For public domain databases, what occurs to me are: - The CIA World Factbook - MAME arcade games - Various genomics and scientific nomenclature for the tree of life
Of course, none of those are as useful to have on an M100 as Pokemons. :) —b9 On Sun, Sep 25, 2022 at 6:03 PM Eric LK <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > B 9 <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sorry for not replying to this before, Eric. Gmail got confused and had > > filed it as spam. > > No worries, it happens to me all the time... I actually found the M100 > list compilation email containing your reply in my spam folder too. > > > I ended up reinventing the wheel, but then this particular wheel has > > probably been invented many times over and just never clearly > > documented. I wonder if anyone has tried to update Anderson's > > Programming Peeks, Pokes and Tips > > < > https://archive.org/details/ProgrammingTipsPeeksAndPokesForTheTandyPortableComputers > > > > since 1989. This technique definitely belongs in there. > > I originally did this because none of the commercial SGBD I tried on > the M100 allowed more than 200 or 250 rows in a table... and I needed > about 900. > > That book is really nice, even if some of the tricks could be improved > (but that's easy to tell now, after 40 years of experimenting :o) ). > I did learned a few things reading this though, so it's still a useful > resource nowaday. > > >> Of course, you have to be careful because any misplaced poke may screw > >> your whole filesystem, but if you have a REX for baking everything up > >> before trying your code it's doable. > > > >Thanks for the advice. I already bake everything up. My worry is that I > >could release a program that seems to work perfectly on my machine, but > >blows up someone else's. It feels risky and dangerous to not have bounds > >checking on POKEs. I guess, that's the thrill of running close to the > >metal on these archaic beasts... > > Definitely, anyone trying those should have a backup, but on the > other hand it's likely that the DB will take most of the 32KB of RAM so > you really have to empty most of the M100 storage before you can test it > (I'm using many REX banks because the tools to generate the DB, > the tools to generate the indexes and the tool to query/edit the DB cannot > fit at the same time in memory). > > > As for a REX, I had been trying to see how much I could do with "stock" > > equipment, so I've been using Brian White's awesome dlplus > > I also was happy without a REX for a couple of years, but after getting one > I couldn't do without it. > > As for using "stock" equipment, I also wanted this experience, that's why > I had my M100 running for many hours to sort and generate the various > index files instead of just using awk on a modern PC, where it would > probably have taken about 30 seconds... But that's what is fun about using > those classic old computers ;o) > > >> (it will probably work if you refetch this base address, but I didn't > try > >> it). > > > >It turns out, it doesn't work. I think I mentioned this before, but I > found > >that even just using EDIT moves the files and does NOT update the > >addresses in the directory. So far, the only way in BASIC that I know to > >update the directory is to call CLEAR. > > Thanks for the hint, that would save me a lot of time if I was trying to > implement this :o) > > >>I may try finding some of my code if you want something to start from. > > > >I've finished, but I'd love to see your implementation. Perhaps I can > >generalize something that will be useful to other people as a library of > >sorts. > > All of my M100 have been out of order for the last couple of years (I know > what's wrong but I cannot find the time to fix them :o( ). but I've found > my > backups and managed to make it run on Virtual T. > > Give me a few days to document the code and if you're OK with this I can > email you a ZIP file at your gmail email address (I'd like to share my code > on something like github at some point, but because I use a DB of... > Pokemons (please don't judge me, my wife likes them ;o) ) I don't want to > upset the big N company... > > By the way, if anyone knows of a freely available (and not copyrighted) DB > of about 800 to 900 "items", I'd be happy to spend some time creating a > M100 DB and document the whole process. > > Cheers, > Eric >
