We're getting there!
26/10/2009 23:10 Filed in: News
Well, today was a good weekend! I locked myself in my room to get some solid coding done :-)
Last week, I had some race events on my Corvette Speedway track and that was a good moment to do some testing on the last beta version 6 of SRM 2.50. I found some bugs, as did some of the beta testers, and was able to fix them. There was also a lot of other work to do...
After I added the Syncing and Championship Template routines, SRM was growing significantly in size. Not a good thing if you're running it on an old 80386 with only 1MB of ram. So, I began searching for ways to get the size of my code down. After 8 hours of looking & fixing I was able to get it back down to the size I started with, WITHOUT the big routines! Fortunately there was plenty of room to make my code more efficient, since a lot of it was written more that 15 years ago! Back then, I wasn't a very subtle programmer, so there was a lot to be gained from finding & deleting repeating code and putting it a separate subroutines.
Besides this invisible work under the hood you will like the improvements. Especially if you use the Championship mode (and you should!) you will find the Template file very handy. It saves you a lot of typing if you regularly run Championships with the same people. Oh, and from now on you can also give your championship a name YOU like.
If you have more than one track, like me (I also have a small rally track with an old SRM computer) you'll find it very handy to have something that will sync drivers and cars. This way, you can type in new drivers and cars on one computer and sync the other computer(s) with a diskette in a very short time! Nothing is changed without your approval first, so just run the Sync routine to check for differences, if you like.
There is still some testing to do, but all the stuff I wanted in version 2.50 is ready now! I will contact the beta testers for a new beta version and the release version will follow as soon as all the bugs are ironed out!
Have fun!
Last week, I had some race events on my Corvette Speedway track and that was a good moment to do some testing on the last beta version 6 of SRM 2.50. I found some bugs, as did some of the beta testers, and was able to fix them. There was also a lot of other work to do...
After I added the Syncing and Championship Template routines, SRM was growing significantly in size. Not a good thing if you're running it on an old 80386 with only 1MB of ram. So, I began searching for ways to get the size of my code down. After 8 hours of looking & fixing I was able to get it back down to the size I started with, WITHOUT the big routines! Fortunately there was plenty of room to make my code more efficient, since a lot of it was written more that 15 years ago! Back then, I wasn't a very subtle programmer, so there was a lot to be gained from finding & deleting repeating code and putting it a separate subroutines.
Besides this invisible work under the hood you will like the improvements. Especially if you use the Championship mode (and you should!) you will find the Template file very handy. It saves you a lot of typing if you regularly run Championships with the same people. Oh, and from now on you can also give your championship a name YOU like.
If you have more than one track, like me (I also have a small rally track with an old SRM computer) you'll find it very handy to have something that will sync drivers and cars. This way, you can type in new drivers and cars on one computer and sync the other computer(s) with a diskette in a very short time! Nothing is changed without your approval first, so just run the Sync routine to check for differences, if you like.
There is still some testing to do, but all the stuff I wanted in version 2.50 is ready now! I will contact the beta testers for a new beta version and the release version will follow as soon as all the bugs are ironed out!
Have fun!