Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!xanth!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!moravian.EDU!nicholaA From: nicholaA@moravian.EDU Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: What's up, II? Message-ID: <8903290712.AA23076@batman.moravian.edu> Date: 29 Mar 89 07:12:47 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 53 Keith Rollin (keith@apple.com) writes: >Which makes me wonder: what is happening out there right now? I am intensely >interested in hearing what wonderful things people are working on in their >spare time. >What else are people working on? What other gems can we find in the dark >corners of people's hard disks and floppies? I think that if we get some ideas >flowing, we could start a new generation of "neat hacks" that made the Apple >II the coolest computer a person could possibly have! Hey Jason Blochowiak! Would you please explain to these people what "The Hurricane Editor" is and what "HyperHelp" is? (Jason wrote a nifty replacement editor for the ORCA/M-GS editor that has a ton of great features.. and the HyperHelp DA is a hypertext help system that operates as an NDA, allowing hypertext help on almost any program that's SHR based. The idea for the HyperHelp DA came from his text-based editor which has it's own hypertext help system built in. Pester Jason to finish this stuff so that we can all see it. :) He's really close.) I'm in the process of getting John Brooks to allow me to put out his replacement linker as shareware for him. John's linker replaces the incredibly slow linker in ORCA/M-GS and APW. It will not currently handle libraries, and makes you use intermediate files for the link, but it *DOES* create OMF 2.0 output, and is (roughly) 13x faster. It used to take 1 Minute, 23 seconds to link my IIgs terminal programs. It now takes 14 seconds with "FastLink." The linker has no limits on lable-table size (claris folks take note). To use John's linker, you have to run a small (9 block) program called "Fcon" (short for FastConvert) which takes the current OBJ files and make new files with John's own OBJ format. This only has to be done once a segment is re-assembled or re-compiled. (the conversion takes about 0.5 seconds per 64k). Then, to link everything, you just execute fastlink. What's surprising is that most of the time the linker spends is doing I/O. The faster the harddrive or ramdisk you use, the faster the linker goes... The linker itself is 20 prodos blocks long and loads quickly. (oh yeah, the 13x faster figure comes from John's own internal calculations without doing I/O -- and for those who don't know, John Brooks wrote Tomahawk/GS and helped with the animation routines for Alien Mind) andy ---- Andy Nicholas CsNET: shrinkit@moravian.edu Box 435, Moravian College InterNET: shrinkit%moravian.edu@relay.cs.net Bethlehem, PA 18018 uucp: rutgers!lafcol!lehi3b15!mc70!shrinkit ---- ALink PE: shrinkit I wrote ShrinkIT, send scantily clad women bearing colorful plumage of exotic waterfowl that squeal "beta! beta!" when pinched by overweight waterfowl pinchers. Ha.