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Okay, in case you're confused I'm talking about BINedit v1.02 (sometimes referred to as BINedit NT or the one wot Ric fixed for us), and the Windows 2000 operating system (which is essentially the same as Windows NT), and the problems I hit when I put the two together.

It's like this: university went back the other week, and seeing as I had a 7-hour gap between lectures on Tuesday, I decided I'd take something along to keep myself amused in the event that we didn't have access to the Games Lab for the multiplayer playing of games, or some similar scenario. What better idea than to copy BINedit (as we know, recently updated for proper functioning on newer Microsoft systems like the Win2K all the uni machines run), along with my Falcon ute model, onto floppy disk and take it along with me. With luck I'd get that third BINedit tutorial finished before mid-year holidays yet.
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But when I loaded it onto the machines, what did we have here? Some artifact/redraw problems (due to the silly Win2000 fading menus and floating mouse cursor with a shadow underneath) were no real problem, you just had to get the program to redraw the screen which it does for almost anything you do. I've seen this happening in other programs, it's more of a minor annoyance than anything else.
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The first real concern was the solid, shaded model view. No, it's not the gif images - it really did look like that in-program. You can see it's not properly shaded; there are only two or three shades of grey splashed haphazardly among the faces. This was not cool.

I had other big problems too. You'd be working at the program, and suddenly it would throw up an error message saying an unnamed resource was not available, which effectively paralyzed it - menu options were still selectable, but it wouldn't draw the screen anymore so you couldn't do any more work. After the error you'd also have some bad video problems - ugly black rectangles occuring around any drop-down menus not only in BINedit, but in any other program you might have running; at which point I figured it best to restart the system (it rather impressed me that our little editor could do this to what I had up till then considered the most stable Windows systems I'd had contact with). This problem may be down to the fact that, on those first days, I think I'd taken the wrong version of BINedit with me (I had one zip file named BINedit1.2 and another named BinEdit_1.02, now which was the most recent release...).


Now, the shading-display problem may be down to the way the uni machines are set up - for starters the ones in the Games Lab have been set up with the DirectX 8.0 SDK for programming work (the SDK files having debugging code etc in them). However I tried it on the computers in the more mundane labs, and got the same result - I'm not sure, but I don't think those are carrying the DirectX SDK. The errors may have been the particular systems as well, or it may have been have version of BINedit I was using at the time - I haven't fully tested that yet.

Is there a Borchard (or anyone else) in the house who can set my mind at ease?

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If it's a good idea,
Phineus has probably already done it.

I have BinEdit_1.02.zip, which I probably got from your site (note, right click and view properties is of no help here but it's 300k on the nosey; p.s. 'about date' is aug 19/01), and so far on xp it's been perfect. My guess is you're on the right track with directx or the graphics drivers. Will they upgrade for you?

Proposed name for future versions: BinEditRB.exe/zip and updated them file props.


P.S. XP is a 9x/NT hybrid. Most things for 9x and NT will work on it. Tonight, however, I hit the first program, the acrobat 'writer', that wouldn't install on it. So you never know.

[This message has been edited by Phineus (edited 02-03-2002).]

BinEdit1.2.zip - created Friday, 24 August 2001 2:45:25 PM - 686KB
BinEdit_1.02.zip - created Sunday, 26 August 2001 8:59:43 PM - 685KB

Other distinguishing characteristics:

BinEdit1.2.zip has a changelog text file named BinEdit 1.2 Update.txt that explains what changes were made and the gritty details (what lines of code caused it, what the new code is etc).

BinEdit_1.02.zip, instead, has OP's original changelog.txt renamed as old_changelog.txt, and also has a new_changelog.txt that explains Rich's changes in the same manner as the BinEdit 1.2 Update.txt in the other zip, but without the code and details. Also, barrel.obj is missing from this file.

When I looked at the zip file I'd put up on my BINedit site (named binedit_102.zip), I saw that the files contained therein corresponded with those of the BinEdit_1.02.zip file, and deduced that, along with the more recent file creation date and altered contents, it stood to reason that BinEdit_1.02.zip was the most recent version (and I had, as I suspected, intially taken the wrong version of the program with me to uni). Then I had a worrying thought, and checked my Truck Making Tutorial, and found that BinEdit1.2.zip was the file offered for download there. Whooops! Presumably I'd made the same mistake when updating that site (which I didn't for some time after updating the BINedit Resource site).

A quick troll through this message board turns up this thread, and if you scroll down a little, you find correspondence which indicates BinEdit_1.02.zip is indeed the correct version. An answer at last.

>> My guess is you're on the right track with directx or the graphics drivers. Will they upgrade for you?

I doubt it. All the machines are imaged from a common Win2K template with pre-installed programs etc (athough the ones in the Games Lab are set up differently, but it's still Win2K). But, having said that, they were looking at updating to the DirectX 8.1 SDK since a lot of us had terrible memory leak problems programming with 8.0. So that may change things - we'll have to see.

>> Proposed name for future versions:

Okay, if we're going to throw that around, how about BinEdit+? This idea comes from a Total Annihilation model editior I have called 3DOBuilder: it was updated in much the same way as BINedit has been, and the new version was named 3DOBuilder+.

>> P.S. XP is a 9x/NT hybrid.

Ugh? The way I understood it, XP is exclusively NT - it just has compatibilty modes that mimic 9x (but not DOS). I thought WinME was the hybrid. (Feel free to refute me - I need more learnin').

Incidentally, I had a guy email me about problems with BINedit on XP. He was using the old version, which worked in compatibility mode but still crashed after a while. I steered him in the direction of the one wot Rich fixed for us and he said that one worked much better, although (if I read the message correctly) it still crashed from time to time. So these are the results of Microsoft's total-compatibility-for-all scheme.

Anyway, I'm off to fix the downloads for my Truck Making Tutorial site(s).

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If it's a good idea,
Phineus has probably already done it.

Welp, DirectX 8.1 seemed to make no difference. It's probably in the way the graphics adapters (GeForce3 on the computers in the Games Lab, and something designated an SR9 on the basic machines) are set up - they're probably not the best, and there are administrative settings in effect to stop us tampering with it (at face value this might seem like a good idea, but when you have a 19" monitor stuck in 800x600 resolution...).

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If it's a good idea,
Phineus has probably already done it.