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From: VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Version Number Confusion
Message-ID: <8906121449.AA01174@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 12 Jun 89 14:50:00 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
Lines: 62
X-Unparsable-Date: Mon, 12 Jun 89 15:25:25 SET


In Info-Atari16 Digest #276, imagen!atari!kbad@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
(Ken Badertscher) writes:

>When TOS 1.4 becomes available to the general public, it'll be pretty
>obvious from the Desktop Info box what its name should be.

Don't forget that many people only have a monochrome monitor. :-)

>                              ... it might be worthwhile to have a
>"version-checking program" so that people can know what TOS version
>they're actually using.  ...

It definitely might be useful.  Unfortunately, most software checks the version
date. For example, the ICD hard disk driver knows about the Beta ROM date, but
fails to recognize my 1.4 version, which is dated Feb 22, 1989.

Also, in Digest #277, he writes:

>In article <801@orbit.UUCP> steve@pnet51.cts.com (Steve Yelvington) writes:
>:The Sversion() Gemdos function allegedly provides this information, but on my
>:STFM it returns a value of 0.19. Does anybody know whether Sversion() really
>:works?

>Hmm, Sversion is returning a float value?  Hmmm... ;-)

>Sversion() returns the GEMDOS version number, not the TOS version.  The
>GEMDOS version number for your machine should be 0x1300 (our version
>numbers are all WORD values); I'm not sure how you get 0.19 from that,...

Many shells display it that way, there's a logical explanation which I had
figured out at one time. ;-)

>but...   In any case, the TOS version number is in the OS header.  To
>get the TOS version number, use the pointer to the OS header (sysbase) at
>0x4f2.  The TOS version number is the second word of the OS header.

Does anyone ever check there ??  I doubt it.  Since Atari documented Sversion()
as "the OS version call" (and the IBM equivalent *does* return the current OS
version number), many people relied on that call.

>To add to the version number confusion, the AES has its own version
>number too (returned in global&0a on appl_init)!

To add even more, what now is the *real* TOS 1.4 version, the one dated
22-02-1989, the one dated 04-06-1989, or the one I'll get next week, with a
version date somewhere in May ??   :-) :-) :-)  All have $0104 coded in the
ROM header, as they should. The only possible way for a program to tell them
apart is by checking the ROM header date code.

>Can you now see why we don't like to give OS releases specific version
>numbers? ;-)

Yeah, quite. We need a little version checker program, authorized by Atari.

PS: Whatever happened to that environment-setting accessory ?  It could pop
    up a little dialog, telling us: TOS/GEMDOS/AES version # and date code.

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