Spinrite 6.1 Alpha Release 8

[FlyingPenguin]

Spinrite 6.1 has been released. You can download it from the same pre-release page for now, but it no longer has an expiration date.

Steve is working on detailed documentation now.

[FlyingPenguin]

BPlayer: Now on to the next release. Maybe in 18 months I will be able to run a pre-release version Spinrite 7.0 on the SSD in my UEFI laptop.

STEVE: I believe that's a reasonable assumption. A lot of the infrastructure we'll need for the various pieces are already in place since they are reusable, like the whole USB boot-prep system that was first created as InitDisk for v6.1. And debugging v6.1 under DOS was actually somewhat difficult since no debugger understands the "flat real mode" that v6.1 uses and the author of my primary debugger, Brett Salter, passed away a few years ago. (I could have obtained Periscope's source from him to fix it.) By comparison, SR7's RTOS-32 operating system debugger is compatible with Microsoft's Visual Studio cross-machine debugging, which will make things FAR easier.

My plan is to race toward getting something running as soon as possible, sort of like "catching the wave" to get things rolling so that we'll have some early results for the project.