Managing MICRODEM
- Update MICRODEM program.
- For key support databases files, the
program will now prompt you to automatically download them when it opens
after
they have changed.
If you do not download them, you are likely to get a program failure if you
run that option, since the name of the file will change because its
structure has changed.
If you download the current
version of the program you will undoubtedly encounter
bugs (some really severe, but most fairly benign). You can minimize this by only using
the full installs at the USNA site, but even these will have
bugs from time to time, and the full install might not be updated very often.
Update the program backs up the
old EXE, so you can restore if the newer version breaks something you need.
Hints to help manage multiple copies of MICRODEM:
- The program needs essentially every file installed into the directory with the executable.
Some files may be needed only for certain esoteric
options, but failure to find files will eventually cause
problems if you try putting new EXE files in different
directories without copying all the support files.
- The key version number is the build number
like 2016.5.9.x which will change with every build. The build number is the date of
compilation, and a sequential number which is probably not very usefule.
- The EXE can be renamed, and multiple EXEs can coexist in the same
directory (but each will have its own INI file and
default settings).
- We do not keep backup copies of old EXE files.
We archive the source code daily, so theoretically we
could recompile something close to what you have, but to
date we have never done that, and are very unlikely to do it. We have, on occasion, retrieved the
source code of a particular module to try to help debug a problem,
but normally we cannot just go back to old working code
because the bug normally appears with an enhancement and
we do not want to throw out all that effort. We will try to fix any bugs, but it will be only in the
current version of the program, with whatever other warts
it might have.
Last revision 9/29/2019