Current events
The snapshot manager
Unfortunately "real life" problems have kept me away from doing serious work with the Spectranet software for a week or three, so I'm well behind where I expected to be. However, I still managed to get the first pass of the snapshot manager working. At the moment it's rather rudimentary, but it does at least have a scrollable file/directory browser, and it can load and save snapshots. It is invoked via the NMI menu (and is a ROM module). I am also moving the snapshot code itself to this module - for testing, this had lived in the BASIC extensions module. Hopefully, by next week I'll have the current firmware in a state where it's worthy of making a video update on what the Spectranet does so far.
The other feature I need to add is a rename system call for filesystems in the base ROM. This will need a slight rearrangement of some internal functions because the jump table is full, and there are some functions that can be combined or moved elsewhere to free up entries (I don't really want the jump table to take up more than 256 bytes). Also I need to write a portable TNFS server (the current one is in Perl, and although this is portable enough, Windows users generally don't have a perl interpreter, and most importantly - a Spectrum will never have a perl interpreter and I want the Spectrum itself to be able to be a file server for the ultimate retro network). Then after that, get some new hardware made for those who want one!
Winston 23:05, 28 December 2009 (GMT)