Spider

Thanks. :) The favicon I will admit I'd completetly forgotten about. I've uploaded a generic one for now, actually its the 3x version of this software's as the 4x does not have one. If memory serves at one point we just had a regular " smiling face " yellow smilie as the favicon. I do remember in dim/distant past trying to make something with M.W but given the size limitations of the favicon it proved difficult. There is some truth (apparently) in lower rankings for http vs https sites, I have heard that before. The reason it was not actually enabled (without boring you too much) as the host seemed to specify a huge array of htaccess code to go along with it, unfortunately this did not play nicely with the existing code we have in there and as at that moment in time it was a question of reopening the site asap, I felt it more important to "open the doors" after a few months being closed. Having said that I've just enabled it without their extra htaccess, so we'lll see if that is actually enough. In theory it ought to be, only possible concern perhaps is the browser complaining about mixed content but I think this may only happen where its a remote linked image, ie someone has not uploaded it but used the IMG tags instead.

Thanks for the updates! 🙂

Eugene hungry ? 🙂

I was used to seeing the # prefix and sometimes a 'h' suffix. Starting on the Spectrum platform in 84, there was not really any built in hex facility. Those who perhaps started coding on the Acorn machines may be more used to & however. For instance typing PRINT &C9 will return you with an answer of 201 , which is correct as #C9 is 201 in decimal. This is also accepted for the Amstrad CPC range too. Can't recall which but one emulator in the "insert pokes" section seems to prefer a $ prefix for hex values too, just to add to the mix! Personal preference is simply #xx as its quite easy to distinguish between: LD A , #80 JP #7530 Decimal of the above: LD A , 128 JP 30000 I do realise I'm slightly contradicting myself as today I did provide some 'pokes' using a different prefix however the prefix suited the platform they were intended for! , but in general if I was writing a post or such I'd rather just use #value, its easy to type and does not or should not lead to any confusion.

I mean to say utf8mb4 Pre conversion (some tables were already at this) , it only effected display. The parser would not be knocked unconscious by broken bbcode, I do know what you're referring to though. 🙂 I did get the data when I did the restore from the raw database via phpmyadmin directly 😉 Upon closer examination of a backup directly, the UTF8MB4 conversion appeared to have done this. Unfortunately had I delayed this, it would of happened anyway at the 3x to 4x upgrade. EDIT... Updated, read end of post info! Looking at post 11772 for instance here , I find the 'converted' (but pre-upgrade backup from last year) was truncated: 3x data (converted) 3x data (pre conversion) Unfortunately, as noted the conversion was not a recent thing, not even near the upgrade at least as I remember. 4x looks like this (just an empty post saying "test" really) I am able it seems to 'rescue' some posts, having found a pre-conversion example, despite having said otherwise previously. No guarantee's on this however i have just restored this post , with only a minor cleanup needed.

As promised. Squashed original .avi of 60mb down to 5mb mp4. Audio quality has not changed, video is still way out of sync anyway as it is with this emulator. Bear in mind the sound chip (afaik) predates the AY unit used the Spectrum, Amstrad and other machines by a few years Inside a .zip as it won't attach directly (browser issue perhaps) Entertainer_mp4.zip Primary sound channel is white, green and yellow indicate channel 2 and 3, decided to double height for the display. These as well as the output itself were something I decided to add. Merely as by default it does not really do anything visually! Run time is just over two minutes. Pic attached of the output for the curious:

I could not (at the moment) find anything else using that player. I do have a superb rendition of The Entertainer however for the same platform. I even modified it to show the "SOUND a,b,c,d" commands as they were "executed on the fly" so to speak. 🙂 Only problem is I could not find a sane speed for it, the default one was too slow and so I speeded it up a little bit. I may attempt to record a video/audio of it later, but the two choices of emulation I have for this platform, one does not sync them very well and the other does not appear to have any recording facilities! 😮 😞 😄

Regarding 'tune.tap' , this is the title screen data from HydroFool and Sweevo's World/Whirled. The data provided was actually extracted from Hyrdrofool, I should of probably taken it from Sweevo as its a separate file but as they load and run at the same address it did not make much difference. Attached is something quite similar, this is a BBC Micro (sound chip on these is a Texas SN76489, 3 sound channels and one noise) unlike the AY3891x series used in say the CPC range and the ZX 128 machines. Anyway the video clip includes a nice player in effect too: Unfortunately the sound quality is not great but its worth a listen I think: 12MB / MP4 / 2m:58s BBC-Micro-Beebioli-Melvyn-Wright.mp4 Enjoy! 🙂

I did do a UTF conversion but that was after the 'missing' data, at least from what I can recall. I don't have a specific date for it unfortunately, not without examining several backup files, last years being compressed .gz's inside a folder for that month which as its last years is itself compressed into a huge single file. I've kept away from Cpanel's automated backup tool (invidivudla option rather than "take it all") as the last host I did notice there was a problem with truncated backups. I take them out via phpmyadmin manually and check they are complete, by this I mean the fact that the last table is present at the end of the file itself, I know this is not 100% however it is a reasonable guide compared to the truncated ones. There's nothing suitablte in WayBack machine, the collected data from that year iirc was before then and after in Sept it collected the 'we are offline' page twice, then things resumed. The backup I picked to restore the data to compare was the nearest "after the last post" I had.

BBC Micro POKE &67EC , &EA + POKE &67ED , &EA + POKE &67EE , &EA = Infinite Lives POKE &6961 , &EA + POKE &6962 , &EA = Partial*** Guardian Immunity *** Horizontal and some but not all vertical guardians. Eugene, Kong and forcefield effect doors are still deadly. Lightening bolts in Meteor Storm are safe. Obviously fire cells are still quite harmful! POKE &80 , &xx = Change Level. Apply during play ( ! ) , &xx value should be &00 to &14 , to activate a life will usually have to be lost. It works but it can occasionally crash the game! Use the built in "A SECRET" teleport cheat in preference to this, only included for reference. EDIT... Note the above 'pokes' are only valid for the original Software Projects release by D.J.Coathupe, and do not work with the updated 2021 edition of this game by TobyLobster

I think he was possibly quoting the 'dead' empty post I removed from Korzy_iz_Adb , only explaination that I can logically think of. Its quite difficult to do this as there's a choice of backup data so I used a different set to do this compared to the Download topic/descriptor I did the other day. In this case I used a backup taken 30th Apr 2020, which was the nearest that would include all the topic. There was an edit by line on the post I removed too, from the author which suggested they had either edited out the content (unlikely as this would not effect the quoted data in the previous version) at that time, as the software concerned the "quote" belongs to the new post author not the author of the quote, if that makes sense as its in their post. 🙂 Regarding internetarchive/wayback , I've never excluded archive.org search bot from the site at all so its possible it may be there if it was at all. I did consider the database charset conversion at one point (switched to UTF8) however that won't eat data, if anything it fixes odd issues where symbols appear instead of the correct characters, this is more a case where the writer is using perhaps a non-English/EU charset.

I've been through this topic: Results: Post dated 9th March by Korzy_iz_Adb has no content in the backup other than a broken quote liking a previous post. I've removed this 'dead post' Post dated 15th March by jetsetdanny that also had no content has been restored, it now contains a quote and the post content itself. 🙂 Post dated 16th March by IRF was similar to the previous, in that it had no content but the old backup data contained some information, I was also able to restore the quoted text and the post content for this one too. 🙂 Post dated 24th March with no content other than a quoted "like" was removed. Post dated 26th March with no content other than a quoted "like" was removed. Post dated 26th March with an empty quote box with no source link (external quote perhaps) was removed.

Its fine. 🙂 You saw the 'raw content' so I think all in all its not too bad a 'fix' 😄

I've made a few more small changes to the descriptor to remove the remaining unparsed bbcode and raw html entities. In particular the items I've highlighted in red. The topic description here will "auto magically" self update over the next few hours to contain the updated details that are in the descriptor itself. It's now (text formatting aside which I'll leave for someone else) about as good as it can be content-wise at least. 🙂

Perhaps rather than a 'hard hat with light' in JSW a torch being carried might be more appropriate if possible. Does not seem very difficult (even for me) to swap the M.W sprite out in a few rooms if needed as I suspect can grab the room number from 33824, stick it into A register then do a quick comparison for 'room x' and if it matches simply change DE to make the code pick up the 'newer' sprite. Almost identical to the existing "are we in the Nightmare Room" code 🙃 One issue might be making it appear for him to carry a torch without it looking odd. Not sure.

File and topic descriptor mostly recovered and now restored. 🙂 Thanks to both @IRFand @jetsetdanny for assistance in pointing this out.

Take a look at the download descriptor and its auto-generated topic for it now please. Its not 100% however 95% of the content (links aside) were put back. You may wish to alter the formatting of it a fraction or two.

Those ones are a tad more tricky as the 'content' is in the downloads data not the topics (forums) as such. The latter will likely be truncated, the former is hopefully the "full monty" so to speak.

I would like to see this effect applied to certain JSW rooms though, perhaps Wine Cellar (typically not that bright in real life in some cases) , maybe Forgotten Abbey for a 'spooky' effect and Under The Drive/Tree Root also spring to mind.

No, that's what I meant. Thank you for updating it. 🙂

I did speak to the author a while back, although I'll have to find the message itself (it was either email or a PM on WOS) , I think from memory and I'll correct myself here in that merely adding a name to the descriptor or third party author was sufficient. IIRC I was requested to leave my name in there too as I'd 'assembled' the games with the modified code and whipped up quick loading screens etc.

Its not quite as simple as it appears. They have to be manually put back, tbh the easiest way is to simply do a copy/paste directly upon the post in question. The way the post data is stored is also different between v3 and v4 too (although tbh this is not a huge concern) I would like a list if possible of anything missing as although its not too difficult in itself, it is quite time consuming.

The Wally Week series of games is also quite good all in all, I considered at one point 'borrowing' some of the graphics for JSW however their proportions were not ideal, mind you giant 'snapping' creatures from Pyjama (unsure if they are crabs, lobster or some other " crustacean" I'm not sure)

There were a few (and it was iirc less than the number of fingers I have) that got truncated and Danny pointed a few out that I was then able to correct. I'll take a look at that either later today or over the weekend. I'll be able to manually fix it if needed from a backup all being well. 🙂 If any more should come to light (unlikely I thought we'd got them all!) please let me know. EDIT... I -do- recall one of the 'fixed' ones from when we re-opened , the backup was also similar truncated too for some reason. I did test a backup 'bare metal restore disaster recovery' at that moment in time to be sure I was not keeping broken backups and they did restore fine with those odd truncated exceptions.

Thank you for the continued updates 🙂