Jake Hamby's Site

Category: Retrocomputing

  • BBC BASIC For Experts

    I’m currently reading the 520 page BBC BASIC Reference Manual for RISC OS, which was originally written in 1992, with updates in 2017 and 2021. That’s quite a bit bigger of a BASIC than the Microsoft BASICs that were available to me as a kid in the USA. Even QBasic for MS-DOS wasn’t all that…

  • Week 6 of RISC OS

    I honestly didn’t expect that it would take me so many weeks to get, let’s say 20% complete on my SMB 3 client port to RISC OS when I started on it at the end of May 2023. I’ve been committing to a branch of my GitHub repo (linked), so if you’re interested, you can…

  • Moving Site to a PC Soon

    Sadly, I will need to mirror my blog to a boring old desktop PC at some point in the next week in order to be able to use my Raspberry Pi 400 for RISC OS-related testing. The Pi 400 has been more than adequate and 100% reliable in its service. At the same time, it…

  • Apple’s Declining Quality

    I’m working on completing the port I started of Apple’s SMB file sharing client to RISC OS, for purposes of collecting a monetary bounty for adding SMB2 and 3 support, and also it’s been very good for honing my software engineering skills. Because Apple stopped supplying the source code to their SMB client after OS…

  • Perseverance

    I’ve been completely preoccupied with this RISC OS SMB client retrofitting project, which is right at the boundary of what I’m comfortable working with as an individual coding project. A big challenge is estimating how many hours and days of work I have remaining. There are large source files in the original Apple code that…

  • Thanks, Apple!

    I’ve been working on upgrading the RISC OS SMB client (Windows file and printer sharing) to work with modern versions of Windows, macOS, Samba, etc. that have disabled SMB1 support. Because the SMB client should be able to fit into the ROM image in order to be able to boot from a file server, as…

  • Oh dear! It’s RISC OS!

    I can tell that I’m debugging British code (RISC OS SMB client) because of the phrasing of some of the debug comments: “Oh dear – client ran out of buffer space!\n” /* Oh dear – looks likely the create would fail anyway! */ case UFORMAT_FRMR: /* Oh dear */ /* FindNBNSName decodes the encoded name…

  • RISC OS Reincarnated

    I finally got around to watching the YouTube talk about the Acorn Archimedes referenced by Wikipedia and I highly recommend it: Since I’ve been reading and watching so much about consciousness, the soul, and reincarnation-related themes, the fact that I’m interested in RISC OS today, despite not having any easy access to, nor interest in…

  • Guru Meditation

    I spent several hours today in silent meditation, although I haven’t been able to clear my mind for even the span of a single breath. On the plus side, I discovered that I’m able to sit cross-legged with a straight posture for extended periods of time. The original Amiga OS had a unique crash screen…

  • More RISC OS Fun

    I’m feeling good about my progress on upgrading the RISC OS SMB file sharing client to support SMB2 and to fix the bugs I’ve found in SMB1, so I emailed RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) tonight to tell them about my intention to claim the “More recent LanManFS protocols” bounty. I told them that I’m…