On 4/22/21 1:02 PM, Dave Christensen wrote:
Yesterday I posted a problem I was having getting files to transfer from
my Windows 10 PC to my T102. It looked like it was something in Windows
with new files that LaddieAlpha didn’t like and returned a FF - File
not Found. What it actually was: If I ask Teeny to load a file from
the PC directory that ended in “.BA” and it wasn’t an optimized Basic
file it returned the “FF” error. The file I was trying to load was a
Basic program in text format (not minimized). When I renamed the file
from “.BA” to “.DO” on the PC, it downloaded fine. Loading this file
into Basic and saving it as a “.BA” file gave me a usable program.
Takeaway: A “.BA” file on the PC needs to be a minimized file, not a
program readable as a text file. I am not sure if I missed this in the
documentation of Laddie and Teeny but it is a two step process: taking
the text program I received from an online source and renaming it a
“.DO” file, download using Teeny the “.DO” file, start BASIC and load
the “.DO” file and save it in BASIC as a “.BA” file.
Sorry for not learning this before I posted the question yesterday - Dave
That's a known thing. Really it's not a Teeny or Laddie thing, it's the
100 itself. You can't just transfer any kind of file nor any kind of
filename.
You can generally only transfer 3 kinds of filenames, .BA, .CO, .DO,
and each of those must actually contain the contents matching the
extension. You can't transfer a plain text file with a .CO extension or
a .BA extension. A plain text file, even if the text happens to be BASIC
code, must be named something.DO, and .BA files are tokenized BASIC.
This is true for any TPDD client (teeny, ts-dos, dskmgr, floppy) and any
real TPDD drive and most emulators (dlplus, mcomm, desklink, pde.exe,
pdduino, etc).
If you used a real TPDD drive with the stock "floppy" client that comes
with it, this would be true.
Laddie however will transparently convert files like this on the fly,
which is convenient when you know about it, but creates confusion
exactly like you experienced when you don't know about it.
It's understandably extra confusing at first because almost all basic
programs on-line are in ascii format, yet named .BA.
I'm guessing this was done originally just so that the code, in it's
on-line/archival state, was more portable and readable. The archival
form of these programs probably should be the plain text form like they
are. Yet they are named *.BA instead of *.DO probably because originally
it was fairly common for a program FOO.BA to have it's manual in FOO.DO.
Then of course sometimes things are named like FOO.100, (to distinguish
between FOO.200 or FOO.NEC etc) which could be anything and it's up to
you to look at the file contents and decide what needs to be done before
trying to actually use it.
--
bkw
