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echo: bluewave
to: Shawn Highfield
from: Dale Shipp
date: 2018-07-25 01:28:00
subject: Re: Blue Wave Linux

-=> On 07-24-18  10:33,  Shawn Highfield <=-
 -=> spoke to Dale Shipp about Blue Wave Linux <=-

 DS> I don't know if BW can run under Linux, but there is an OS/2 version.
 DS> Since my current computer is a 64 bit computer, I cannot run it in
 DS> native form -- but choose to run it in a virtual window with Win XP.

 SH> I use it in dosbox on my 64bit windows and linux computer.  So that
 SH> will work as well!

There is another dos emulator that I like better than DosBox.  It is
called vDOS, a link to info and download page is:
https://www.vdos.info/download.html

DosBox was mainly written to support games.  The program vDos has some
other features which I find nice, e.g. you can configure it to print
something.

It is worth mentioning that both DOSBOX and vDOS have BlueWave
exhibiting two problems that it does not show when run in a 32-bit
environment.

One of these is minor and cannto (to my knowledge) be fixed.  That is
that when BW is run in its usual environment, it does not alter the
date/time stamp of the QWK file.  In fact it uses that fact to help
display the files and their read/personal info in the listing of QWK
files.   When run with either DOS emulator, the date/time stamp is
changed -- presumably because they detect that the file has been touched
and changed.

The second one is more serious, but a fix has been issued.  There is a
fairly long discussion on the forum Vogons about this.  The solution is
given in the post as quoted below, but you will probably need to go to
that forum to get the link to the fix.

[quote]
The problem was easier to find with the DOSBox debugger than I thought
it would be. Blue Wave appears to have a flaw where it uses the DOS
"FindFirst" function INT 21/4E with a malformed filespec. Using the
example mail packet the program comes with, it tries to find
"C:\BWAVE\WORK\WELCOME.XTI*.BAK". MSDOS 5/6 and the WinXP NTVDM are
unforgiving and return error code 3 (invalid path), leading to a benign
result. DOSBox is more lenient, and finds the "WELCOME.XTI" work packet,
which the program proceeds to delete. Maybe the intent was to clean out
.BAK files in the work folder; but that seems redundant because the
program deletes *.* from there when it finishes recompressing the
packet. It's probably just a mistake that wasn't noticed until DOSBox
shed some light on it. 

I adapted a little interrupt watchdog program to work around this
situation in DOSBox. It monitors the FindFirst function, and if it sees
a filespec with an extension of XTI* it will override with an error code
3 result. Run BWAVEFIX.COM from the BWAVE folder; it runs BWAVE.EXE as a
child program. The child exit errorlevel is reflected through the
parent, and the parent command line is given to the child, so the
program is friendly to batch files. Assembler source code is included in
the attached archive.

ATTACHMENTS
 BWAVEFIX.ZIP
(1.55 KiB) Downloaded 101 times
[/quote]

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=18242&hilit=bluewave&start=20


... Shipwrecked on Hesperus in Columbia, Maryland. 01:53:46, 25 Jul 2018
___ Blue Wave/DOS v2.30

--- Maximus/NT 3.01
* Origin: Owl's Anchor (1:261/1466)
SEEN-BY: 15/0 18/200 19/36 34/999 90/1 116/18 120/331 123/140 153/7715 218/700
SEEN-BY: 220/60 222/2 230/150 152 240/1120 250/1 261/38 100 1466 266/404 512
SEEN-BY: 267/155 275/100 280/1027 282/1031 1056 291/1 111 320/119 219 340/400
SEEN-BY: 342/13 393/68 396/45 633/267 280 640/384 712/132 620 848 770/1
SEEN-BY: 801/161 189 2320/100 105 3634/12 5020/1042
@PATH: 261/1466 38 712/848 633/267

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