Bitcoin Forum

Alchemist v1.0.7.1 is a free, simple utility to monitor values of interest to holders of Philosopherstones (PHS). It eliminates the need to access the debug command line for common values, and makes several calculations:



Most of the values should be self-explanatory. The status line at the bottom contains these values: The version of your Philosopherstone wallet, the number of connections the wallet has, the locked/unlocked status of your wallet, and the percentage of the money supply contained in the wallet. For Alchemist to display information about your wallet, your wallet must be running. It cannot access the wallet.dat file directly.

Overstrike text indicates values that could not be updated because a connection failed. This is common in values that access Cryptsy, so don't panic. Cryptsy values are only updated once every five minutes, if you need more frequent updates, you should use the site itself.

Double-clicking on the black difficulty display will allow you to set difficulty alerts. The alerts will only play old-school .wav files, other formats are not supported.


1. There is no installation installed. Just unzip all the files to the same folder and run the Alchemist.exe.
1b. If you are updating, delete the old Alchemist files and unzip the new ones. You may also delete the old config folder in C:\Users\<user name>\ AppData\Crocuta.
2. For Alchemist to connect to your wallet, stop your wallet and make sure that philosopherstone.conf (located in c:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Philosopherstone) contains these lines:

rpcuser=<username>
rpcpassword=<password>
server=1

Replace <username> and <password> with values of your choice. Please exclude the angle brackets. Note: The username and password can be any alphanumeric string you like. This password is NOT your wallet passphrase.

3. Start your wallet.
4. In Alchemist, enter the username and password you chose above and hit GO. THERE WILL BE A SLIGHT DELAY.
5. You may set mining alarms by double-clicking the black difficulty display. Only old-school .wavs will work.
6. Hitting the [X] in the upper right corner of Alchemist minimizes it to the tray. To exit the program, you must hit EXIT.
7. When you exit Alchemist, it will save your login data. When you restart it, you do not need to hit GO.



    1. Gets BTC data from www.bitcoinaverage.com and not Mt. Gox.

    2. Exposes the wallet port and Cryptsy marketID strings in the config file allowing Alchemist to monitor other currencies. See Below.

    3. Fixes losing contact with Cryptsy forever requiring restart.



Note: These are alpha features that expose internal strings, changing these may lead to Alchemical instability. If things don't work, delete the Alchemist folder and unzip a fresh one.

Although one instance of Alchemist can only monitor one currency at a time, you can change which currency it monitors (against BTC) by changing these strings in the Alchemist.exe.config file in the program folder:

• CurrencyDisplayString - The string Alchemist displays of the currency is being monitored. It is display only and does not affect values in any way. For Philosopherstone you'd leave it at "PHS", for DogeCoin you'd change it to "DOGE", or "WOW" or whatever you like. (Sorry, Comic Sans is not available.)
• WalletPort - The string that determines what port Alchemist communicates with the wallet. It matches the rpcport in the config file (e.g. philosopherstone.conf, dogecoin.conf, etc).
• CryptsyMarketId - Get this number from Cryptsy. Go to the screen like you're going to make a trade then look at the URL. It should end in a number. PHS ends in 86, DOGE ends in 132, etc.

If you make more than one Alchemist folders, and change the Alchemist.Exe.Config file in each of them, you should be able to run multiple instances, but this has not been extensively tested.



This is Alchemist version 1.0.7.1 for Windows only (.NET 2.0 required).



Note: The program queries information from your wallet, Mt. Gox, and Cryptsy. The only information the program sends is that which is required to make those queries. It does not "phone home," check for updates, or send any of your PHS information to anyone. All the information saved, such as username/password, port number, etc. can be located in the config file in appdata\local\crocuta. This file may be viewed with a text viewer and should be self-explanatory. The program does not have the capability to decrypt your wallet and at no point does it access your wallet's passphrase or directly access your wallet.dat file.

Disclaimer: Alchemist is experimental software developed with cooperation from Philosopherstone Development, but is not part of that initiative. Although every reasonable effort has been taken to ensure that the program will not cause problems, this is not guaranteed. Although Alchemist is free, it is not open source and there are no plans to release the source code at this time. By agreeing to the license agreement, you agree to the license agreement.

very cool :) i will look into PHS been meaning to for quite some time.

Nice! The Cryptsy values seem a little off now and then though. How often does it update?

Glad to see this out - will add link to main threads!

90 seconds, usually. It's last trade price. You will get frequent crossed values, which means that latest connection attempt failed, so the values aren't the latest.

Crytpsy posted a new API URL right as this was being prepared for release. This uses the old one, and it's not as reliable as I'd like. If it gets stuck crossed, restarting Alchemist should fix it.

Thanks!

Do I put this in the same folder as the wallet?

I wouldn't recommend that, but you can put it any folder, as long as all the files are together. You can even put the folder on your desktop and run it from there if you wish.

Neat, thank you :)

Got new APIs gox is so bah

great work. only problem I see is that the BTC value is being pulled from MtGox. Can we use different source of price like BTC-E or Bitstamp? Mt.Gox doesn't reflect the true price of BTC.

Testing a new version now, so unless I find a bug I can't spin as a feature, it'll go up within a day or so.

Improvements:

1. Gets BTC data from www.bitcoinaverage.com (http://www.bitcoinaverage.com) and not Mt. Gox.

2. Exposes the wallet port and Cryptsy marketID strings in the config file, so Alchemist can be configured to potentially monitor any currency on Cryptsy with a wallet running on the local machine.

3. Fixes losing contact with Cryptsy forever requiring restart.

using Win 7  Starter 32bit. ...'Alchamist has stopped working' immediately on executing.

any solutions. Thanks

I don't have an immediate answer. You do need to have .net 2.0 sp 2.0 installed. You can check this with this program, but I'm pretty sure all W7 has that:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/dotNETInspector.shtml (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/dotNETInspector.shtml)

I will work on it and post back in a day or two, hopefully with a version that works on your system.

ok, thank you . Pls ignore the PM. Maybe you can also answer my newbie question[just posted] on the main PHS forum

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=292720.new#new

I can't replicate the error in Windows 7 32 bit, except if the config file is missing or corrupt.

Make sure to unzip all the files from the original zip into the same folder. If it starts after you edit the config file, then that configuration is invalid.

You could try redownloading the original zip.

Does it happen on the very first run? Does it happen after the license screen?

Hi, Thanks for the response. I am Windows 7 Starter edition

It does not start at all. message says......

Alchamist has stopped working...Windows is checking for a solution.

Description:
  Stopped working

Files that help describe the problem:
  C:\Users\AM\AppData\Local\Temp\WER91C6.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml
  C:\Users\AM\AppData\Local\Temp\WERB780.tmp.mdmp