Re: LZ: Shells

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Re: LZ: Shells

On Tue, 03 Jun 1997 00:22:57 -0700 <kyrie@telepath.com> writes:

>>You've got some good ideas, but you're
>> also forgetting the main method of transport for these programs--THE
>> TI-85.  VERY few people have a GRAPHLINK
>
>Ummm... If they have no access to a link...what are they doing on
>list-zshell??

It is quite true that few people have graphlinks.  The majority of
List-ZShell subscribers may have them, but overall very few do.

At my school there are about 200-400 people who have ZShell games
on their TI-85's, and only 3 have graph links!  The primary method
of distribution of games/shells is definitely calculator to
calculator.  The ability for a new shell to be customized on the
computer is not terribly useful, because most people who get it
will not have the chance to customize it themselves.

I don't really think that anything too fancy is needed in a shell.
Version 2.1 of CShell-NT all that you need (except security).  If
anything else is needed, it is library support as in Fargo.  This
might save a lot of memory in some cases.  For example, three of my
games have the exact same title screen and highscore management code,
and two of them the same sprite-plotting code.  The code for library
handling might turn out to take more space than it is likely to save,
but it's worth a try..

OS-85 v2.0 shows just the "trouble" that can result from a non-standard
shell.  Since OS-85 v2.0 does not recalculate checksums, using it will
result in your programs having bad checksums if they modify themselves in
any way.  It is widespread in my school because of this!  When someone
with ZShell wants to get games from an OS-85 user, they find that they
don't work because of the bad checksum.  The ZShell user has to get a
backup from the OS-85 user in order for the games to work.  Then this
person too goes around spreading OS-85 backups for the same reason!

Many of the ignorant users actually believe that this is a problem in
ZShell, and that OS-85 is better because it runs the programs when ZShell

can't!  OS-85 v3.1, which actually has proper checksum handling (and can
recalculate the checksums in programs that were trashed by the old OS-85)
is not used at all!
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