forums.silverfrost.com

John-Silver · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 802

Not really FTN95 related but ...

Browsing through the 'Announcements' forum (as one very rarely does) I came across this from 'the very early days of Silverfrosts incarnation

http://forums.silverfrost.com/viewtopic.php?t=25

which led me to googling out this (not clearly linked from anywhere on FTN95 branch of the website)

https://www.silverfrost.com/2/solar_kingdom/overview.aspx

So, what was (is ?) this all about then ?

Was this what Silverfrost were doing back in 2004 before the take-over of Salford Fortran ?

Looks very interesting.
Seems only to have been left dangling with just a v.1.x demo available.

Are there any other bushels under the Silverfrost haystack or are you dedicated now to FTN95 ?
_________________
"This is the triumph of folly.
The machine, which knows no rest, ought to remain a tool,
... but instead becomes our master and will swallow up our life and soul"

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:59 pm Post subject:

Not a daft question, John. Also not a daft question is how many variants or options are there in FTN95?

A 32-bit version
A 64-bit version that appears to have been developed from scratch
A .NET version, with multiple plug-ins
Clearwin+ for 32 and 64 bit versions
Visual Clearwin
Plato
... and to save me listing them, versions of linker, debugger, library manager, SCION blah blah blah. Remember that it isn't just doing bug fixes, but also coping with the changes imposed by MS in Windows and Visual Studio, AND developing new facilities.

Based on a sample of one, I find it hard to believe that any user requires everything, or that any user requires absolutely every facility even in the subset of FTN95 that they use. So it is easy to say things like: "I don't know why they bother with X ..." when perhaps X is vital to another user.

Frankly, I don't know how they do it, and Paul deserves enormous credit for his role in keeping it all going.

Eddie

John-Silver · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 802

I agree with you 100% Eddie - every developers nightmare is trying to juggle versions/offshoots/add- ons and the credit is well deserved in the case of FTN95.
You also forgot to add that thankless task of merging in user suggestions/demands/bug fixes into a 'live' deelopment situation.

My question was because I was just curious as to the existence of this apparently completely unrelated program to explore the universe and how it came about and where it went to. I've not found any trace of it anywhere except a shareware version on a few sharware sites.
_________________
"This is the triumph of folly.
The machine, which knows no rest, ought to remain a tool,
... but instead becomes our master and will swallow up our life and soul"

DanRRight · Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 10:24 am Post subject:

Have anyone tested Solar Kingdom demo? It complains about missing d3drm.dll

silverfrost · Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 4:48 pm Post subject:

I don't think Solar Kingdom works on recent operating systems. Microsoft decided to not ship d3drm.dll any more and it is key to the program. A few years ago we copied the dll from an older OS and it did work...