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Well, this is likely to be the last version of FACTS for 68k machines. It has reached a stage where I believe it to be stable and feature-rich as it needs to be. If anybody wants to update it further or finds a bug, then you can still email me and I will try to fix it. Major updates are however very unlikely. This does not mean I am going anywhere. I have a new version of Facts in development which is a complete rewrite. This means that it does not have all the features of Facts r4.91. It does however mean that it is specifically written to take advantage of OS4 and will be PPC native. As OS4 is not yet available, it only exists as a small 68k compiled program running on OS3.5 (and one that does, most likely, also run on older versions). Much like Facts4, it installs itself as a commodity and runs in the background keeping the time in sync. There is currently no GUI - partly because I haven't implemented it yet, partly due to OS4 Intuition changes and partly down to me considering whether to give it a window like Facts4, just provide a Dockie, install it only as a new menu or AppIcon on Workbench or leave it completely hidden in the background configurable only through tooltypes. Whichever method, I can't really do much until I have an OS4 NDK in my hands (except the last one, which is already done) FactsPPC does not currently implement any legacy stuff - ClockDaemon, SummertimeGuard emulation, TZ env-var or AutoDST. I am hoping that the time system of OS4 will be overhauled and include DST switching. I will decide if any of these need to be added at a later date. Providing it is stable, and at least the synchronisation part works, I plan for FactsPPC to be released as soon as I can compile it for OS4/PPC and test it. This means when I have an OS4 machine and NDK. Additional features and any modifications for it to better work on OS4 machines will come afterwards. I would rather not have a program running constantly in the background relying on 68k emulation, so my priority is PPC native rather than OS4 enhanced. I also have the fade... project. This is "Facts for AmigaDE", and is a scalable client/server time sync tool. It has had quite a few downloads at http://www.amigadev.net but has limited usefulness due to being a CLI based tool with no GUI. Eventually I will add a GUI, but the OS4 version of Facts is more important to me so fade has effectively been put on hold. More information will be put up on my website at http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk which will soon have a revamped time synchronisation section with separate areas for the above three programs. Facts 4 list included for historic reasons and reference purposes: Here is a rather hurried list of future enhancements; * Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server support (unsure how to do this at the moment) * Anycast mode: connecting to ntp.mcast.net is supposed to return time from any one NTP server connected to that multicast address. However, it doesn't seem to work quite like that, so if anybody has any knowledge on this I'd be grateful for the help. Update: I've found additional documentation, but not quite what I need. * Removal of [apparently 20ms (20000µs)] time lag on SNTP. The actual lag is probably nothing like that, but my simple tests involved console output counted in the time... * Server mode (unlikely: the accuracy you get from an SNTP server is slightly higher than time/udp, but for the most part using the TCP stack's built-in time/udp server is perfectly adequate) (fade will however be equipped with a server mode - see below) * Support for SNTP v4 (minor alterations required, unnecessary) * Full NTP client/server instead of SNTP (this probably won't improve accuracy) * Rewrite and clean up of parts of the code (I'll probably instead rewrite it for AmigaDE, rather than rewriting the AmigaOS version) * Cancel button or hotkey to abort connection operations (apologies to the person I promised this to: I still haven't worked out how to do it) * Configuring the displayed time format (should be handled through locale's time/date options) * Any ideas? E-mail me. | |
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