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Domain: tbcnet.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to tbcnet.com.

Comments · 3

  1. Erin Grey Hot? by NMerriam · · Score: 2 · on New Episodes Of Battlestar Galactica?

    Oh, yes.

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  2. Re: CAB File Format by caolan · · Score: 2 · on Microsoft's Watered-down Version Of DOJ Remedy
    A working implementation of the CAB inflater and details of its format can be gotten from the freeware DUMPCAB program. It was quite trivial to convert the decompression routine to cross platform code. I did this for my ivt2html utility to convert those pesky proprietry Microsoft InfoViewer .ivt files to html. .ivt uses the exact same MSZIP compression mechanism as CAB.

    MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find

    On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.

    Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.

    C.

  3. Re:Generic computers using Phoenix? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Phoenix to embed bootup ads in BIOS

    Me too... I don't think there are any generic boards which use Phoenix. Most of the ones I worked with were Award with AMI on most of the 486's and a small percentage of P2's.

    I had this little program which would allow you to change that little "Energy Star" logo on the Award bios. It works great to get rid of especially annoying resellers who try to get every possible discount and then resell the stuff at 2x the price they paid... "Purchased from XXXX. Call XXX-XXXX for all your computer needs."

    If you want to mess with the logo, grab unaward from here. That can uncompress your 128k BIOS images. Most of the newer P2 are 256k though. I lost the location of the image editor some time ago.