Hercules 1.71 announcement

Jay Maynard

Jan 19, 2001

What's new in release 1.71

Release date: 18 January 2001
* Compressed CKD DASD support release 2, with improved performance,
shadow file support, and better reliability (Greg Smith)
* Hercules Emulated Tape format support (Leland Lucius)
* Make HET bzip2 compression optional, analogous to CCKD bzip2 (Jay
Maynard)
* Fix for track overflow record zeroing (Roger Bowler)
* Clarified licensing discussion in FAQ (Roger Bowler)
* Treat printer X'37' CCW as NOP (Jay Maynard, suggested by Brandon
Hill)
* Treat X'E503' MVS/XA assist instruction as no-op (Jay Maynard,
suggested by Brandon Hill)
* Read commands from hercules.rc at startup (Willem Koynenberg)
* New tapelist program prints contents of 80-byte record tapes (Jim
Morrison)
* Increased MAXDBLK from 3000 to 40000 and MAXTTR from 10000 to
40000 in dasdload (Volker Bandke)

As I noted earlier, this is anticipated to be the last release of Hercules
version 1. The new version should be available shortly, and will have the
same capabilities as well as several new ones, not just in the area of
architecture support, but usability as well. Staying with just one release
makes life simpler. There may be bug fixes applied to Hercules version 1,
but I don't expect to do so unless things are reallybroken for some reason.
I was hoping to not put out 1.71 at all, but the track overflow bug fix was
important enough - and the other enhancements are useful enough - that it
needed to be done.

2:47 am