This particular change brought the emulator (HostFS) into alignment with the behavior of real hardware (or SD card image on emulator). CMDR-DOS on SD card has always required `@:` for overwrite. I would consider this change in the emulator a bugfix. If people end up writing software based on the behavior of the emulator, and then they find that it doesn't work on real hardware, I think this would be a far bigger problem. This is where we were at for other reasons before R42, and there have been minor fixes since then.Ed Minchau wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 6:22 pm The r42 changes, particularly the need to prepend @: to filenames when overwriting, broke all of my software.
System software/VERA forward compatibility date?
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MooingLemur
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- Joined: Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:44 pm
Re: System software/VERA forward compatibility date?
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Ed Minchau
- Posts: 503
- Joined: Sat Jul 11, 2020 3:30 pm
Re: System software/VERA forward compatibility date?
Oh, I understand the reason for that particular change, that's not the problem. The thing is at some point it has to stabilize, or else instead of writing new code I'm going back to fix old code, some of it four years old, to work with the new changes.
Rewriting code because there's newer, faster ways (such as the introduction of MACPTR or the VERA/FX 16 bit multiplication) is fine; it's a new feature I can use to make things faster. And I was ready for the move of the RAM bank and ROM bank pointers because we were warned well ahead of time. But the change to the way filenames work caught me by surprise, and scratching to find space to make changes. Any more breaking changes like that at this late date runs the risk of obliterating the code base.
Rewriting code because there's newer, faster ways (such as the introduction of MACPTR or the VERA/FX 16 bit multiplication) is fine; it's a new feature I can use to make things faster. And I was ready for the move of the RAM bank and ROM bank pointers because we were warned well ahead of time. But the change to the way filenames work caught me by surprise, and scratching to find space to make changes. Any more breaking changes like that at this late date runs the risk of obliterating the code base.