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+--- Thread: ***MBEECAT.HTML*** — From Concept to Catalogue (/thread-1029.html)
***MBEECAT.HTML*** — From Concept to Catalogue - ChickenMan - 20-05-2026
Thanks to Graham72 for his endless pursuit to creating a menu driven catalogue of all the MWB files in the MBUG's 186 disk catalogue. There are 1199 MWB files that can be searched for and even extracted. All this in one HTML coded file for you to run in a browser on your PC. Further description of the development process of this file from Graham -
What began as an ambitious attempt to emulate SQL Server functionality on a
Microbee computer — running SQLBEE in BASIC on a Z80 machine emulation
within ubee512 — evolved through several distinct phases before reaching
this release. A complex process: editing 3 DAT files, batch concatenation,
ngrok exposing a local server, and users accessing live data. It was built,
it worked, and it served its purpose - an index of every .mwb file in the
MBUG disk catalog. Claude and Grok AI assisted in fast project realisation.
Then a 'what if"- using Gemini AI to workshop a scope review - embedding
data directly into the HTML itself rendered the entire pipeline
unnecessary, and allowed extraction of the actual .mwb programs. Two hidden
text areas — one holding 1,199 program descriptions, one a base64-encoded
ZIP blob of every MWB file across 74 MBUG discs — transformed a distributed
system into a single self-contained file. The ngrok tunnel was deprecated
after only five days.
From that foundation, refinement followed refinement. A CRT warm-up
animation builds the display section by section, each sweeping in from the
top like phosphor warming on glass. The MBUG emblem — bee over Australia —
holds the screen until the catalogue emerges over it. Sortable columns,
live search, async ZIP decoding, and a fixed 11-row layout ensure the
experience is fast and consistent.
Spelling corrected. Footer restored. FLAG fields stripped. Version
incremented. With special thanks to ChickenMan for version reviews.
Sometimes the best architecture is the one you outgrow in five days.
*MBEECAT.HTML v1.2 — May 2026. GJU*
So in the MbeeTech Repository in the Microbee\Software\Applications folder we placed
MBEECAT.HTML