On this page, you can find the history of beta releases of The Star Commander and the Star Utilities.
Changes in SC 0.83.23 beta since SC 0.82:
Mod: Paths longer than 80 characters are also saved inside and between sessions. (This changes the structure of the SC.INI file.)
Changes in SC 0.83.23 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.22 beta since SC 0.82:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.22 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.21 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: During file rename, already existing target files are now detected correctly under operating systems other than real DOS, as well.
Fix: The number of sides is not detected for disks in 1570 drives anymore.
Fix: The progress indicator counted blocks incorrectly while copying a file from a Commodore drive in normal transfer mode.
New: Introducing support for accessing Commodore drives via the OpenCBM driver (cbm4win 0.4.0 or above) under Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003 – use the "OpenCBM" value for the "Serial cable" option in the "Transfer options" configuration screen.
Changes in SC 0.83.21 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.20 beta since SC 0.82:
Mod: The "Change drive" dialog box does not spin up floppy disk drive(s) under Windows NT/2000/XP, during the detection of available drive letters.
Mod: As the parallel port mode cannot be reliably detected under Windows NT/2000/XP, the warning about using an XP1541/XP1571 parallel cable on an SPP parallel port is not displayed anymore.
Mod: "File info" recognizes more of the standard load addresses of BASIC programs for various Commodore machines.
New: Command line options, except for "/cmd", are also available in the external setup program, SCSETUP.EXE.
New: Mouse wheel up/down acts as Cursor Up/Down, when CuteMouse - or any DOS Wheel API-compatible mouse driver - is installed.
New: The new "SafeAll" and "SafeUsed" values for "Detect port modes" skip port mode detection under Windows NT/2000/XP, to avoid delays and crashes of the DOS shell, but work exactly as "All" and "Used" under other operating systems.
Changes in SC 0.83.20 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Mod: Beta versions expire six months, rather than three months, after their release.
Changes in SC 0.83.19 beta since SC 0.82:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.19 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Src: All imports from non-Turbo Vision units to Turbo Vision units have been removed so that you can modify any non-Turbo Vision unit and still have the source compile without the #70 Unit version mismatch error. (Constants at the beginning of LOWLEVEL.PAS are duplicates of the constants that have been moved, during this process, to the indicated Turbo Vision units. Do not change those constants!)
Changes in SC 0.83.18 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: The "Attribute" function could not change the date stamps of files under Windows XP.
Src: The source package does not include the (modified) source of Turbo Vision, Borland Pascal's user interface, anymore, only the compiled units and object files plus patch files that convert the original Turbo Vision source files into their modified form.
Changes in SC 0.83.18 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.17 beta since SC 0.82:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.17 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: In the previous beta, all disk turbos locked up.
Changes in SC 0.83.16 beta since SC 0.82:
New: The mouse cursor changes into an icon over screen hot spots and while a mouse operation is taking place.
New: Middle mouse button clicks on the key bar activate the functions that are normally accessed with Shift held down.
New: Clicking the middle mouse button outside the active dialog box has the same effect as pressing Enter.
New: You can drag the cursor in the command line with the left mouse button held down.
New: You can select text in the command line and all input lines with the right mouse button held down.
New: You can change the width and height of the panels by dragging the middle and bottom edges of the panels with the mouse.
New: You can change the width of the Name columns of panels by dragging the vertical separator line to their right.
New: When editing menu and extension files with the internal editor, Shift-F1 toggles the mini help at the bottom of the screen.
New: Star List now recognizes 1571 and 1581 disk images, as well.
Src: The size of the external setup program has been reduced to half, by removing references to unnecessary units.
Src: The size of Tabs in the viewer and editor can be changed from the default of 8, with the TabSize constant.
Changes in SC 0.83.16 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Mod: The "Detect port modes" option has been changed into a three-value list: "All" detects the modes of all parallel ports, "None" detects none of them, "Used" detects the modes of only those parallel ports that are configured in the "Serial interface" and/or "Parallel interface" options. (NOTE: The batch variable "DetectPortModes" has been updated accordingly.)
Fix: The disk copier has been sped up significantly on PC's running real DOS without a disk cache.
Changes in SC 0.83.15 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: Quotation marks are removed automatically from DOS paths and file names entered into input lines so that you may copy and paste them between the Commander and other applications easily; quotation marks in Commodore paths and file names are kept, however.
Fix: The Commander doesn't crash dosemu anymore but XMS is not used either.
Mod: Under Windows NT/2000/XP, the quasi-files, assigned to the GiveIO and UserPort drivers, are kept open during parallel port access and closed only afterwards so that drivers can set up exclusive port usage for the Commander.
Mod: The interval of valid parallel port addresses has been expanded to $0200-$F800.
Mod: The Commander, the internal viewer and editor and Star Lynx all handle the last file in Lynx archives without errors, even if the "offset of last useful byte in last sector" counter is missing from its directory entry.
Changes in SC 0.83.15 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: You can "unconfigure" the serial cable by setting "Serial cable" to "None"; instead of an error message, then the configuration screen coming back again and again and, at the end, a crash, this setting is accepted and the error message is displayed only when you try to access a Commodore drive.
Changes in SC 0.83.14 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: The viewer is now able to show files up to the maximum size of DOS files: 2 Gigabytes.
Fix: Moving the mouse does not halt the process of a Quick view panel collecting the number and size of files and directories inside the directory highlighted in the opposite panel.
Mod: The Commander is now able to show file and disk sizes up to the maximum size of NTFS/ext2 files: 8 Exabytes (1 Exabyte = 1 thousand million Gigabytes).
New: More alternative hotkeys: Delete for deleting files, Backspace for entering the parent directory.
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.13 beta since SC 0.82:
Mod: To complete a command or file name on the command line, using long file names, use Ctrl-Shift-Tab; if there are several choices, in the menu, you don't have to use Shift-Enter or hold Shift while clicking with the mouse, to get a long file name, anymore.
Mod: When pasting the names of files into input lines or the clipboard, "\*.*" is not appended to directory names anymore.
New: When copying from a disk image to a GCR-based disk image format, you can enter the sector header ID manually.
Changes in SC 0.83.13 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Mod: The EGA colors for the "PETANSI" mode of the viewer have been recalibrated, according to the RGB values measured by Pepto.
Changes in SC 0.83.12 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: When disabling long file name support with Ctrl-N, selected files were not reselected.
Fix: PETSCII codes $7E, $9E, $DE and $FF were incorrectly displayed with the lowercase/uppercase C64 charset: the character was reversed.
Fix: In the palette setup screen, the cursor did not show the current color of the item highlighted in the list.
Fix: You couldn't enter subdirectories in 1581 disk images in the file selector of the internal viewer and editor.
Fix: Very long Commodore file names, those of files in subdirectories of disk images and archive files, were cut improperly to make them fit into the title bar of the internal viewer and editor.
Fix: The directory list of the file selector is now centered on the screen in VESA modes, too, where the screen is wider.
Fix: Star List, when using a format specification file, did not display the container header if the first file entry of the container was deleted and so not visible; it also did not display the container footer if the listing ended because of too many entries in the container.
New: Introducing the "/nowinclip" command line parameter that disables usage of the common Windows clipboard.
New: The new "PETANSI" view mode of the internal viewer, designed for viewing ANSI-style PETSCII art, can process some control codes in PETSCII text files: carriage return, all colors, reverse on/off and character set switching; other control codes are ignored and not displayed.
Src: Replaced many character references, mostly CR and LF, to ch* named constants.
Changes in SC 0.83.12 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: The "Video mode" function sometimes displayed the 80x25 mono mode as mode $0004 – rather than the correct $0007 – and did not manage to correctly highlight the current screen mode in the list.
Fix: Boolean values in batch processing mode were not case-insensitive, only lowercase values were accepted.
Fix: You couldn't extract files from LHA and ZIP archives.
Fix: It is not possible to change to the C64 character set anymore in the "Country info" setup screen.
Changes in SC 0.83.11 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: Star List shifted the filenames one line upwards when listing LHA, LHA SFX and TAR archives without format specification.
Mod: Removed the screen flickering upon entering and exiting standard viewers and editors and, when the Commodore character set enabled, the screen mode changes upon entering and exiting the internal viewer and editor.
Mod: An error message is displayed if, before a disk copy, you try to preformat a destination 1541 disk for an extended 1541 disk image and "Command exec mode" is set to "Normal".
Mod: When turbo formatting an extended 1541 disk, and "DOS type" is set to "Dolphin DOS" in "Transfer options", the first padding byte of sector headers is set to $0D, so that Dolphin DOS also recognizes the disk as having 40 tracks. The same occurs, when converting an extended 1541 disk image or diskpacked ZipCode archive to GCR-coded disk image or sixpacked ZipCode archive format, and "DOS type" is set to "Dolphin DOS" in "Image options".
Mod: When "DOS type" is set to "Prologic DOS" in "Image options", only extended disk images get a DOS version code of "P" written into the BAM sector upon creation; normal disk images don't.
Mod: The "low brightness on black" shadow color has been changed to "low brightness on low brightness" because it casts a more realistic shadow onto reverse characters.
Changes in SC 0.83.11 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: When running the main executable, SCMAIN, directly, not via the SC loader, calling standard viewers and editors may have caused lockups or "out of memory" errors.
Fix: If the target file was too big for the editor, accepting the offer to view the file instead had no effect and the hotkeys for viewing and editing files did not work anymore either, until the Commander was restarted. The same occurred if the internal editor was called from the pull-down menus, for editing menu and extension files.
Mod: Star List now also accepts long names for the list file.
New: Added the "list" command for batch processing. (WARNING: It is experimental. You may run into bugs and strange behavior, caused by the code still being unfinished!)
Changes in SC 0.83.10 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: On certain machines, with a buggy VGA BIOS, the Commander displayed an empty screen, although worked correctly. (Thanks to Hársfalvi Levente for the fix.)
Mod: It is now possible to toggle the character set even if a dialog box is on the screen.
Mod: Now Star List allows you to use field widthes up to 255 characters rather than only 63.
Changes in SC 0.83.10 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
None.
Changes in SC 0.83.09 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: Standard viewers and editors are executed in a way that is more compatible with DOS clones.
Mod: The "/novesa" command line parameter disables VESA support completely, not only during startup.
Mod: You get an error message if the Commander runs out of memory while reading the directory into a panel.
New: Introducing the "/color", "/bw" and "/laptop" command line parameters to force the color, black & white and laptop palette.
Changes in SC 0.83.09 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
New: You can use DOS environment variables in batch commands with the syntax "%%<environment variable name>%".
New: You can enable the bad sector-aware 1541 disk formatter not only with the global "Verify write" option but there's also a local option for the same purpose in the disk format dialog box.
Changes in SC 0.83.08 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: When reading Commodore disks in warp mode, the complete sector header, including the two padding bytes, is transferred to the PC and stored into the destination, if it is a GCR-based disk format.
Fix: Pressing the "Skip" button in the replace confirmation box of the editor had no effect.
Mod: If the "Delay value" option is set to 0, the new default value, then the actual delay value is computed by the automatic calibrator before every access of the Commodore drive.
Mod: The "Force async transfer" option is now called "Async transfer" and its "Auto" value allows you to let the Commander automatically decide whether to use synchronous or asynchronous data transfer. (NOTE: The batch variable "ForceAsyncTransfer" has been updated accordingly.)
New: Introducing disk turbos for 1581 drives. (NOTE: You have to switch "Transfer mode" to "Turbo" to enable them. At the moment, the data transfer is always asynchronous, no matter what "Async transfer" is set to. WARNING: The implemented turbos are "read directory", "read disk to disk image" and "disk editor"; everything else will crash!)
New: Introducing read-only support for the "*.f64" disk image companion files created by FCOPY-PC.
New: Introducing a Commodore 1541 disk formatter that verifies sectors and allocates bad ones in the BAM; for non-extended disks only.
New: The current transfer mode is highlighted in the "Drive interleaves" frame of the "Drive options" menu so that you can tune the transfer speed easily.
Changes in SC 0.83.08 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: Although the documentation said so, the "noinit" command doesn't have to be in the very first line of a script, it only has to be the first command in the script.
Fix: If the manual file name conversion box was displayed during a file copy, you couldn't view or edit any file afterwards.
Changes in SC 0.83.07 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: In the confirmation dialog box for overwriting read-only or write protected files, the "No" button has been renamed to "Skip" and it doesn't cancel the complete file operation anymore.
Changes in SC 0.83.07 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: The execution of single batch commands never stopped, the Commander kept running in an endless idle loop.
Fix: In batch mode, you couldn't copy disks from Commodore drives, it always tried to access the drive with the device number #0.
Mod: In batch commands, only the empty string, "0", "No" and "False" are accepted as the boolean value "false".
New: Introducing replies for confirmation messages, as variables, for scripts.
Changes in SC 0.83.06 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: The external setup locked up upon exiting the "Configuration" menu.
Changes in SC 0.83.06 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: You could neither view or edit DOS files that had "%xy" hexadecimal codes in their names as the prefix for these codes was changed from "%" to "$".
Fix: When converting several disk images, the disk copier stopped after the first disk image instead of continuing with the next one.
Fix: All dialog box frame characters were missing in the external setup.
Mod: When executing batch commands, usual screen components – panels, menu bar, function key bar, command line, clock – are not displayed anymore, only progress windows and confirmation and error messages.
New: Introducing the new commands "set", "noinit", "init", "setdrive" and "exit" and the global configuration settings as variables for scripts.
Changes in SC 0.83.05 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: When using the "Quick view" item of the "Left" and "Right" menus, it was the opposite panel that switched to Quick view mode and the display of the specified panel was emptied.
Fix: For 1571 drives, the Commander now uses the drive's own detection method to determine whether a disk is single- or double-sided.
New: Under Windows NT/2000/XP, files with the extension ".cmd" are also considered executable program files.
New: The checkbox settings of the "Copy disk" dialog box are remembered during a single Commander session.
Changes in SC 0.83.05 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: You couldn't copy DOS files if the source and destination directory was the same.
Fix: You couldn't view or edit files inside images and uncompressed archives directly from the Commander because the viewer and the editor opened the container image or archive instead.
Changes in SC 0.83.04 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: You get no error message about the drive setup file being corrupted if the main setup file is missing.
Fix: A weird problem, that caused extremely rare lockups upon launching the Commander on systems with XMS memory available, has been fixed in the OverXMS unit.
Fix: When owners are displayed, the BAM editor corrupted the BAM upon saving changes that affect the second or third BAM sector in 1571 and 1581 disk images.
Fix: The option "Orig format pattern" was always displayed as disabled in the configuration menu, although enabling or disabling it had the correct effect.
Fix: If "Copy onto dir track" was enabled, when copying a too large file into a GEOS-formatted disk image, the Commander locked up rather than displaying an error message about the destination disk having become full.
Fix: When pasting long file names, containing spaces or other invalid characters, into input lines, they were enclosed into double quotation marks.
Fix: If the video card returned bogus VESA screen mode numbers, the "Video mode" function couldn't position the highlight bar onto the line representing the current screen mode upon popping up.
Fix: If the video card returned bogus VESA screen mode numbers, the Commander, its loader, the viewer and the editor may have switched the screen into 80x25 mode, thinking that the current screen mode is graphical.
Fix: When changing the date and/or time stamps of DOS files, the archive attribute was always set.
New: Introducing batch processing capability, read the documentation for more details. (WARNING: It is not finished yet.)
New: Introducing the "/noxms" and "/noems" command line parameters that disable XMS and EMS usage.
New: The viewer and the editor accept the names of Commodore files inside image and archive files on the command line, using the common syntax.
New: To specify special PETSCII characters, "%xy" hexadecimal codes can now be used for source file names, as well.
New: In "File attributes", DOS date and time stamps can be specified in the ISO "yyyy-mm-dd" and "hh:mm:ss" format, too.
Changes in SC 0.83.04 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: For all data transfers in normal mode, including the upload of disk turbos, interrupts were not disabled; therefore, lots of timeouts and lockups occurred under a multi-tasking system, even if "Force async transfer" was enabled.
Fix: The warp disk copier messed up data written onto Commodore disks.
Fix: Copying a file of the size of 0 bytes caused a 200 runtime error.
Changes in SC 0.83.03 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: When appending to a DOS file, the progress bar doesn't get filled already at the beginning of the file copy and, when cancelling the operation, the destination file gets its original size and date stamp back rather than getting deleted.
Mod: In the "File attributes" box for DOS files, the year part of the date stamp is displayed with four digits, including the century.
Mod: In the "File info" box for GEOS files, the hour part of date stamp is always displayed in AM/PM mode, even if the regional settings of the operating system tell otherwise.
Mod: The "User command" function of the user menu for Commodore drives always displays the drive status and displays it as PETSCII string so that all kinds of unusual drive commands can be used.
New: Introducing support for sixpacked ZipCode archives in the disk copier.
New: The disk copier is now able to create damaged GCR-encoded data: if the error info block of the source disk image holds an error code for a sector, the disk copier intentionally damages the GCR-encoded data accordingly, when copying it into GCR-based formats such as Commodore disks (warp transfer mode only), GCR-coded disk images and sixpacked ZipCode archives. (NOTE: Currently, this works for sixpacked ZipCode archives only; Commodore disks and GCR-coded disk images will be supported later.)
Changes in SC 0.83.03 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Mod: The ZipCode compressor in the disk copier is now more aggressive: unlike the original ZipCode software, it compresses sectors even if the gain is only one byte, which makes the resulting diskpacked ZipCode archives the smallest possible.
Mod: When neither the source nor the destination of the disk copier is a Commodore drive, successive disks are copied without showing the main dialog box in between; to speed up disk copy even more, "All" buttons were placed into other dialog boxes, too.
Changes in SC 0.83.02 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: Deleting the last file in Arkive, Lynx and filepacked ZipCode archives caused data corruption.
Fix: Adding files to a filepacked ZipCode archive may have corrupted the last block of the previously last file in the archive.
Fix: The "DOS type" setting was not saved at all into the drive setup file.
Fix: The warp disk copier handled 20,READ ERROR's incorrectly: no data was read from the damaged sector and other sectors, on the same track, may have inherited this error.
Fix: In the error info editor of the disk editor, you couldn't put error codes A to F to a whole track by pressing the shifted letter.
Mod: If the system code page is other than 437, there are seams, rather than national characters, where double and single lines meet in dialog box frames; also, active options are marked with an "x" instead of a check mark.
Mod: While writing a Commodore disk, 25,WRITE ERROR's are retried as many times as the value of the "Number of retries" option.
New: A new option, "Invalid GCR error", lets you configure what error message the warp disk copier should generate when it encounters invalid GCR codes in sectors of Commodore disks.
New: A new option, "Num of smart retries", enables a different method for retrying bad sectors on Commodore disks: if the damaged raw data, read from the disk, is the same for this many consecutive retries, the sector is considered to be successfully read, the error code is noted but no error message is displayed.
Src: There's a small software, TXT2HTML, that converts the documentations into HTML format; the documentations have been slightly changed, to make this conversion easier. (WARNING: The software is heuristically optimized for the structure of the documentations of the Commander and related software, its behavior is unknown for other files!)
Src: All graphical characters of the user interface have been collected into constants so that they can be easily redefined.
Changes in SC 0.83.02 beta since previous SC 0.83 betas:
Fix: If you copied a disk from a Commodore drive and specified no type prefix for the destination, the disk copier fell into an endless loop.
Fix: The warp disk copier now does copy data, read from damaged sectors of the source Commodore disk, to the destination disk.
Mod: Beta releases expire for non-registered users only and, instead of completely refusing to run, they only display a warning upon every startup.
Changes in SC 0.83.01 beta since SC 0.82:
Fix: When trying to create a subdirectory inside a 1581 disk image, an error message, complaining about the number of tracks, kept popping up forever.
Fix: It is now possible to rename files inside LHA archives to names longer than 16 characters.
Fix: The disk copier locked up at the end of merging disk images.
Fix: "Fast mouse reset" didn't make any difference with PS/2 mice.
Fix: When copying files out of LHA and ZIP archives, the archive is temporarily uncompressed into the destination directory – or, if the destination is a Commodore drive, the TEMP directory – rather than the source directory, which may be a read-only medium such as a CD-ROM or a network drive.
Fix: If you renamed files on Commodore drives with a device number other than 8, the Commander tried to move them instead.
Fix: There was a memory leak, causing weird behavior or lockups, in the message box in which the disk copier warned about the sector header ID and the BAM ID of the source disk being different.
Fix: The "Extended 1541 disks" setting was saved incorrectly into the drive setup file.
Fix: When copying files into filepacked ZipCode archives, sectors filled with one byte were compressed as "packed" instead of "homogeneous", by both the Commander or Star Zip, which causes no data corruption but increases the archive size unnecessarily.
Fix: In disk images, the Star Utilities assume files with a starting track of zero to be phantom files and don't fall into an infinite loop when trying to extract file data anymore.
Mod: In the Filter settings, TAR archives are taken for PC archives rather than CBM archives.
New: From now on, beta versions expire three months after their release; please, always download the newest beta and don't complain about problems with old betas!
New: Introducing support for ZIP archives, using Info-ZIP as external archiver: you can read the directory and add, extract, rename and delete files; note that PKZIP will definitely not work.
New: Introducing read-only support for diskpacked ZipCode archives: you can read the directory, extract files and view the disk with the disk editor.
New: Introducing the enhanced disk copier that can copy between any pairs of Commodore disks, disk images and diskpacked ZipCode archives. (NOTE: Support for GCR-coded disk images and sixpacked ZipCode archives is coming later!)
New: Added a separate online help page on disk errors: what their reason is and how the disk copier reacts to them.
New: With two new symbols, "!`" and "%`", you can use the extension part of file names in menu and extension files.
Src: The frame characters for windows have been collected to *FrameChars constants so that you can change them easily.
Src: Features of different panel modes (i.e. image/archive types) have been collected into the PanelModeAttribs constant so that adding new panel modes is easier.
Src: The at* constants have been replaced by the pm* constants as it was bad to have two different sets of, effectively, the same constants for two different purposes.
Src: Internally, the Commander is now ready for converting between any pairs of the three basic track types: "normal" (256 data bytes per sector), "GCR" (GCR-encoded data, with headers) and "raw" (complete track, with gaps); the disk copier is already using ConvertTrack() for this conversion.
Src: All routines for reading and writing filepacked and diskpacked ZipCode archives have been collected into ReadZipCodeBlock() and WriteZipCodeBlock().
Src: Assembly routines, that don't need to be in assembly, have been marked in the source; these will later be converted into Pascal, for easier porting or translation to C.
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