as I said is nothing
> >  new...
> 
> Actually its used by my Electron emulator, two in development, BeebEm and
> B-Em. That constitutes every Acorn 8bit emulator that anyone has worked on
> since the UEF format was invented except pcBBC. The Stairway to Hell which,
> at an estimate, deals in at least 60% UEF's logged 12mb of downloads last
> week. At around a 30kb average file size, thats quite a few. I personally
> had 10 odd downloads of the utility for converting tapes to UEFs in the same
> week.

Ahum!

The above is an explanation to my first comment, i.e. referring to the
tape format suggestions many many years ago, the .dsk suggestion also
years ago and the uef format):

For the BBC the situation was at the time of your mail to which my first
comment referred, as follows:
     - just about no utilities, and certainly none to extract from/add
       to/catalogue an uef file.
     - very few files (large repository you say, I don't know how many
       eletron files there were, but for the BBC, there were veryfew.
     - only one BBC emulator had support.
     - You write a mail to advocate/draw attention to the format (which
       would not be necessary if it was used much!)
     - You say it's nearly a year old (and yet, there's only 1 BBC
       emulator supporting the format even though uef is meant as an
       emulator format; Although .inf could be used directly, there's no
       need so this is not an issue here (this is point is related to
       the utilities comment above)).
     - 'Noticed in other ways': Have you seen a real discussion (not
       isolated posts) about uef and a good tape format for emulators on
       this list? I haven't (same for .dsk and .inf tape format
       suggestions).

Conclusion: 'my comment was about the format being a year old and not
being used much by emulators nor noticed in other ways. That as I said
is nothing new...' is accurate, moreover it was just a comment saying
'this (=taking a while before something gets noticed) happens elsewhere
too'. I thought it was all very clear and it was an innocent comment,
but if you didn't see it, too bad. What I do not like though is that you
now describe the situation at this time to 'prove' that my comments were
wrong which were actually referring to your comments at which time the
situation was different!

So what's your point? Are you angry about some of my comments? None were
meant to offend, I always try to be completely accurate; your own
mails and the situation at the time implied what I wrote above.

> What is your definitely of 'used much'? And how much do you expect people to
> care about a tiny little nich file format?

I don't see what you mean with this comment.

Anyway, this is a waste of time on an irrelevant subject, and I won't
explain or comment any further on this subject.

Wouter