Subj : TIC files
To : Deon George
From : Andrew Leary
Date : Wed Sep 12 2018 04:47 pm
Hello Deon!
12 Sep 18 13:54, you wrote to me:
DG> I've noticed that I receive tic files from non MBSE BBS's (Mystic at
DG> the moment), and those tic files have a name similar to the file they
DG> are representing. EG: pinet.tic for pinet.250, fsxinfo.tic for
DG> fsxinfo.zip.
Yes, I've noticed the same thing.
DG> MBSE is not processing those tic files - however if I renamed the tic
DG> file to have 8 numbers (with .tic) at the end, they were processed.
DG> EG: I renamed pinet.tic to 00000000.tic and it was processed.
I do the same thing with them when I find them in my inbound.
DG> I had a quick look at FTSC specs (5006.001 and 1039.001), and it
DG> doesnt mention anything about how a tic file should be named
DG> (character limit nor only numerical/hex chars, etc).
FTS-5006.001 specifies a filename in DOS 8.3 format. Thus, it could be
interpreted that .TIC files with shorter or longer names are non-compliant.
DG> I then had a quick look at the code mbfido/tic.c and it looks like it
DG> will only process a tic file if it has a length of 12 chars (being 8
DG> chars plus ".tic"). Could this be changed? Or is it referenced
DG> somewhere else that tic files should be 8 chars (suffixed with .tic)
DG> and other BBS software is not following that standard?
In my mind, I consider Mystic's implementation to be non-compliant, although
it probably should be clarified in the FTSC documentation as well.
When James Coyle comes back to working on Mystic again, I intend to mention
this to him and see about getting it fixed.
If there appears to be a delay on this, I may add a switch to mbfido to enable
processing of these "extended" .TIC names. MBSE will never create .TIC files
with other than a DOS 8.3 style name ending in .TIC.
