Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!gatech!bloom-beacon!oberon!pollux.usc.edu!papa
From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Atalk III 1.0e
Keywords: zoo arc vt100 ATalk-III chop zmodem
Message-ID: <14733@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 17 Jan 89 07:33:47 GMT
References: <242@lakesys.UUCP> <00063@meph.UUCP> <14652@oberon.USC.EDU> <343@antares.UUCP>
Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU
Reply-To: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 45

In article <343@antares.UUCP> pnelson@antares.UUCP (Phil Nelson) writes:
|In article <14652@oberon.USC.EDU| papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
||When running the resulting program one will get the dreaded
||"unable to load XXXX: file is not an objetc module".  Whatever program you
||are using, please turn auto-chop off for .ARC and .ZOO files.
|
|Please pardon my ignorance, but why must an auto-chop mung the end of a .zoo
|or .arc file? Shouldn't it leave the file alone if it doesn't know how much
|to chop?

Chopping works by getting to the end-of-file and searching backward for a 
particular "hunk" that indicates the end of an Amiga loadable program.
Using the fact that the uploaded file has an .ARC or .ZOO extension works
most of the time, except when the user "renames" the file he/she is downloading
(Note that auto-chopping has a meaning only for Xmodem transfers that require
the user to select a "local" filename in which to store the incoming file.
YMODEM Batch, ZMODEM and Kermit file transfers always send the file 
size together with the file, so A-Talk III completely ignores the Auto-chop
setting for these transfers.

|By the way, I received my A-Talk III upgrade today, I'm running it now. So
|far, I like it! I tried a 9600 baud Z-modem transfer from a Sun server at
|work, it worked 1st time, and very quickly. 

The ZMODEM code has been improved a LOT.  As a matter of fact some UNIX hosts
cannot keep up with the speed A-Talk III can send files at.  We are planning
further unprovements to ZMODEM's performance by encoding the CRC generation/
checking in assembler. That's were now most of the time is spent, and those 
routines are still written in C (as ALL the rest of A-Talk III).  By the way,
I'd like to acknowledge the help we had with code improvements with Tomas
Rokicki's [sorry If I misspelled it] profiler.  The profiler works like a champ
with ALL versions of MANX after 3.40e and is provided in the MANX release 
disks.

|It may be that I will finally
|retire vt100, which I have been using in preference to the several other
|commercial comm programs I own.

Maybe :-) Thanks, anyway.

-- Marco Papa 'Doc'
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