Hardy's Homepage

Copyright (c) 1998,1999 by Hardy Griech


Table of Contents


1 News

26-Feb-2000
new Quick Start Instructions, thanks to Robert Keith Elias for submitting them!  Although especially designed for Win95/98/NT, OS/2 users could use this page too as a good starting point.

18-Jan-2000 (this site is now y2k-ready!)
VSoup1.2.9.48Beta for OS/2 uploaded:  the previous beta was broken.  Get it from here!

29-Aug-99
VSoup1.2.9.44Beta:  new OI (i.e. output interface) & parallel operation of news/mail transmission/reception. Download the OS/2 version or the Win9x/NT version. Sources are available here.

17-May-99
VSoup1.2.9.38Beta:  fixes the emxfix01 problem for OS/2. VSoup users upgrading emx with emxfix01 (even only the runtimes) have to download this version (or later).

16-May-99
emxfix01 breaks VSoup!  I.e. if emxrev shows revision 61 for certain DLLs, VSoup < 1.2.9.38Beta for OS/2 will no longer work.

29-Sep-98
VSoup1.2.9.34Beta:  new news receiving option: initial catchup count -Cn which allows the limited fetching of newly subscribed groups.

01-Sep-98
VSoup1.2.9.33Beta:

  • email transmission:  BCC header now really results in blind carbon copies,

  • email reception:  better diagnosis.  VSoup now also displays KBytes received and KBytes expected,

  • news reception:  the 'kill message' now shows the header line with the highest negative score.

04-Aug-98
VSoup1.2.9.30Beta (OS/2 & Win95/NT) available:  CC/BCC headers can be ignored with -X for outgoing mail.

08-Jul-98
VSoup1.2.9.29Beta (OS/2 & Win95/NT) available:  APOP can be disabled via command line switch,  SMTP failure will result in more meaningful messages.

13-Apr-98
VSoup1.2.9.19Beta (Win95/NT) available.  Now containing the VSoup utilities, see VSoup95 page.

24-Mar-98
VSoup1.2.9.18Beta (OS/2) now knows something about APOP authentication (versions with timestamp prior to 23:10 do not work!)

10-Mar-98
VSoup1.2.9.16Beta (OS/2) now knows pushing to news server and transmission to multiple news servers.

01-Feb-98
VSoup95 page now also contains a link to Torben Weiberts XP2SOUP page.
The VSoup95/NT BETA001 is discontinued.  Now only one beta version (the RSXNT version of course...)!

19-Apr-97
Release:   VSoup1.2.8


2 Introduction

This is the home of VSoup.  You can find here the online version of VSoup documentation, also downloadable betas of VSoup.

Sorry that there is only an english version of this index.  Anyway subpages will be partially or completely in german.


3 Programming


3.1 VSoup

VSoup is a multithreaded network mail and news client program for OS/2 Warp with TCP/IP (or the Internet Access Kit) installed. It transfers mail and news fetched from a POP3 server and NNTP server respectively to packets in SOUP format. It can also send messages in SOUP reply packets to NNTP / SMTP servers.  Estimated speed gain due to multithreading is about 200-500% for news reception!

Although VSoup is especially designed to work with Yarn, it is probable that VSoup will work with most offline newsreaders which expect SOUP as their input and output.  You can find some pointers about that topic in the FAQ.

If you like to check the feature list of VSoup, follow this link.  If you are a first time user of VSoup, you should read the installation section, if you are upgrading, you should check the history part of the documentation.

The online documentation reflects always the most current state of VSoup, i.e. it is a documentation for the betas distributed through this site.  Check the history part for changes since your VSoup version.

Check the new Quick Start Instructions to get an idea how easy VSoup can be installed (on your computer).

Although especially created for Win95/98/NT, these instructions can be of good use for OS/2 people too.


3.1.1 VSoup 1.2.8 (released 19-Apr-97)

Current release version of VSoup is 1.2.8.  The documentation is available through this link. Check here to get links to the several download sites.

Most exciting new feature of VSoup128 is scoring.  Due to heavy requests I've decided to make this step which allows more flexible killing of unwanted news.


3.1.2 VSoup Beta Information

The current beta (1.2.9.38Beta) is well tested and contains as additional features context sensitive handling of the Date: header - which allows aging of articles, the possibility to query the state of the POP3 and NNTP servers, pushing of articles to the news server, transmission to more than one news server, APOP authentication, real BCC etc.  Check the VSoup history for other changes. Source code of the beta can be obtained here.


3.1.3 VSoup95/NT

Andreas D. Bauer has ported VSoup to Win95/NT.  Now there is a beta version of VSoup95/NT available from this site.  Although VSoup95/NT has been ported on a Win95 platform, it also runs under NT, as its name suggests. Follow this link for more information.


3.2 cpem80

This is an old project of mine, dated somewhere in the beginning of 1994.  As the name might suggest, this is a CP/M80 emulator - very oldfashioned of course.  Nevertheless it was required for a larger programming project named PRARE (not contained here...) which was based on Z80 assembly language.

Back to the original topic: cpem80 can be obtained from various places, e.g. ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/devtools/utils/cpem8010.zip. Source (in pseudo-C++) is included, documentation is a little bit poor.  But if you need a well tested CP/M80 emulator, cpem80 is not the worst choice.  BTW cpem80 is capable of running TurboPascal 3.0, TurboModula 1.0, WordStar, the Slr180 assembler and so on.


3.3 Lotus Notes

Because I am (at least trying to) programming now in Lotus Notes, here is a small collection of links concerning Lotus Notes. Although only links, the comments and description is available in german only.


3.4 EmxDoc

The VSoup documentation was written with emxdoc (from Eberhard Mattes), a converter tool which originally allowed generation of IPF, LaTeX and plain text output from one single input file.

A small project of mine was to extend emxdoc output capabilities to HTML.  You are reading a sample output of the resulting program.

To make trouble bigger, the tool is still called emxdoc, is not publicly available, but can be downloaded from here. Online documentation can be previewed through this link.  Please note, that there is really no support for this tool!


4 End

If you have any suggestions, complaints or so (concerning these pages), drop me a note.

Please no comments about the absolutely ridiculous applet on top of the page.  I'd only like to show, that I've heard the word java...


Info1: This page has been accessed times.

Info2: This page has been accessed times (another counter...).


This page was created on Sat, 26 Feb 2000 22:24:36 MET by a modified version of emxdoc (0.9c/rg081299) from Eberhard Mattes. Contact Hardy Griech for more information.