Magnum One/Magnum One (Mid-American Digital) (Disc Manufacturing).iso/d7/laser.arc/README.1ST

Text File | 1992-01-14 | 3.6 KB | 65 lines

    Thank you for downloading and trying these programs. We here at
the University, needed a cheap and easy method to allow any user across
our network to access a laser disk player. The player is attached to
a dedicated workstation on the network and plays a disk of public
domain software. Commercially available programs would have worked,
but our budget, wouldn't. One day, while browsing around the Novell
public forums on Compuserve, I came across the programs that Paul
McGinnis of AST Research, Inc., had uploaded. These programs, along
with a lot of brainstorming over a couple of days, produced these
two programs.

   Player.c and the compiled program player.exe are written in Turbo
C from Borland (of course). This program is meant to be ran on the
computer that the laser disk machine is attached to. This machine is
nothing more than the oldest IBM that I could scrounge up and only
has a monochrome card, two floppys, a network card, and the laser
player driver card. The boot disk contains all the files necessary
to boot up and make the laser disk a dos drive c. After booting up
it continues on to log itself into the network, wherein the network
entry does not have a password and can only log in from that particular
work station. Once the network login procedure is completed it runs
the player program. The player program; runs the netbios program,
makes a entry for the laser player in the netbios call table, and
then goes into an endless loop waiting for some one to call it. The
program has no exit feature and can only be stopped by rebooting the
computer.

   Laser.c and laser.exe are what the user uses to call the player
program and request that a file be sent to the current directory.
This program should only be run by one user at a time. If a second
user also runs the program, it will not let them access the laser
disk. The first thing this program does is load up netbios on to
the workstation. If it already exists, then netbios will usually
not reload and tell that it is already there. It then goes out and
gets the users login name from the network. This was not necessary,
but it look nice. It then creates a netbios entry for this user,
which can and will take several seconds. After that a loop is
entered, where upon the user is prompted for a file name and
directory name. These names are added together, echoed to the screen
and also sent to the laser disk. The laser disk will look up the
file and send it back 512 bytes at a time. In the meantime, the
laser program has opened a file on the local drive of the same name.
When packets start arriving, this can take several seconds, a seies
of dots will be written to the screen. This is a visual indicator
that packets of data are arriving and being written into a file on
the local disk. When the file has been received, the user is asked if
they would like to receive more files. The default is no and can be
selected by hitting the return key. When the user exits, his name is
deleted from the table of user names.

    These programs were put together in a hurry, but are serving the
purpose quite well and are used "A LOT" by our faculty and students.
They could be cleaned up and made a lot better, but I am currently
writing a new version which will make use of Novell IPX packets and
promises to be a whole lot faster than the netbios version. Anyone
having any thoughts on these programs or the new one, please feel free
to contact me by mail or call me at my office.

Patrick L. McGillan
University of Wisconsin
Superior, Wisconsin
[phone]
compuserve: 73217,2717