Subj : TIC files
To   : Deon George
From : Andrew Leary
Date : Wed Sep 12 2018 16:47:02

Hello Deon!

12 Sep 18 13:54, you wrote to me:

 DG> I've noticed that I receive tic files from non MBSE BBS's (Mystic at
 DG> the moment), and those tic files have a name similar to the file they
 DG> are representing. EG: pinet.tic for pinet.250, fsxinfo.tic for
 DG> fsxinfo.zip.

Yes, I've noticed the same thing.

 DG> MBSE is not processing those tic files - however if I renamed the tic
 DG> file to have 8 numbers (with .tic) at the end, they were processed.
 DG> EG: I renamed pinet.tic to 00000000.tic and it was processed.

I do the same thing with them when I find them in my inbound.

 DG> I had a quick look at FTSC specs (5006.001 and 1039.001), and it
 DG> doesnt mention anything about how a tic file should be named
 DG> (character limit nor only numerical/hex chars, etc).

FTS-5006.001 specifies a filename in DOS 8.3 format.  Thus, it could be 
interpreted that .TIC files with shorter or longer names are non-compliant.

 DG> I then had a quick look at the code mbfido/tic.c and it looks like it
 DG> will only process a tic file if it has a length of 12 chars (being 8
 DG> chars plus ".tic"). Could this be changed? Or is it referenced
 DG> somewhere else that tic files should be 8 chars (suffixed with .tic)
 DG> and other BBS software is not following that standard?

In my mind, I consider Mystic's implementation to be non-compliant, although 
it probably should be clarified in the FTSC documentation as well.

When James Coyle comes back to working on Mystic again, I intend to mention 
this to him and see about getting it fixed.

If there appears to be a delay on this, I may add a switch to mbfido to enable 
processing of these "extended" .TIC names.  MBSE will never create .TIC files 
with other than a DOS 8.3 style name ending in .TIC.

Regards,

Andrew

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