Experimental port of File Conductor

[bjonte]

I have made an experimental port of File Conductor for the C128 to VIC20. You can try it out and tell me what works and what doesn't, what you like and don't like. It's made to handle lots of files and won't be useful with a single floppy drive. It starts to be useful with several drives and mass storage devices like the CMD hard drive. It requires a whopping 32 kB expansion to run. Note that this is still experimental and it may only partially work. Don't use on valuable data. I'm grateful for any help with testing.

https://kollektivet.nu/fileconductor/bi ... eta.498.7z

The program can basically be controlled with only cursor keys and RETURN but there are a number of shortcuts to things. Instructions are provided on the diskette.

[Mike]

May I suggest you use MG BROWSE to view the instructions?

I find the built-in lowercase character set rather difficult to read due to its flattened appearance and lack of line spacing, and those 22 columns/line lead to lots of premature line breaks.

MG BROWSE displays any 7-bit ASCII text (which covers 99.9%+ of all available "read me"s) in soft 40 columns with word wrap. No extra conversion step to PETSCII is necessary. You find the original, including source, here. I merely changed the main program not to prompt for a file name but display the file "instructions" directly.

The tool assumes the file "instructions" to have SEQ file type - within VICE VDrive in PC directories, this is not checked for, but the OPEN command deliberately specifies ",S,R" as those text files are not actually programs, neither do they feature a 2-byte load address.

[ral-clan]

So what does File Conductor do?

[Mike]

So what does File Conductor do?

File management on the native platform: here, with a VIC-20 and (preferably two) disc drive(s). Copying files between disks, renaming files, deleting files, sorting the directory, you name it.

See another thread for bjonte's motivation to do his own implementation.

[bjonte]

May I suggest you use MG BROWSE to view the instructions?

Ah, yes. I didn’t spend any time on the instructions really since it’s at an experimental stage. Good point.

[bjonte]

So what does File Conductor do?

Like Mike said, file management stuff. The advantages are:

• Simple controls that should be somewhat intuitive to a modern computer user
• Fully recursive directory operations copy, move or delete.
• Proper error handling. Lots of work went into giving useful alternatives when problems happen. Warns before attempting to copy USR files for example.
• Using kernal to do everything screen or disk related. This can be seen as a disadvantage as well with no turbo loading or raw sector modifications.
• Properly copies REL files. Between directories on the same drive also, although slowly.

[Mike]

• [...] Warns before attempting to copy USR files for example.

Normal files with USR type, as an 'alternative' to SEQ type files, or actual drive utility files (loaded by CBM DOS directly into drive RAM and executed there) should not pose any problems. You are concerned about GEOS VLIR files?

[bjonte]

Normal files with USR type, as an 'alternative' to SEQ type files, or actual drive utility files (loaded by CBM DOS directly into drive RAM and executed there) should not pose any problems. You are concerned about GEOS VLIR files?

Yes, the GEOS file type is a specific example of the problem. Since the USR type is kind of meant to be user defined I can’t make assumptions about how it stores data. The program will simply ask if it’s OK to treat it like a SEQ file. That’s the only way it will be able to copy those.