Re: "LisaBBS" / Who knows Lisa font formats?

Hi Brian,

A lot of LisaBBS is Lisa-specific. The 68K assembly code is not going to work on ARM, of course, and all the code that talks to the filesystem or works with the serial port targets Lisa OS specifically. Additionally, some of the data that LisaBBS packages in archives that it sends (e.g. the 128k of "label" data, plus some of the filesystem metadata) has no counterpart on a Linux box.

There may be an additional problem for would-be porters. Lisa Pascal supports arguments to functions and procedures that are also functions and procedures. I don't know if Free Pascal does this---I'm not sure, but I get the impression that this capability isn't found in most Pascal compilers. (Disclaimer: I've only ever written Pascal code for the Lisa---and the computer science AP test back in the 1990s :-)

The implementation of quicksort uses function and procedure arguments pretty extensively, see

https://github.com/stepleton/lisabbs/blob/master/LIBSORT.TEXT#L22

They turn up elsewhere, too.

Fortunately, there's little point to porting LisaBBS to a modern computer running any sort of Linux. You would be much better off writing a very thin Pascal shell (or Python would be even easier) that mimics the simplistic LisaBBS interface and invokes lrzsz
<https://ohse.de/uwe/software/lrzsz.html> to send files to the remote system.

--Tom

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 8:50 PM, Brian Connors <connorbd_at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:

> How much of this code is dependent on LisaOS? Something like this ported
> to Raspbian and Free Pascal might be a good thing to add to my simulator
> project.
>
>
> On Friday, July 17, 2015 at 8:42:10 PM UTC-4, Tom Stepleton wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I wrote a program that lets you download files from the Workshop using
>> your favorite terminal program and YMODEM. It's still pretty buggy, but you
>> can check it out anyway (source only):
>>
>> https://github.com/stepleton/lisabbs
>>
>> I've only tried it on a Lisa 1 running Workshop 1.0. No idea what it does
>> on other systems.
>>
>> Anyway, I used this to download an interesting-looking file named
>> "font.lib" (you can see it listed in the "screenshot"). I thought I'd try
>> to see if I could visualize fonts inside the file, but I'm giving up now :-)
>>
>> I'd still love to see the fonts, though.
>>
>> I've been able to determine that font.lib is an archive (like ar or tar
>> makes) containing a few dozen individual files with names like
>> CENTURY24RPH.F, which certainly look like good names for font files. There
>> seem to be several types of files, distinguished by the letter before the
>> .F, which is either W (probably information about fonts for particular
>> kinds of printers), H, S, or T (don't know about these). I don't have any
>> good guesses for what W, H, S, and T could stand for, either.
>>
>> My efforts to get anything that looks like letterforms out of these
>> individual file records have all failed so far. With the exception of the W
>> files, it seems the files may be lightly compressed somehow, but I'm not
>> sure how.
>>
>> Does anyone know more about these "files" or their format, or what kind
>> of compression might have been used for important system resources like
>> fonts? RLE is a candidate, but I'm not sure about that. Huffman coding
>> might work, too...
>>
>> More details when I have more time to write,
>> --Tom
>>
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