Subject:
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Spectre Update #1 12/1/99
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 1 Dec 1999 21:04:51 GMT
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Original-From:
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Brian Connors <connorbd@NOSPAMyahoo.com>
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Viewed:
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757 times
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Okay, all... This is the first of what I expect to be
weekly updates on the progress of Spectre, my proposal
of a few weeks ago for an open-source, cross platform
replacement for spirit.ocx.
First off, the scope of the project: Spectre (and its
low-level driver API Seance) is intended right now to
be no more than a basic C library at this point, and
that's about how it's going to remain until it works
(at which point anyone who wants to build a COM
interface for spectre.ocx is more than welcome to do
so, at least as long as you bring enough for everybody
(WinCE, MacOS ActiveX) :-) ) The first priority in
developing Spectre is to reimplement all spirit.ocx
functions and data structures that aren't
Win32-dependent (meaning a few bookkeeping fns like
the ones that deal with thread priorities will be
ignored). In its first releases, Spectre is intended
to support only the RCX and Cybermaster; while I think
Scout support is probably a good idea, I don't think
there's enough known about the Scout to handle it. The
hooks are there in the spec, but they may never be
used.
What I'm working on right now is not Spectre itself,
but Seance, the low-level API that handles IR tower
communication. Seance (in its current form) is based
on the RCX comm functions in Kekoa Proudfoot's send.c,
and as such uses his code for the most part. I've made
a few additions to the API (for error reporting,
mostly) and will be publishing the final spec along
with my Seance-compliant hack of send.c Real Soon Now.
Note at this point that Seance as written is very
strongly Unix-dependent; I'm hoping that once I've
published it someone will be willing to write Seance
drivers for MacOS and Win32 as well.
I'm looking at this point for someone to host a web
page for Spectre. Responsibilities, at the very
minimum, will include uploading updates to an FTP
site; I wouldn't mind some hosting space for my other
project, NQCIPC as well. Reason: my website is a
GeoCities site and they're a little strange about what
you can upload.
If there's enough interest, I'll post a tarball to the
list of what I've got so far, but otherwise I'd like
to make sure it'll build first.
I'm also working on the actual spec for Spectre
itself. This is an ongoing project, basically sifting
through the spirit.ocx docs and converting the spirit
APIs into something that can be easily programmed in
C. An early note: many of spirit.ocx's control
functions require some sophisticated string handling.
I won't even try to copy that, and will instead borrow
Dave Baum's constant handling techniques from NQC. (If
you don't understand, you will eventually...) The spec
will probably take a little longer.
I'm not going to ask for suggestions for extensions at
this point when the only actual code may not even run
yet. Apart from a couple of extensions (most notably,
a function to send bytecodes directly to the RCX),
there isn't much reason at this point to do so.
Brian Connors
Project Spectre
=====
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