Subj : SVDM - Which SBBSEXEC.DLL and DOSXTRN.EXE version?
To   : Digital Man
From : Fzf
Date : Mon Mar 25 2024 14:18:58

  Re: SVDM - Which SBBSEXEC.DLL and DOSXTRN.EXE version?
  By: Digital Man to Fzf on Mon Mar 11 2024 07:32 pm

 DM> The latest and greatest sbbsexec.dll and dosxtrn.exe can be find in the
 DM> nightly builds of Synchronet for Windows:

Thank you for looking into this.  I apologize for taking all this time to get back to you.  Real life sometimes intrudes.

 DM> How did you determine the read/writes were "nonsense"?

As I looked into what was going on I moved to lower and lower level diagnostic programs until I finally just wrote my own to know exactly what was being done on the program side.

 DM> Would happy to try address whatever issues with the UART emulation aren't
 DM> working for you, but please update to the latest and get new/updated debug
 DM> log output and share with me.

I had downloaded the latest SBBSEXEC.DLL the morning after you made the initialization change and have tried it out.  It's working 100% along with the version downloaded today!  Pushing the UART hard also no longer creates any errors or even any unusual debug log entries.  Thanks again for fixing this.

There are a couple of other issues I would like to mention.

1. When SVDM uses an inherited socket (the -h option) no telnet negotiations are done.  As a result, the connection is assumed to be in ASCII mode and server side CR characters are translated to CR/LF.  Since most programs are already transmitting a CR/LF this gets translated to CR/LF/LF with the expected results.  When using an external socket in telnet mode, could SVDM set the
telnet.local_option and telnet.remote_option variables as so:

  A. Assume both remote and local have already suppressed GA and set the two
     options accordingly

  B. Set the remote telnet echo option to off and set the local telnet echo
     to follow the ServerEcho option from the .INI file

  C. Set both remote and local BINARY_TX options to follow the ServerBinary         option from the .INI file

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume these have already been set up when the telnet connection was initially made.  If someone really wants to change the behavior they could still do so by using the .INI file options mentioned.  The GA and echo options probably make no difference now but leaving them unset might cause trouble somewhere down the line.

2. Can anything be done to reduce the CPU usage?

3. The VDMODEM isn't importing target_ia32.props and thus is using SSE2 instructions.  SSE2 has been around for a little while now and it's fair to assume most everyone has it available.  However, BBS users tend to be more likely than the average person to be using what I'm going to lovingly call 'period correct hardware'.  Many of the CPUs from that era don't have such advanced instruction sets.  Could the instruction set extensions be changed by using the target_ia32.props file?  I do realize this may be in slight conflict with #2 above.

Thanks yet again for all the work you've done on this and for fixing the issue I was having.

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