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FormatChange250
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1992-06-14
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3KB
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65 lines
**** VERY IMPORTANT **** March 29/92 - TLR
** CBU101 is a format changing program. If you have an old Comixbase program
with the pre-Comixbase 2.50 format, then you need only run this program
once.
** CBR164 is an update to the data file restructuring program. This is
program used to clean and remove data which is no longer used.
It also sorts the title file in alphabetical order.
IE: If you delete a file, the information will still be in the database,
just unaccessable. That data is taking up space, and so CBR164 will
remove it from the database.
****************************************************************************
First make sure you have made a backup of your database. I try to ensure that
this program is bug-free on release, however some bugs may be very subtle,
and will only arise under the right circumstances. For instance, a bug may
cause small corruptions in the database structure which may render the
database useless.
****************************************************************************
Howdy, if you have never used Comixbase before then ignore the rest of
this file and the program called CBU101, otherwise read on.
(For pre-Comixbase 2.50 user's only):
To use Comixbase 2.50 and up, you need to run the program called CBU101.
This program will change the format of the database very slightly, but in
a necessary way in order to get some improved speed.
After running CBU101, it is advisable that you run the program called CBR164.
This is an update to CBR162 (Comixbase Restructure). It will clean up
the data files.
**** Do NOT use CBR164 before you have used the CBU101 program. ****
In order to make Comixbase a little faster I have made a slight change
to the text data formats (comix.d1 thru comix.d5). I have noticed that
on average a good percentage of my comics in the database had blank lines
in the various data fields (especially the artist fields).
Since the database actually stores the text lines as a byte representing
the length of the line, followed by the text itself, for lines which
contain absolutely no data (IE: no blank spaces), it would store a single
byte which was equal to zero.
What that means is everytime you change to the next or previous comic,
if there were blanks lines in that new comic it would have to access the
text data files and then read that single byte in. Since this occurs often
I decided that if there was a common place where the zero byte would always
be then I could simply detect it with an if/then type statement and cut
out the need to access the file.
So I came up with this: the first byte of every text data file will
be the 0 byte or null string. This speeds access a fair bit (not much from
ram though), but off of a hard drive or (egad!) a floppy it's noticible.
Example: With my collection moving from the end (the Z's area) back up to
the A's area (Action Comics) using the left arrow key to skip
titles at a time (on the hard drive), the old format took 53 seconds,
the new format took 45 seconds. So it is a bit faster.
(I will add buffering in the near future. This will make running off floppies
feasible.)