Bodacious Bodean's Binary Bakery: 4

Bodacious Bodean's
Binary Bakery
By J.L. White

owdy,

Welcome to another edition of BBBB. I hope all of you that went to NAB this year had a good time. As much as we wanted to go, we were just too busy to get away. I was hoping to hear that Newtek would announce the new Flyer for the PC, but alas we are still in a holding pattern on that issue. However, Flyer owners should be receiving a new update (4.2) to the Flyer software real soon. It is mainly a patch for bug fixes and such with 5.0 to be released later this year. We have been testing a beta version and all seems to be working fine. This should make all of you that own third party software VERY happy, as this means all our stuff won't get broke this time around.

One thing I always do when I get a new update is to start looking through the Newtek drawer to see what has changed. Are there any new files? Are there any missing? This reminded me of one of my earlier searches when I found a file that was not mentioned in ANY manuals, doc files or messages. There is a drawer called Toaster:Programs/Flyer_Support/C. I found a file in there called PlayClip and was curious to find out what it did. Did it actually do what the name implies? Was it a command? Was it an Arexx script? What the heck was it! It turned out to be a command that would indeed play a Flyer Clip from the CLI. Yes, you heard me right. You don't have to be on the Flyer screen to Play a clip.

While the arguments may seem a little wierd (they do to me anyway), they pass all the required information to the command. After a bit of trial and error I finally got it working. I even used this in an early version of Control Tower. Below is a simple script I wrote to use this.

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/* Play Flyer Clip From CLI */

arg InFile
Start = 0
End = 0

call remlib('ToasterARexx.port')
call remlib('PROJECT_REXX_PORT')
call addlib('PROJECT_REXX_PORT')
call addlib('ToasterARexx.port',0)
Switcher(TOSW)
Switcher(M003)
Switcher(TOWB)

Address command "Toaster:Programs/Flyer_Support/C/PlayClip >NIL: 0 0 0 "InFile" "dx2(Start)" "dx2(Total)" 0 1 2"

call remlib('ToasterARexx.port')
call remlib('PROJECT_REXX_PORT')

exit

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For those of you that use DirOpus or a similar program that can play arexx scripts, this can be REAL handy. All you have to do is pass it an argument with the name of the Clip. For those that want to experiment, look inside the script. It defaults to playing the entire clip, but you can pass it the number to start and end with. By passing it a 0 for both, it uses the defaults and just plays the entire clip. Your output monitor must be set to Input 3 to run the command itself from a shell. In our Arexx script, we flip back to the Flyer Screen, then set the Input for you, then flip back to Workbench, so all you have to do is pass the clip name and you are ready to go.

As you can see, this can be a handy util that would never have seen the light of day without a little browsing, so from time to time, start going into drawers that you have no idea what they are for, and you might be surprised with what you find!

Until next time,

Jeff White
(Bodacious Bodean)