Date   : Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:30:43 +0100
From   : "Ian Wolstenholme" <BBCMailingList@...>
Subject: Re: *INFO

A lot more complicated than I first thought, but it was no trouble
as the programme had been sitting on my "BBC B Development Disc"
for the last 2 years.

It's a shame how little use my poor old BBC B gets, when I fired it
up it still had the Electro Freddy flippy disc in it from the time we
were talking about flippy discs yonks back.

I'm not sure this programme is going to be compatible with Watford
DFS, I don't know the details but it must use up more sectors at 
the beginning of the disc to store the catalogue information.

My programme reads the file length information directly from
where it should be in the disc sector for Acorn DFS, which is a
bit naughty and very sloppy.  I should have used OSFILE really
for compatibility with other DFSes.


----- Original Message -----
From: Tennant
To:  "'Ian Wolstenholme'" <BBCMailingList@...>
Sent:  Wed, 30 Aug 2006 13:55:01 +0100
Subject: RE: [BBC-Micro] *INFO

Blimey...that code is definitely not what I would call "simple"...thanks
ever so much for going to this trouble. I'll report back on how my dad gets
on...

Does this account for the Watford DFS having up to 62 files?

Tennant 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Wolstenholme [mailto:BBCMailingList@...] 
Sent: 30 August 2006 12:28
To: tennant@...
Subject: RE: [BBC-Micro] *INFO

Curses, foiled again!

Of course you say things like "simple", "straightforward" etc. in an attempt
to appear knowledgeable and then when you go and look in the manual it's
about 5 times more complicated than the fudded mind remembers!

There is a simple OSWORD call to read the free space, but it's an ADFS call
and there is no corresponding call available to DFS.

So you have to read the disc size and then deduct the space taken up from
the files on the disc from this amount.  There are various ways of doing
this, I remembered a programme I wrote a couple of years back to give the
same output as 1770 *FREE on 8271 DFS, but having looked at it, it's a real
bodge although it works.

5 machines later (BBC DFS>>FileStore>>Master 512 ADFS 640K>>Acorn A5000 DOS
720K>>PC) it's here:

http://www.BeebMaster.co.uk/Downloads/8271spl.txt

Hope it does the trick!

Best wishes,



Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Tennant
To:  "'Ian Wolstenholme'" <BBCMailingList@...>
Sent:  Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:04:17 +0100
Subject: RE: [BBC-Micro] *INFO


-----Original Message-----
From: Majordomo List Manager [mailto:majordomo@...] On Behalf Of
Ian Wolstenholme
Sent: 29 August 2006 15:59
To: bbc-micro@...
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] *INFO


> Otherwise reading the free space is a fairly straightforward OSWORD 
> call
which could be knocked together in a few lines > of BASIC and then saved for
future reference.


I like the BASIC program idea, my dad has a home made menu system on each of
his disks that installs with Shift-BREAK. He cold easily include this as one
of the options in that menu. Any pointers on the required OSWORD command
(I've long since lost my BBC Advanced User Guide) and we have no reference
material for the Master!?

Tennant