Hi guys.
Sorry that I've not been posting on these forums in a long while. The manual hasn't been updated for about a year, and I really haven't been able to commit much time to it. My wife and I are now expecting our first child at the end of this month (I told you we'd been spending a lot more time together!), and my time is split between many tasks, of which, SMS is now a low priority. Please accept my apologies.
In my absence however, the manual has been extremely popular, even in it's non-updated state, sometimes got 1000 hits per day. I discovered to my horror this morning, that this had passed the ISP's bandwidth allowance for the 100MB free hosting that came with my ADSL internet access. So in short, they cut it off, deleted the content and locked my hosting account
. I tried uploading the pages again, but I got 'access denied'.
The most up-to-date version of the manual is on the main SMS site at:
http://ps2-scene.org/sms/SMSMANUAL/sms_usermanual.html I suggest that this should the primary source for the manual from now on.
I know about the
www.sksapps.com site that has mirrored the content, (without notification) but I'd recommend using
http://ps2-scene.org/sms directly where possible. The up-to-date-ness of mirrors can't be guaranteed.
I'd like to remind you all that the full source code of the manual is (and always has been) in the SMS svn repository at svn://svn.ps2dev.org/ps2ware/trunk/SMS. Anyone can download it and generate the manual themselves. While on this subject, I'd also like to remind people that you can freely contribute to the manual to help update it.
I hear the suggestion of going over to a Wiki, I think it has its merits, the main one being ease of updates. My only concern is that it might turn into an ever expanding plethora of information and caveats rather than a set of walk-throughs which was the original intention. The structure and layout of the manual is based on two very successful open-source projects:
Mplayer and
GIMP. They still use the XML based approach, although they do appear to have a lot more people on-board. If people are able to actively maintain it, the XML based manual may still give the best final content to the first-time SMS user. My goal was to make it easier for first time users to get up-and-running with SMS.
I ultimately see the manual as something to be packaged with the download of SMS.elf itself, in PDF form, that people can print out and refer to during set-up.
Whether this happens will depend largely on my available time, and the willingness of volunteers.
