BinSCII II BETA TEST (was Re: Binscii v2.0)

[toddpw@sloth.ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

velasqua@ucs.orst.edu (Tony Velasquez) writes:

>	I've been hearing lots of talk about this upgrade of Binscii and I'm
>quite excited!  Has it been released yet?  Where is it?  If it's not out yet,
>when can I expect to get my impatient little hands on it? :-)  Enquiring minds
>want to know!

1. It's not an upgrade, it's a complete redesign and rewrite from scratch.

2. No it hasn't been released yet. It's NOT just an Apple II program.

3. Right now my beta testers are flaking big time. (see, they get it from me!)

Dave Whitney and I started work on the new format years ago, but we both have
pretty hairy work schedules (plus we are attempting to get a life, thank you
very much) so there is not a lot of free time left to work on it. The very
first implementation (a super-generic C source version) is now ready to go,
however I need more beta testers with free time and NOT JUST APPLES!! The
Apple II specific versions get written _after_ the one I have right now is
unleashed on an unsuspecting internet.

Unlike all previous formats of its kind, BinSCII II is a true "multi-platform"
format. It is also not tied to the text encoding; you can have binary segments
with almost no overhead (i.e. a superset of Binary II) as well as text segments
either with the classic 33% overhead encoding or with the more efficient 20%
overhead encoding (computationally more expensive, but generally worth it).

The raw format is also much more powerful than the simple ProDOS oriented
format that's currently used. The CRC protection is generally better and
can be enhanced without breaking anything. The segments are sequenced so
decoders can tell you when you have all the parts of something decoded.
Everything is very extensible, and quite a few other cool features are
specified in the format but not implemented in any existing program yet.
(You name it, it's probably in there or we have good reasons for not putting
it in yet.)

Like I said, beta testing is the bottleneck right now. I had a core of about
10 testers from a pretty wide range of computers, but only a couple of them
seem to be doing anything substantial. I got some fresh blood from a post on
alt.binaries.pictures.utilities last week. If anyone wants to beta test the
"cc 'n' go" net-infiltration version of the code (you WILL need a C compiler,
and preferably a machine other than your Apple to test for portability),
send me email with:
	your preferred email address(es) for mail and large mail
	what machines you can compile for and test on
and I will bounce you a beta package (four emails, two of them nearly 32K).

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu