wraggster
April 3rd, 2013, 22:56
After I released version 0.03 of rpix86 last weekend, things were pretty quiet for a few days on the rpix86 side, so I decided to work on ax86 for a while. I had added a feature into rpix86 where it downloads (after asking a confirmation from the user) the 4DOS.COM command interpreter if it is not found on the disk, and I wanted to have similar feature in ax86. So, I started reading Android documentation about how to add dialogs and how to download files. It turned out that both of those things are reasonably simple to accomplish, and after spending a couple of evenings working on them, I had a working system in place!
When ax86 starts, it attempts to find 4DOS.COM from either the internal data storage, or from the SD card storage area. If neither locations have it, ax86 displays the above dialog. Clicking on Cancel will quit ax86, clicking on Download will start downloading 4DOS.COM. This phase shows a progress bar dialog while the file gets downloaded. After 4DOS.COM has been succesfully downloaded, ax86 starts running the main emulation code and presents the DOS prompt. I am thinking that this dialog could perhaps also have a third button, "Choose directory", in case the user already has a directory reserved for DOS software and wants to use that for ax86.
In the middle of last week I suddenly began to get lot more emails and forum messages about rpix86. This increased acticity was caused by several major technology news sites suddenly releasing an article about rpix86, so I got thousands of hits per day into my web site! I decided to switch back to working on rpix86 because of this increased interest in it. I will try to keep working on ax86 as well, though, so that I can eventually release it publicly as well.
http://ax86.patrickaalto.com/ablog.html
When ax86 starts, it attempts to find 4DOS.COM from either the internal data storage, or from the SD card storage area. If neither locations have it, ax86 displays the above dialog. Clicking on Cancel will quit ax86, clicking on Download will start downloading 4DOS.COM. This phase shows a progress bar dialog while the file gets downloaded. After 4DOS.COM has been succesfully downloaded, ax86 starts running the main emulation code and presents the DOS prompt. I am thinking that this dialog could perhaps also have a third button, "Choose directory", in case the user already has a directory reserved for DOS software and wants to use that for ax86.
In the middle of last week I suddenly began to get lot more emails and forum messages about rpix86. This increased acticity was caused by several major technology news sites suddenly releasing an article about rpix86, so I got thousands of hits per day into my web site! I decided to switch back to working on rpix86 because of this increased interest in it. I will try to keep working on ax86 as well, though, so that I can eventually release it publicly as well.
http://ax86.patrickaalto.com/ablog.html