PureBasic Forums - English

And at this point a TV advertisment of a toothbrush shows more intelligence than humanity again...

TI-994A wrote:What I see are the words "poor design", which, sadly, is a fact. Texas Instruments have always manufactured the highest quality electronics, and the TI-99/4A was no exception. It comprised some of the finest componentry from Texas Instruments, especially the 16-bit TMS9900 processor, and the solid state speech synthesizer; the only computer in its class to have one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currah

Please no war between TI-99/4A and the ZX Spectrum, it would get bloody because i would fight to the death for my lil plastic brother

I'm sure the Atari 600/800 computers had those synthesizers too, sadly i never owned or worked with a TI-44/9A but i remember well what happened when i tried to buy one here. The IBM PC shop guys had TI99/4A and ZX Spectrum on display of their shop, and when i happily entered the shop, they told me that they only sell IBM PC's and those other computers where there just to show off the "professional class" of their IBM PCs compared to "those home computers"

There was another computer shop who offered TI-99/4A for sale and i entered the shop and asked if the computer would be delivered with some kind of assembler or if i had to order it seperately. Their surprised reply to me, was that "this computer can't speak assembler, but it supports BASIC". I hardly made it out of their shop without laughing But you probably see why i then went looking for other computers. I remember how advanced the TI-99/4A looked technically at that time, and i really wanted to leave rubber keyboards in the past (after owning a ZX 81 and ZX spectrum), but TI-99/4A support in my region seemed non existent.

Good old times <3 but i think we are getting slightly off topic even for the off topic forum by now

ps: i think the really sad part is that today this diversity does'nt exist anymore. Now we have different gaming consoles but only one "computer". Ok ok - and apple who somehow didnt realize this and survived with a digital walkman accidentally

Ramihyn_ wrote:Please no war between TI-99/4A and the ZX Spectrum, it would get bloody because i would fight to the death for my lil plastic brother

I'm sure the Atari 600/800 computers had those synthesizers too...

Don't worry; no cause for war to begin with.

IIRC, that third-party device was launched towards the end of 1983, after Texas Instruments had pulled the plug on the flailing TI-99/4A.

And, I believe that the one for Atari was not hardware-based, but rather a speech synthesis software application.

It still stands; the only computer in its class to have a solid state speech synthesizer.

Nevertheless, you're right; good times!

What I had to work with was pure junk. I was not in a position to do better than what I had, and I had limited documentation to work with. It might have had some nice stuff inside, but they did not show on the outside,

You claim it had PEEK() and POKE in its Basic, but there was no evidence of that, as it was not in the docs and the commands were not recognized when entered. Byte IS the correct spelling for a single unit of memory, be it 6 bits, 8 bits, or 12 bits, as in the early days, there was division as to what size it should be. Without PEEK() and POKE or inline assembly, there is no machine coding from Basic. TI sold a developer's kit for thousands, and with that you got some or all of what you describe. That was not for the average person. There was no reason to go to TI when it was no where near mainstream.

You make claims and hurl insults, but let others judge on the face of it now. TI is not in the game, is it? That tells you something. And the dates 72 and 74 was picked up from a history of early PC years found online, so check your facts first for a change. And get off my case, I've more important things to attend to.

I'm freed up enough at the moment to resume discussing superblocks and providing data on what has happened to my drives, but I've found this thread poisoned by some indifferent souls and their detraction from the real problem, so I'm done here.

Find me under General Discussion, and I will show you how you can check for superblock problems yourself. No harm to your drive when you do this, and it is entirely under your control and independent of my direct involvement. I just cite what I do, and you decide if you do the same or try something different.

It was propposed a subunit would be named nybble instead of nibble, but it never caught on. An early advanced PC Mag was named BYTE, but you probably don't remember that. It nearly went under and was picked up my Ziff-Davis, and finally went away. I liked its slant on things, an wished I could get my hands on an early article about processing an algebretic string of characters.

oldefoxx wrote:An early advanced PC Mag was named BYTE, but you probably don't remember that. It nearly went under and was picked up my Ziff-Davis, and finally went away. I liked its slant on things, an wished I could get my hands on an early article about processing an algebretic string of characters.

Maurier, W.D. (1976, February). BYTE the small systems journal, Processing Algebraic Expressions, Volume 0 Issue 6

Now THAT is a reply I can appreciate! Thanks a lot for the link.

I'm going to pass on my little command line process in sh or bash for generating td1.txt and td2.txt from a testdisk.log file. If you run Windows. you wont't have bash natively. but you can download a Ubuntu LiveCD iso and make a dvd disk or put it on a USB stick and boot up to it. You can even install it to a stick or added partition, or just use it in Try mode.

What you will need is the free testdisk program which you can find online. Or get a free recovery/repair CD ISO image that has it on there. Use that to run testdisk, but the trick is to enable the log file feature, then work down to where you do the deepest search. That goes sector by sector, which takes quite awhile for large drives.

I'm not expert by any means, but skimming through the log afterwards you can find if there are errors or not. A good skimming tool is the command

less testdisk.log

If you want to find specific errors, use this command instead:

grep "wording" testdisk.log

where "wording" is something like "error" or "fail". Case is important. For ,more specific errors, use the less command and scroll up or down with the arrow keys until upu see what you want to search for.

These commands are done through a terminal, and in Ubuntu, you open the right top icon button which is to Dash, and type "te". That is enough to get you to the terminal. Lower on that left panel you can see icons for any partition that is recognized. You can also open and run gparted from a terminal window. These two programs run with the partition unmounted. You can mount or unmount a partition via its icon on the left panel. Tou can also unmount it from gparted under Partitions. Not that most options under gparted do not take place until you click on "Edit" and click on "Apply All Operations"/ gparted leaps ahead in what it shows sometimes. but it does not happen if any operations are still pending.

On that LiveCD, the user name is ubuntu and there is no password assigned. All mounted partitions appear in terminal mode under folder /media/ubuntu/. This directory structure does not exist until at least one partition is mounted. You can get to any folder/subfolder with the cd (current directory) command. You can see what your present level is with the pwd (present working directory) command. You can see the contents of the folder with the dir (directory) or ls (list) command. You can become super user (root) with the sudo -i command. Most commands can be queried by <command> --help. where <command> might be any valid loaded sh/bash command or any installed program.

This is not the place to teach Linux or bash, but I've been off Windows since 1998 and won't go back. I'm showing you it is simple enough to do many things under Linux, and a LiveCD (meaning it includes both a Try and and Install process), is an easy way to get you on board with what I know and can do. Whether you vhoose to do it or not is your business.

The LiveCD only uses RAM natively for the Try feature. You need to get testdisk.loh gone to someplace permanent before you ahut down or reboot. Upload it to a web site. send it to yourself if you like, or mount a partition long enough to copy it there is about all I can suggest. There is plenty of small free Cloud storage accounts around if you look for them. The are very slow compared to actual drives. but for the price, that is not a big deal.

I have a file of another bad drive's log to upload for your inspection. Trouble is, there seems to be a (hopefully) short term problem getting it uploaded to my free account with pcloud.com. It's worth checking out, as few places give you 20GB free storage/ They do, and this is the first problem I've had with that account.

So here is the code, and I am done for the night. Some final words about terminal: To scroll a screen up and down beyond the screen limits, hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys together and use the up and down arrow keys. Also use Ctrl+Shift with the C or V keys to do a copy or paste from ot to the screen. The copy will always be from the portion highlighted using the mouse. The pastr will always be an insert at the current cursor position on the terminal window, assuming the focus is still there. The hold area is the clipboard, meaning you can use the regular Ctrl + X, C, and V to copy and paste between the terminal and some other opened window or file on your system. Used well, the clipboard can eliminate a lot of typing.

One last thing: There is no set limit on the length of the command line. It can wrap on and on and appear on multiple lines. You can join multiple commands with ; as a separator or use && to extend a true condition through multiple commands. Anf logical expressions are evaluated in either [ test ] or [[ test ]] pairs, one for numeric and one for strings. && represents a logical AND, while || represents a logical OR. NOT is represented by ! or ^. Logic-wise, you do have am if ...; then ...; elif ...; then ... else ...;fi structure. but as you can see. I merely inferred a logical sequence without use of if ... fi

Seriously now, I'm gone for the time being.

DarkDragon wrote:

oldefoxx wrote:I'm not offered a choice of doing either quick or long formats. gparted and the installer so quick formats for ext4, but long formats for ext2 and ext3. Trouble is, these formats skip the orphaned superblocks according the teskdisk's deeper search after the format completes. Like I said, it seems normal writes apparently avoid or skirt existing superblocks, though new superblocks are written to report details of the partition during the format process.

I don't know what you mean by orphaned superblocks, maybe because I'm not often enough working on that level. IIRC superblocks are storing the main partition information (am I right?), but why does someone mark them as orphaned and why shouldn't they be deleted during a format? Can you answer these questions in short answers, please (<=100 words each)? Doesn't the fsck utility help?

I know how to directly access the harddrive under linux. Just write to /dev/sdX or /dev/hdX (depending on the harddisk type). Handle it like a normal file, but make sure no partition of it is mounted. If you only want to write to a specific partition you can also attach the corresponding partition number Y to it.

I refer to them as orphaned because the partitions they belonged to no longer exist. To date, none of the processes mentioned make any effort to remove them, and at least one process tries to use them to "correct" the partition table, which causes a magnitude of new problems when partitions overlap each other.

I believe that answer suffices and meets your word limit. Correct me if I am wrong on either count.

Thought you were done here.

oldefoxx wrote:What I had to work with was pure junk. I was not in a position to do better than what I had, and I had limited documentation to work with. It might have had some nice stuff inside, but they did not show on the outside...

Don't blame the computer for your own shortcomings. The truth is, you were not in a position to do better than you were able to.

Next time, just blame the weather.

oldefoxx wrote:Byte IS the correct spelling for a single unit of memory, be it 6 bits, 8 bits, or 12 bits...

oldefoxx wrote:Ignoring facts or not verifying what you think are facts can come back and byte you.

But it's not the correct spelling in the context you used.

oldefoxx wrote:Without PEEK() and POKE or inline assembly, there is no machine coding from Basic. TI sold a developer's kit for thousands, and with that you got some or all of what you describe. That was not for the average person.

Firstly, Peek and Poke are BASIC programming functions. Secondly, assembly language has never been for the average person.

And now you're suggesting that entry-level home computers in the eighties were capable of inline assembly? You must be kidding!

oldefoxx wrote:...let others judge on the face of it now. TI is not in the game, is it? That tells you something.

Not in the game are Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair, just to name a few. The former two are long gone, while Atari is holding on to dear life as a brand namesake, and Sinclair is making bikes.

But Texas Instruments is still going strong in the industry, continuing to manufacture state-of-the-art computer processors and components.

Another failed argument.

oldefoxx wrote:... the dates 72 and 74 was picked up from a history of early PC years found online, so check your facts first for a change.

And more out-of-context rambling.

Thanks for the laughs, but please avoid topics that are beyond you.

oldefoxx wrote: Mon May 23, 2016 12:35 am

nco2k wrote:tl;dr

c ya,
nco2k

Neither Ubuntu nor OpenSUSE recognize tl or dr. Looks like you have something going under Windows. Some more details whould be greatly appreciated. This muxt be custom code you are referring to, not generic to Linux. If it does what you suggest it does, that would be really great.

From what I am told file systems are stagnated waiting on stuff to catch up with SLC P/E in solid-state. That's why most people are ignoring everything outside of ext4, NTFS, and HFS...