ALPHA VERSION 3 RELEASE NOTES:

Note that everything in the Alpha 1 & 2 notes still applies.

When the actual releases start (possibly including wider betas), these will be merged into one document again.

CHANGES FROM ALPHA 2:

1) KRNP3 has been optimized some more, both for size, and a little for speed (particularly printing the first part 'ERROR: xxx')

2) The 6809 version now has RUNB, INKEY, SYSCALL, GFX2 & GFX pre-merged, like the 6309 version (thanks Wayne Campbell, for catching that)

3) Older, less optimized versions of RUNB and BASIC09 were in the 6309 version (pre Y2K fixes) - these have been replaced with current versions.

4) SNAKEBYTE game installed, as well as it's level editor program.

Full documentation for both is in DOCS.

Arrow keys to play.

5) Alpha of new compressed ROGUE game.

Should run marginally faster, and will soon get the ability to specify the font one wants to use (if running on a graphics window), since we have at least 2 Rogue fonts already.

This version is for testing to make sure I haven't introduced any bugs while optimizing it, before I start adding too many new features.

This version does allow using variable sized graphics windows with the Rogue fonts; the original would only use these on an 640×192 full screen window.

6) Allen Huffman's TOWEL (a file utility that runs in hardware text mode, kind of like an MSHELL or GSHELL, but w/o program launching) is installed.

Doc file is also installed.

NOTE: Towel uses it's own config file for setting the mouse parameters, and overrides Gshell's.

I have set both up to use the same defaults now.

If you change the mouse parameters for GSHELL (in /dd/sys/env.file), for now you will have to make the same type of change to /dd/sys/ethawin/ethawin.cfg.

I have reached out to Allen to see how hard it would be to have his share the mouse parameters from env.file; we shall see if that is a feasible change.

7) XMODE/TMODE are the stock OS-9 Level II versions for backwards compatibility.

XMOD2/TMOD2 are the new versions, and include some minimal help on their differences in the HELP file.

We purposely made the length of the names exactly the same as the old; that way, if you do need to patch a more recent program to run the new versions, you can simply use DED or KwikZap to edit the module directly, change the last character of the name wherever it is referenced, save and re-verify the CRC (both utilities have this built in).

Eventually, we will make both of these “fat binaries” that allow both syntaxes, so it will be compatible with old and new software, without needing 2 versions of each.

That's all for now.

I had a lot more planned, but the last few months have been my rush season at work (not to mention taxes, NitrOS-9 level 1 bugfixes & CocoVGA support/optimizations, etc.), so I didn't get as much done as I had hoped.

Hope to get a lot further with Alpha 4.

L. Curtis Boyle, April 14, 2018

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