Msg: 6776 *Conference*
08-28-96 14:29:03
From: RON WIESEN
To : ROBERT BENSON
Subj: REPLY TO MSG #6772 (OS FOR RAMPAK)
This may sound simplistic of me Bob, but while on-line the Club 100 library provides us with access to "so-called" .BA files that actually are ASCII forms. In other words, what's shown with a .BA file name in the Club 100 library is in fact downloaded as ASCII. So where you say you transferred ".BA files from the library", you may have forgotten that they are actually ASCII and hence more like .DO files. For that matter, if a file is not the format which it's file name extension would suggest then file transfer utilities would indeed make quite a mess within the RAM of the laptop. .BA suggests tokenized line-delimited BASIC that ends with a NUL triplet. .CO suggests binary preceeded by a 6-byte header denoting TOP, LEN, and EXE addresses for the HIMEM region of the laptop. .DO suggests ASCII that ends with an EOF. Sorry to belabor this issue Bob. I spent considerable time investigating the conflict between NPL and disk utilities (FLOPPY, TS-DOS, TINY, TEENY, D, etc) and found only a conflict for ASCII (.DO) files - specifically the presence or lack of terminating EOF on the media. Nowhere in this investigation did I find conflict regarding with tokenized BASIC or with binary file formats in the media. Once again I must pester you with this question. Otherwise, somehow my investigation (and file back-up methology) failed to find concern outside of ASCII file format on the media (disk versus RAMPAC). Simply put the question is: are you REALLY REALLY REALLY SURE that those files with .BA file name extensions were TOKENIZED BASIC file formats?