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From: nico@cs.ruu.nl (Nico Verwer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Re: Stealing vectors... IT's already documented!
Keywords: cookies XBRA
Message-ID: <1991May30.115257.19816@cs.ruu.nl>
Date: 30 May 91 11:52:57 GMT
References: <1991May25.164250.5204@menudo.uh.edu> <1991May27.210056.14706@mks.com> <1991May29.190047.15959@wam.umd.edu> <1991May29.234238.24892@menudo.uh.edu>
Organization: Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science
Lines: 26

In <1991May29.234238.24892@menudo.uh.edu> uace0@menudo.uh.edu (Michael B. Vederman) writes:
>Sorry, Flip!  The 'Cookie Jar' is not XBRA, or even remotely similar.
>And, unfortunately, you can not get the information concerning the cooking
>jar unless you are a developer (go tier 1 support and you'll get it).

If this is so, why should I use the cooking jar? I guess there are many
people like me, who ocasionally write a program which needs to steal a
vector. If Atari refuses to make the specification of the cooking jar
PD, it is better to use the XBRA standard, which is well documented and
PD.
I don't understand why Atari releases the "how to steal a vector"
specification only to registered developers. Is this to ``protect''
commercial developers against PD software? I think this is bad policy,
because it makes people write badly behaving programs.
I really need to write a vector stealing program myself, since there are
no programs supporting my SilentWriter LC-800, and I am not going to
hire a registered developer to write a printer driver for it.
When I first wrote a program which needed to steal a vector, I first
disassembled a few PD programs, to see how they did it. Then I just
imitated this. Now I have got the XBRA specification, with an example
using it in Turbo C, and my vector-stealing programs behave correctly
with respect to XBRA.
-- 
Nico Verwer                                       | nico@cs.ruu.nl
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Utrecht  | phone: +31 30 533921
p.o. box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands | fax:   +31 30 513791