New Spectranet TNFS public server

[flatduckrecords]

Thanks very much for the detailed reply, sounds like you have a nice workflow going there. I had no idea about the usage log option, that's really smart!

as much as I love my Speccy, the keyboard and BASIC editing experience is just too punishing these days to work in 100% of the time. So I instead keep my code and routines on my laptop where I can edit them with vim or VScode.

Yeah, I don't blame you at all; Spectranet is the perfect interface for deploying cross-compiled code to a Spectrum I reckon - either through a local TNFS server, or that handy 'Load arbitrary data to RAM' in the NMI menu for machine code routines. So you can take advantage of modern development tools, and still test/enjoy the results on original hardware - why wouldn't you?! (The Oliver Twins built their Spectrum games on an Amstrad, isn't that right? That's kinda the same thing…).

The only problem I have with txt2bas is that it doesn't support the Spectranet % commands, so they tend to come out garbled and result in Nonsense In BASIC errors.

Have you tried zmakebas? I haven't tested it extensively but it seems to work for me and doesn't complain about the % commands (though it might be treating them as NextBASIC variable names, I'm not sure!).

Anyway, thanks for the details, you've given me some fresh ideas for my own site - cheers!

[Pegaz]

Great update, [mention]mdr[/mention] .
I really like the Hall of Fame section, especially because my favorite game Dan Dare is on the list.
The utility section is also great, I even noticed a very advanced screen editor (Ekranski editor), from my former homeland Yugoslavia, with a lot of memories related to that time.
Thank you.

[cmonkey]

Thanks for taking the time to put this TNFS server together. I'm thoroughly enjoying browsing the game list and picking a random game to play and the menu system makes this a breeze.

If I could just make one suggestion that would make finding the game that you're looking for a lot faster - would you consider adding the ability to be able to type the second letter of the game you're looking for and then the game list would start with the first game that started with the original letter you chose followed by the second letter you typed.

For example, there are 50 pages of games starting with the letter 'S'. Say, for example, I want to play 'Sweevos World'. That's on page 49 out of 50. So I have to flick through 48 pages to get to it. If it were possible to type the second letter of the game name ('w') and then the game list would jump to the first game that started with the letters 'sw' then Sweevos World would appear fourth in that list. It would massively reduce the number of pages you had to flick through if the list were slimmed down to games that started with the first letters of the game that you were looking for, rather than just the first letter.

If you were thinking about implementing this then you'd have to reassign the current 'P', 'N' and 'M' keys for 'previous page', 'next page' and 'previous menu' but perhaps those functions could be mapped to 'Space', 'Caps Shift' and 'Enter' (although that would make it a little difficult if the second letter of the game you were looking for was a space char, but there's probably not too many games with a space as the second char!)

It's just a thought, no worries if you don't want to implement this, I just thought it would make it easier for people to get to the game that they were looking for a little quicker than potentially flicking through 30/40/50 pages of games beforehand. Maybe I'm in the minority here, maybe most people are totally happy flicking through many pages before they get to the game they want to play.

Thanks once again for putting this server together and for the enhancements since it went live. It's much appreciated.

[mdr]

For example, there are 50 pages of games starting with the letter 'S'. Say, for example, I want to play 'Sweevos World'. That's on page 49 out of 50. So I have to flick through 48 pages to get to it.

Agreed. I've implemented a search system now which should make it a lot less hassle to get to what you're after! I've added it to the Demos, Games, Covertapes and Utilities sections:



It jumps to the first (case-insensitive) match for your search in the list. It's just a first implementation and I can improve it a lot; As it simply reads over the entire list of files, if your search is located towards the end of the pile, it'll take a fairly long time to match it. But at least you don't have to keep bashing the N key over and over again. Plus, Sweevo's World is now in the Hall Of Fame so you can always get to it that way

Hopefully it improves things a little. Thanks for the suggestion!

-Mark

[cmonkey]

Just tried the new search functionality Mark. Brilliant! Thank you so much for implementing it.

I'm probably responsible for Sweevos World in the Hall of Fame, as I am for Chuckie Egg 2 also!

Thanks once again for your work on this.

[flatduckrecords]

A couple of suggestions for the "Other TNFS servers" list:

• Alexander Sharikhin's tnfs://nihirash.net/ - uGophy (gopher client)
• Pat Hills' tnfs://zx.cm7.ch - based on zx.kupo.be, has some cool news/weather/webcam experiments

[mdr]

Good morning everyone!

Another big update for the site today.

There is now a message wall where you can leave a post for users of the site, and I can ask the important questions:



Seriously. Number 1. What is wrong with you?

This was a load of fun to put together; I always wanted to run a BBS when I was a kid so this is one of the features I was most keen to implement. Thanks to [mention]flatduckrecords[/mention] for your help hacking on zmakebas to improve support for Spectranet tokens so I could make use of %fopen! I also added the TNFS sites you mentioned in your last post to the links section.

So what else ? There's now a "recent uploads" page under the new "Lists" option in the menu:



You can press a number and play the games straight from this list like all the other sections. Amongst other things, you can see I've uploaded a bunch of modern games from this thread. I want to keep this site up to date and not just a dump for old games, so this is a great way of checking out the latest additions.

Speaking of lists, I also started on the first of of a set of curated lists and suggestions. I took the chart from the OFFICIAL UK Top 40 thread and added it as a playable list:



There's a bunch of other little changes as well like a 64-column font added to a bunch of sections. You can find more info in the "about" section:



Hope you enjoy!

Cheers,

-Mark

[MonkZy]

Thanks to [mention]flatduckrecords[/mention] for your help hacking on zmakebas to improve support for Spectranet tokens so I could make use of %fopen!

Is it possible to post here how you did this. I am writing some code which uses BASIC and adding in the % tokens is a real pain. A spectranet modded version of zmakebas would be awesome.

[flatduckrecords]

Is it possible to post here how you did this. I am writing some code which uses BASIC and adding in the % tokens is a real pain. A spectranet modded version of zmakebas would be awesome.

Hi [mention]MonkZy[/mention], some forum posts were lost so I'm just reposting this (in case anyone else might find it useful!) the source code is available on GitHub.

As noted, it wasn't my original work; I believe that Alistair Neil first added %-command support, but with [mention]mdr[/mention]'s help we fixed the tokenisation and added support for several more %-commands. Some code examples from the Spectranet Wiki were included as well for reference.

Cheers,
Robert