Re: Apple Disk Server Beta. Need testers.

[Egan Ford <datajerk@gmail.com>]

On Jan 5, 5:02 am, David Schmidt <schmi...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/2012 2:03 PM, David Schmidt wrote:
>
> I used my iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1, whatever version of Safari Apple
> pushes.  I needed to set volume to 100%; anything less than that didn't
> work.  I found that the web page often didn't render the INSTA-DISK line
> with audio player control when it first came up; I often needed to pinch
> and un-pinch the page to get it to show up correctly.

I have not installed iOS 5 yet.  I suspect an issue with that.  The
web page (see the source) is really pretty basic.  And I used Apple's
recommend HTML.  I'll test again on my kids iOS 5 phone.

> I have two Platinum IIe machines.  One was never able to "hear" the
> INSTA-DISK phase correctly.  I would say ETA 9 SEC, but then would error
> out every time.  That machine didn't like the online game server either,
> so I suspect its hearing is marginal.  The ADTPro server (audio from a
> Mac, something I didn't try last night) still works with that machine,
> so it must be down to the amount of sound my iPad can pump out.

I've boosted the volume from 50% to 75%.  I just tested and it still
works for me.  Other had similar issues (50/50 at this point).  Can
you retry again.  I'd like this to be 100% reliable.

> The second IIe worked well, with occasional failures of indeterminate
> origin.  Retrying generally worked.

I get 100% success rate if the audio is not interrupted.  On failure I
could always track it down to a system sound (mostly e-mail
notifications).  Testing with my iPhone helped the most since it would
vibrate on any alert when the headphone jack is in used.  There was a
1:1 correlation.  OTOH, I got so frustrated with iPhone alerts that I
stopped testing on it, so I may have missed random failures.  I hope
boosting the volume ends any mystery errors.

> Non-standard hardware I have:
>
> Vlad's HDDD worked fine.  I pushed DOS and ProDOS images, both booted fine.

Cool.  I do not know what that is.

> Rich's CFFA3000 didn't work, failing at INSTA-DISK's format step - which
> is not unusual for its Disk II emulation.  Which brings me to a
> suggestion for that.  While I know it would be unusual to push a disk
> image to the CFFA3000 since you could just copy the .dsk to the CF or
> USB drive, it would still be nice to make the format step optional.  It
> could be a checkbox at the server end - format or not - and then push an
> audio stream that included a non-formatting INSTA-DISK and audio stream
> that didn't wait for the format to happen.

I'll add it to the to-do list.  Right now all the audio files are pre
created.  I can easily add a second file with no-format.  It may take
me a while to figure out how to add a check box, then dynamically
create the file, then detect when done, then clean up with minimal
fuss for the user.

> Nice work on this - I love the way the pad tells the Apple how much
> pad-time remains before the next chunk is sent.

Thanks!

> I'll definitely be
> stealing the compress/inflate for audio bootstrapping.

The compress code is standard RFC 1951 DEFLATE.  There has to be a
bunch of OSS code for Java for your ADT server code.

The inflate 6502 code is actually from Piotr Fusik (http://
atariarea.krap.pl/x-asm/inflate.html).  However I did port it from his
Atari assembler to ca65.  It is in the aforementioned zip file as
diskload3.s.

David,

Thanks again for all your testing.  If you wouldn't mind a 2nd pass,
I'd appreciate it.  The diskserver site is updated with the 75% volume
files.  The gameserver site will be updated in about an hour.

Thanks again.