On 3/4/21 7:23 PM, Peter Vollan wrote:
When using dlplus in Linux, you must make sure that all of the files in
the desklink directory are in all CAPITAL letters. If not, then files
will appear to transfer but those files will actually be mostly null
characters. So "file.do" is unacceptable, it must be FILE.DO. Just one
file that does not follow this rule could screw up all of your
downloads. It took me years of tearing my hair out and a half dozen
serial to USB convertors before I deduced this.
Just a day or so ago I changed the default behavior not to mess with the
filenames.
Originally it was converting names to uppercase by default, but I think
not doing the job fully, so it just made things worse when something
didn't work and you're trying to figure out why not.
It was screwing me up while trying to work with REXCPM.
I reversed the default behavior so now it's "what you see is what you get".
And you are correct that you should rename any files to uppercase on the
host side.
But the reason and the limitation is in the M100 firmware not in the
drive emulator (at least no now). A real TPDD drive doesn't care about
the names and doesn't change them or lie about them. And other TPDD
clients like Cambridge Z88, Tandy WP-2, Atari Portfolio, etc, they
aren't Model 100's and they don't have the 100's particular quirks and
limits. They can have lowercase names, and other extensions besides the
few valid M100 extensions, etc.
I think the zero byte file thing was caused by the automatic uppercase
translation being incomplete. Like there would be a file on disk like
foo.DO, but it would put FOO.DO in the directory listing, and then the
100 would say "give me a copy of that FOO.DO", and then on the host it
goes "I don't see any FOO.DO? Here is zero bytes of data." But by then
TS-DOS has already created the filename in the 100's ram filesystem.
Something like that. I didn't really dig in and debug it all the way so
it might not be that exactly. I just disabled the behavior so the drive
no longer injects it's own variables and unexpected behavior into the
equation.
There's various parts of the m100 firmware that expect and require all
uppercase names so, the simplest thing is, keep all names all uppercase
on the host. IE, do just what you said.
--
bkw
