Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 11:36:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Wesley W. Garland" 
To: andrew clarke 
Subject: Re: Maximus / Squish UNIX Port -- You can help!
Message-ID: 

On Fri, 23 May 2003, andrew clarke wrote:

> Are you connected to the MUFFIN echo?

Not yet, but I plan to be shortly. I need to sort out my Binkd->NEC
password problems, and find an Areafix (is that what it's called? haven't
done fido in 10 years) program I can use. Also, Maximus is currently broke
(whoops) -- and it's the only echomail software I'm running right now. If
you could cross-post this I'd appreciate it. (Have you got a telnet bbs
where I can post to MUFFIN?)

> There has been some talk of a
> UNIX port of Maximus from Bob Jones but nothing came out of it since
> then, so I was quite surprised to read a message from Bo Simonsen about
> you doing a UNIX port.  It looked like an amazing amount of work to me
> because of all the DOSisms in the code.

Yeah -- there was a fair bit of work involved in that, but I'm pretty
proficient C coder and porting is favourite game of mine. :)   I also
emailed whoever it was on SourceForge who was talking about a port
(probably Bob), but haven't heard SFA from him.

> I did try connecting to wes.zapto.org:2000 with a telnet client but
> nothing happens after the initial connect (even after sending
> CONNECT^M^J).  Maybe it's down?

The MEX virtual machine has been puking on me for a few days -- I expect to
fix it shortly, but just haven't had the time, as my wife is in the
hospital -- making me a single parent (whoo, what a lot of work!). I still
expect to have it stable by the end of the month, and I'm pretty sure my
MEX problems are 64-bit CPU related (it would probably work on Intel; I'm
testing on Alpha).

> Anyway, I'd be glad to help the project where I can.  I'm a C programmer
> with some experience porting Msged to 32-bit Windows, and more recently
> timEd to UNIX and BeOS.  I have access to systems running FreeBSD 4.5 &
> 4.8, SuSE Linux 6, MkLinux (on an old PowerMac), OS/2 Warp 3.0, BeOS 5
> and MS Windows (98SE, 2000 & XP) here.  I use several compilers on the
> Windows machines - Cygwin, Borland, MSVC, Watcom, etc.  Lots of test
> systems...

Cool! Are you any good with C++? (I'm not)  I'm afraid that some of Scott's
C++ may be problematic under newer compilers, since the standards have
changed since he wrote it (it's riddled with warnings but seems to work
okay under ecgs-2.91).

So, where do you feel like starting / what do you feel like doing?

I would definately like to know what it does and doesn't build on, and
where the problems are. Squish is stable (I think -- it needs more
testing); Max is unstable on my platform but may work better under Intel. I
haven't written any GNU Autoconf support for it yet, but I tend to code in
a fairly UNIX-agnostic way, anyhow.

There a few *major* things on the hitlist before I'll consider Maximus-unix
done: 1. Some kind of an installer (The DOS-based one will be hell to port)
2. Big Endian support (he does file-io directly into structs.)
3. Better comm driver (not too hard -- talk telnet instead of raw socket io)
4. Fix local console support -- it's always one screen update behind (very
odd). Once BE support is done, I can figure this out quickly, because I
have better debugging tools on my sun workstation. 5. Fix MexVM (It's
free()ing unallocated space -- I think because he is coercing pointers into
32 bit ints and back -- pointers are 64 bits on my machine) 6. Develop
Serial IO comm driver  (using POSIX termios)
7. Of course, TESTING

I expect to tackle these in the order 5, 3, 1, 2, 4, 6 with 7 paralleling
the whole thing. I have tonnes of experience with comm drivers of all
sorts, the one that exists now was just "whipped together" before
chatting with Scott. My curses experience (4) is somewhat limited, but I
believe adequate for the task at hand. It's kind of funny, he has his own
version of curses which talks to the underlying hardware -- and I replaced
the underlying hardware with curses. Big Endian support is going to be a
long and arduous task of hunting through the code. The installer is
probably going to be a shell script. If I'm feeling particularly motivated,
perhaps it will use dialog to make a nice full-screen curses + X-windows
installer.

I will do a little bit of tidying on the source tree tonight, make my work
available to anyone who wants it. You and Bo will be getting email
notifications, hopefully that will make it to MUFFIN too. :)

When Maximus is working better (soon), I will be available via routed
netmail at 1:249/128.

Anyhow -- here's a teaser:

MAXIMUS Version 3.02
Copyright 1989, 2003 by Lanius Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Design by Scott Dudley.
Development by Scott Dudley, Peter Fitzsimmons and David Nugent.
UNIX port by Wes Garland.

For technical support, send mail to tech{at}lanius.com or "Tech" at 1:249/106.
For more information on Maximus, send mail to sales{at}lanius.com, or write to:

    Lanius Corporation
    777 Downing St.
    Kingston, Ont.
    CANADA  K7M 5N3

 Version: Compiled on May 14 2003 at 23:56:40 (GNU C)

      OS: Linux 2.0.35, running on alpha hardware (alpha)
  Memory: 999,424 bytes remain in heap

Press ENTER to continue


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Cheers,
Wes

--
Wes Garland
2000 Kawasaki EX250-F
wes{at}ninja250.kingston.net

--- timEd 1.11.b1