Well, I’ve studied the lists and had a go at writing a little application (very rusty, haven’t touched BBC BASIC for probably 25 years and all of that was on a BBC B), to decode the headers in all the podules fitted to a RISC OS machine. It should work on any RISC OS machine but I only have a RISC PC (3.70) so couldn’t test it on any other OS.
However, it doesn’t give expected results with all Podules, (such as ViewFinder) so there is obviously a flaw in the program or the method. I thought it was because the information wasn’t collected using assembler in service mode but having tried assembler the results are the same. I then thought it may be because I was running the program too late to read the information, as I seem to remember reading somewhere, that the information is only guaranteed to be available just after a cold start but this proved to be a red herring as well. It would seem that the Viewfinder podule is not an Acorn conformant podule or the program is wrong. Again any guidance would be appreciated (The program is in the application as the standard !RunImage, in uncompressed BASIC).
If you’d like to try it out (after reading the previous paragraph), just unzip it with !Sparkplug or similar and double click it. This will create a text file inside the application called PoduleHdrs. To open the file Shift + Double Click the application, then double click the file called PoduleHdrs and hopefully, you should see a report of all the podules in your machine.
If you find a podule that reports as an unknown type, manufacturer or country please post back the PoduleHdrs file and known details of the podule.
However, it doesn’t give expected results with all Podules, (such as ViewFinder) so there is obviously a flaw in the program or the method. I thought it was because the information wasn’t collected using assembler in service mode but having tried assembler the results are the same. I then thought it may be because I was running the program too late to read the information, as I seem to remember reading somewhere, that the information is only guaranteed to be available just after a cold start but this proved to be a red herring as well. It would seem that the Viewfinder podule is not an Acorn conformant podule or the program is wrong. Again any guidance would be appreciated (The program is in the application as the standard !RunImage, in uncompressed BASIC).
If you’d like to try it out (after reading the previous paragraph), just unzip it with !Sparkplug or similar and double click it. This will create a text file inside the application called PoduleHdrs. To open the file Shift + Double Click the application, then double click the file called PoduleHdrs and hopefully, you should see a report of all the podules in your machine.
If you find a podule that reports as an unknown type, manufacturer or country please post back the PoduleHdrs file and known details of the podule.
Statistics: Posted by Drobell — Sun Oct 27, 2024 9:58 pm