News

Blah blah.

The 20s have not been very happy so far. Maybe we can turn that around.

It's 2020. I'm still here. That is all.

Thanks to Luis Felipe Antoniosi (Retro Canada) for pointing out the 5150 config switch issue.

Version 3.1 is here.

The massive database of QBASIC games, created and mantained by Lachie, is available once again!

It was previously hosted at qbasic.com, which has been offline for a couple years now. It is now available at games.phatcode.net.

It's been almost 9 years since an official update...but old school never dies.

I released the Super PC/Turbo XT BIOS 3.0 a couple weeks ago and I thought I should dust off the site and give it a little design facelift.

I also fixed the Scene News page and updated all the broken external links. Turns out a lot of websites move and disappear over a decade, hmm.

And...the forum is back!

The following features have been added in Version 1.1:

• EMS Magic will now load itself into UMBs by default, unless the /L switch is specified. This should save
  7K conventional memory on most systems with limited free UMBs. Previously LOADHIGH was needed to load EMS Magic into UMBs, which required 64K+ free initially.
• MAX option added to the /RAM switch. Specifying /RAM=MAX will use all available XMS for EMS.
• /BEST switch added. This forces EMS Magic to use the "best fit" memory allocation strategy when loading, rather than the default "last fit". This is needed for some programs that expect the upper end of conventional memory to be available.

You can download the new version here.

Unless a major bug is found, this will likely be the final release. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback.

I am not dead. Updates will be coming soon.

Also, we have reached 100,000+ visits. Booya.


That is all.

Grab it here. Noteable changes are:

• Relaxed license
• Compatible with PHP 5.x
• Added ability for admin to edit posts
• Added option for auto subject line (re: ...)
• Added option to allow/disallow <code>, <b>, <i>, <u>
• Fixed bookmarks (#) in autolinking
• Added word filters
• Added spambot protection
• Encoded field names
• Trigger phrases
• Trap field
• Timed forms
• Link verification (LinkSleeve)

That's right, it's finally finished.

A couple of months ago I threw together a new logo and put it up as a test. I've decided I like it better than the old one, so I touched it up and it's staying.

I updated the 88x31 button, so if you link to Phat Code please use the updated one at: http://www.phatcode.net/images/button.png. Also, the favicon has been updated, so clear your browser cache if you want to see the new one.

The tagfile (phatcode.exe) hasn't been updated yet because I'm adding some animation to it, but that should be updated soon.

All hosted accounts with 50 MB space have been upgraded to 100 MB, enjoy.

Phat Code passed the 10,000 visitor mark yesterday, in less than a year. My last site took 2 years to reach 10k, so I'd say that's an improvement. :)

(and yes, that's "visitors", not "hits"...page hits are obviously much more...)

I also uploaded a short 96k intro that I wrote for a compo over at qbasic.com. It's pretty crappy, but I think I actually like it better than Digital Reality. Seems to "flow" better.

Thanks to everyone who tested beta 1. I've implemented the last two functions ("Alter Page Map & Jump" and "Alter Page Map & Call") and partially optimized the code. I've also found and removed a lot of bugs, including the 32K sample bug with Impulse Tracker and the graphics corruption with GYAN-E-B-GYAN.

My main focus now is getting programs which are 95% or less working as best I can. I have a much better debugging system now that records interrupt activity to a logfile, so that should make things somewhat easier.

There may or may not be a second beta. If there is, it probably won't be public. But if you're interested, as always, you can contact me to try it out.

phatcode.net, freebasic.net, and all hosted sites have been moved to the new server. The average server load is much lower, which means you should see improved performance on all sites.

Well, it's December 1, time to announce the winner of the chiptune contest...

Except nobody entered. Hrmm, looks like I'll just pick something from the Mods Anthology again. :P

As promised, EMS Magic is now in the beta stage. :)

All XMS 3.0 and EMS 4.0 functions have been implemented, with two exceptions (see below.)

Next is the testing/fixing/optimizing stage. There are still quite a few programs that don't work correctly with EMS Magic. My goal is to get all programs that don't rely on data aliasing working 100%.

The first beta of EMS Magic is a closed beta, which means you have to be a beta tester in order to get a copy. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester, email me at plasma@phatcode.net.

* The "Alter Page Map & Jump" and "Alter Page Map & Call" EMS functions are not yet implemented. The reason for this is that these functions are very stack-dependent and would have to be rewritten anyway after optimization. These functions are only used by programs that use EMS overlays for program code.

I'm working on a new phat code intro (see phatcode.exe in any of the downloads) and need a new tune...except I suck at tracking myself. :P

So, I thought it would be fun to have a little contest. The winner will get his name and tune in the intro. And free hosting. Umm, wait, hosting is free anyway....ermm, anyway...

So here are the rules:

• At least a minute long and loopable
• <= 12 KB
• 4-channel MOD format

(It's a "chiptune" contest, but if you'd rather do a different style, that's fine.)

The deadline is December 1, 2005 at 12:00 AM EST. Yeah, that's over two months away, but it gives plenty of time for procrastination. You can't have a good contest without proper procrastination.

You can enter as many times as you want, whether it's just a new revision of the same tune or a completely different one. Email all submissions to plasma@phatcode.net.

The winner will basically be whichever one I like the best... So if you'd rather not put your name on it when you submit it, that's fine. Just make sure you have a functioning return email address so I can contact you if you win.

If you have any questions about the contest, feel free to email me or post on the forum.

I regret that I have been unable to work on EMS Magic for about the past four months. I am resuming work on it now; it should be ready for beta within the next month or two.

It's been three months since my last news entry, but I've been working hard:

• Links section is finally "finished", with over 100 new links added. I will, of course, be adding new links as I find them. If you know of an interesting site that's not listed, feel free to inform me.


• Poll script has been updated so that bots/spiders/crawlers can't vote.


• Scene news page mostly fixed, although there are still problems fetching headlines from some sites occasionally. qb45.com has been added to the scene news, and VPlanet and QBNZ have been removed. (VPlanet will be back on once it's relaunched, but QBNZ is dead as far as I can tell...)


• Affiliates section has been added on the front page with links to qb45.com and Stars Dev.

I'm still working on EMS Magic. The code was becoming a mess, with some dirty fixes to problems that weren't initially addressed. (Like a variable number of handles and context save maps.)

So I completely rewrote everything that I had so far. This set me back a few weeks, but now it's much better. Tables for handles and save maps are allocated at runtime and placed in UMBs (if available) to save conventional memory.

In addition to providing XMS 3.0 support, the XMM patch also now fixes the problem of Windows incorrectly reporting free XMS.

And no, I haven't forgotten about the rest of the links section. :P It should be finished soon.

FlatForum 1.3, the stand-alone version of the Phat Code forum, has been released.

Empty text files are no longer generated for posts with no message content, so that should save some space. Also, word wrapping for IE has been fixed. The database format has not changed, so upgrading from 1.2 should be a simple swap-n-go. (You can also delete all empty .txt files in your forum data directory.)

Well, it's not as "complete" as I'd like, but it's time to go public...there's quite a few more articles and links I'd like to add, but that will have to come later.

Special thanks to Toshi for sending me all the demos and rules from his old compos. Thanks also to Dav for his support. (Anybody know where he is now?)