From Ron Mitchell.........................


Richard, Frances, I'm not at all sure that the reply I prepared 
last night to your latest got through. My MAC hiccuped (happens 
now and then), and I'm unable to find record of my outgoing in 
the 'sent' basket....

just in case.....



The Serially Linked Server program that Rich Drushel prepared, 
and demonstrated at several ADAMCON's comes in several variations.
It seems that slightly different patching is required depending 
on what COM port the host uses to talk to ADAM, and what type of 
drives the host offers for ADAM to use. Here I have two old IBM 
'clunkers' that I'm playing about with as SERVERS, an XT with a 
360k 5-1/4 drive as drive A: and a 720k 3-1/2 inch drive as drive 
B: That machine talks to the outside world through COM 1

Then I have a 286 which offers a 1.4 MEG 5-1/4 inch floppy as 
drive A and a 1.2 MEG 5-1/2 inch as drive B. For some reason that 
I've yet to get to the bottom of, this computer out and out bold-
faced lies to me when I ask it  about COM ports, and says it has 
2 and I can see two physical connections onto the serial card, 
but I've only been able to get one to work with mouse/modem/
serial stuff..... and that's COM2. Probably some kind of IRQ  
conflict that I'll figure out sooner or later. Meanwhile... 

 With Messrs Drushel and Mason, this leave me in a bit of a 
quandry. All of their SERVE72X.EXE variations except  use COM 2. 
Accordingly, my 286 works just fine. But since I'm never satis-
fied with what I already have, I want to get the XT working on 
COM 1 as well. The only SERVE72X.EXE variation that works with 
COM 1 doesn't offer me the right combination of disk drives.

Now.... onto Filemanager 4.0

That's Rich Drushel's hack of Filemanager 3.0.... and so far 
as I know, it exists and lives only on the ADAM Server Program. 
I took it 'out of water' yesterday to see if I could port it 
over to the ADAM Emulator, or to an ADAM. On the former, it 
died...causing a system crash, and on the latter, it produced 
one of the most spectacular multi colour crashes I've ever 
seen on any ADAM. 

Hope that explains things. I  would still like to arrive at 
the point where I can use my equipment to produce emulator 
images of whatever size, and I should be able to do that. A 
true ADAM disk image should not care where it lives.... be it 
ADAM disk, emulator file, server initialized disk, or wherever.

So sez I at any rate.

Ron Mitchell



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