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Well, this is likely to be the last version of FACTS for 68k machines. It has reached a stage
where I believe it to be stable and feature-rich as it needs to be. If anybody wants to update
it further or finds a bug, then you can still email me and I will try to fix it.
Major updates are however very unlikely.

This does not mean I am going anywhere. I have a new version of Facts in development
which is a complete rewrite. This means that it does not have all the features of Facts r4.91.
It does however mean that it is specifically written to take advantage of OS4 and will be PPC
native. As OS4 is not yet available, it only exists as a small 68k compiled program running on
OS3.5 (and one that does, most likely, also run on older versions). Much like Facts4, it
installs itself as a commodity and runs in the background keeping the time in sync. There
is currently no GUI - partly because I haven't implemented it yet, partly due to OS4 Intuition
changes and partly down to me considering whether to give it a window like Facts4, just
provide a Dockie, install it only as a new menu or AppIcon on Workbench or leave it completely
hidden in the background configurable only through tooltypes. Whichever method, I can't really
do much until I have an OS4 NDK in my hands (except the last one, which is already done)
FactsPPC does not currently implement any legacy stuff - ClockDaemon, SummertimeGuard
emulation, TZ env-var or AutoDST. I am hoping that the time system of OS4 will be overhauled
and include DST switching. I will decide if any of these need to be added at a later date.
Providing it is stable, and at least the synchronisation part works, I plan for FactsPPC to be
released as soon as I can compile it for OS4/PPC and test it. This means when I have an OS4
machine and NDK. Additional features and any modifications for it to better work on OS4
machines will come afterwards. I would rather not have a program running constantly in the
background relying on 68k emulation, so my priority is PPC native rather than OS4 enhanced.

I also have the fade... project. This is "Facts for AmigaDE", and is a scalable client/server
time sync tool. It has had quite a few downloads at http://www.amigadev.net but has
limited usefulness due to being a CLI based tool with no GUI. Eventually I will add a GUI, but
the OS4 version of Facts is more important to me so fade has effectively been put on hold.

More information will be put up on my website at http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk
which will soon have a revamped time synchronisation section with separate areas for the
above three programs.


Facts 4 list included for historic reasons and reference purposes:
Here is a rather hurried list of future enhancements;

* Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server support (unsure how to do this at the moment)

* Anycast mode: connecting to ntp.mcast.net is supposed to return time from
any one NTP server connected to that multicast address. However, it
doesn't seem to work quite like that, so if anybody has any knowledge on
this I'd be grateful for the help.
Update: I've found additional documentation, but not quite what I need.

* Removal of [apparently 20ms (20000µs)] time lag on SNTP. The actual lag
is probably nothing like that, but my simple tests involved console output
counted in the time...

* Server mode (unlikely: the accuracy you get from an SNTP server is
slightly higher than time/udp, but for the most part using the TCP
stack's built-in time/udp server is perfectly adequate)
(fade will however be equipped with a server mode - see below)

* Support for SNTP v4 (minor alterations required, unnecessary)

* Full NTP client/server instead of SNTP (this probably won't improve
accuracy)

* Rewrite and clean up of parts of the code (I'll probably instead rewrite it
for AmigaDE, rather than rewriting the AmigaOS version)

* Cancel button or hotkey to abort connection operations (apologies to the
person I promised this to: I still haven't worked out how to do it)

* Configuring the displayed time format (should be handled through locale's
time/date options)

* Any ideas? E-mail me.