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The February 16th meeting will be one of our split SIG meetings. For the C64/128 SIG, Emil Cobb will be demonstrating the perennial favorite - Newsroom. For the Amiga SIG, it will be a MOD night with the Master of Music, Kevin Hisel. Kevin will be playing some of his favorite MOD and MED files, showing us some of the best players, and how to modify files to better suit your own musical standards. You might want to bring along your favorite MOD tunes; we might have an open stage later!
Aminet in St. Louis (the main site) just replaced the "Amiga Resource" link (the page that has become the defacto Amiga main page) in their main WWW menu with CUCUG's Amiga Web Directory. That means that tens of thousands of Amiga users will now be exposed to our page as the main directory of Amiga links on the Web.
[Editor's Note: I would personally like to extend my congratulations to Mr. Kevin Hisel for the superlative job he has done on CUCUG's WWW page. We derive so much from his efforts. Thanks, Kevin!]
(sigh)
Things just keep getting weirder.
Commodore UK is "making noises" (as Amiga Format's Web page puts it) that they've got the highest bid. In the meantime, CEI is all set (so they say) to submit a new, cash-and-carry bid with a full letter of credit.
In the midst of all of this, the US courts, Bahamanian courts, and Commodore creditors FINALLY agreed on a protocol-that is, a concrete method to handle the liquidation. The decision was to proceed to the auction phase as soon as possible, and to allow examination up to 12 months into Commodore's history for mismanagement.
In response, Irving Gould and Medhi Ali have filed a motion to block on the grounds that they filed for liquidation under Bahamanian law and insist that it be followed to the letter. Between the lines, though, is the fact that Bahamanian law only allows examination 3 months into the past of the company...and last I checked, Gould and Ali didn't win any "Business Executive Of the Year" awards.
Aaargh.
A rumor also claimed that Commodore Canada was refurbishing machines and selling them to dealers, promising a 1 year warranty and new machines within two months.
Well, a representative of Commodore Canada unilaterally denied those rumors this morning.
So, to sum up, nothing particularly new...unfortunately.
by Dan Stets, Inquirer Staff Writer
CUCUGAMI #138: GfxCon (a utility to load in images and convert them to any of a number of formats), Rockslide (another Tetris-like game), WReadFiles (PROPERLY reads text files by ignoring unspeakable codes and correctly pronouncing words most commonly mispronounced by the Amiga SPEAK: device), and HydroZone (a game where you fly down a 3D obstacle course).
After Kevin's presentation, President Jim Huls announced that he has arranged for Jason Compton of Amiga Reports fame to come speak to our group in June. Jason might bring along his C65. On the heels of that impressive news, Jim reported we had eleven members renew their memberships at this meeting.
After the break, the Amiga SIG was treated to a working demonstration of WReadFiles. The demo during Kevin's main disk presentation faltered due to a missing library, which was subsequently installed on the club machine.
Turning to the scheduled activity of the evening, the floor was opened to specific Amiga related questions and problems members might be having. Kevin Hopkins posed the first question. His sister has recently purchased a clone machine and has asked his help in converting an eight year library of text files from the C64 to her new platform. Having nearly 2000 files to convert from the 64's PETSCII to the DOS world's ASCII, Kevin asked if there was a way to write a script that would repeatedly call a conversion program he has (named P2A), for each of the files on a disk, without having to do it manually for each file. Kevin Hisel offered a solution utilizing the LFORMAT function of the LIST command.
First you would use simple redirection to send the output of the LIST command to a file. In its simplest form it looks like this:
list >RAM:cucug
Working on the fly Kevin Hisel (KH1) wrote a script that handled the basic requirements of the task. It looked like this:
pcd RAM:
list lformat="P2A %s%s RAM:%s" files >RAM:XXX
execute RAM:XXX
The PCD command in the first line is itself a script and can be found in your System:S directory. It comes with your Amiga. It is a CD script that remembers the previous directory you were in. Issuing PCD again, by itself, will return you to the directory you came from.
The LFORMAT option has two pages of explanation in my manual, so if you're interested in learning more, I suggest you refer to your manual. For our discussion here, the %s in the second line is telling the LIST command to just list the filenames. The double %s is telling the LIST command to output the path of the file as well as its filename. The manual says, "The format for the output specification string is LFORMAT=<string>. To include the output of LIST in this string, use the substitution operator %S." So, the second line is the one that builds the script file using my provided command name, then the path/filename of the files it finds in the current directory as the source files, and giving the destination of the conversion process as RAM: with the same filename. The FILES option to LIST specifies files only, no directories. Then, we have our redirect command for the output of the LIST to a file named XXX in RAM:. In the third line, we execute our resultant script file to get our job done. Simple, right? That's why I asked.
Being another of our resident script writers, Jim Lewis was asked to post some of his scripts to the BBS, as examples of using the LFORMAT option, for others to study. Jim said he would.
The next question came from Vice President Dave Witt. He has some Macintosh sound files and wanted to know how to convert them to the Amiga. Kevin Hopkins said he has done this and thought he had used AmiMacTools-1.0a to do it. Upon further research, Kevin (KH2) has discovered he used MacResourcer1.0.a off of Aminet in the mus/misc directory. Jim Lewis said he needed a binhex dearchiver for the Amiga; that is in AmiMacTools in Aminet's misc/emu directory and on the club BBS as well.
Someone asked about "the no name file" on the club disks. KH1 said, with a wry smile, "Don't play with the file named 'space'."
Kevin Hisel then asked' "What's up with the Fonts directory?" This sparked a general discussion about fonts. In the case of a font like diamond. The directory named "diamond" contains the bitmaps for the screen. The file "diamond.font" contains the basic information about the font and the sizes available. The program FixFonts corrects these definitions should something change, like one of the sizes gets deleted.
A Compugraphic Font, like CGTimes, had no "directory". Its .font file contains the font definition for this scalable font. The program Fountain creates a bitmap rendering from an outline font for faster screen printing.
On another topic, Bill Zwicky reported that RTPatch for ReqTools caused his Amiga to crash when accessing the phonebook in the VLT terminal program. Others believed the problem lies in the VLT phonebook itself, as there have been reports of similar problems using it. However, VLT comes highly recommended, as it is very fast.
Someone asked how to create a hidden directory. If I understood correctly, there are no "hidden" directories or files on the Amiga, like in MSDOS. However, there are ways to keep inexperienced yet prying eyes away from certain material you wish to keep less visible. The simplest is to have your Workbench SHOW ICONS ONLY under the WINDOW menu and then make sure the directory you wish to protect has no icon (.info) file. Under WB1.3 and lower this pretty much happened automatically - you didn't have a SHOW ALL FILES where Workbench would provide you with an icon to work with if there wasn't one. No icon; no access. In the above cases, you are relying on your snooper not knowing about the CLI or how to operate Workbench's menu system. Not always a good bet.
Other suggestions as how to hide a directory from unwanted access were to bury it deeply in an unrelated directory tree, or use something like MultiDOS and mess with the format.
A final suggestion was to make the directory with an unusual key combination, as in:
makedir (ALT-Amiga-S)
I suppose how the directory name appears would depend upon which font you had as your System Font, but you could be fairly certain someone prying into your machine would have real trouble coming up with the proper key combination. Of course, our CLI pros promptly said that if you used the DIR INTER command (for DIRectory INTERactive) someone in the know could still gain access to your directory's contents. And, of course, there's CD ? or our good old friend SNAP. But all of these possibilities imply a pretty strong working knowledge of the Amiga
Jim Huls posed the next question. He asked about ENV:. It was pointed out that this is where certain settings and variables are stored by the Amiga for programs' and its use. Your Preferences are stored in ENV:Sys. You can usually find ENV: in RAM:. In order that you can maintain some continuity, these settings are also stored in the ENVARC directory in your System's Preferences directory and read from there into ENV: when you turn on your Amiga. So, if you want a program's settings to be maintained from session to session and it stores those settings in ENV:, make sure a copy also gets put in the ENVARC directory.
As a final bit of information for the night someone mentioned that mouse.prefs will screw up your WB3.x upgrade. Be sure to delete this file before you upgrade and reset it to your preference once your upgrade is complete.
The 64/128 SIG attendance was very light, to say the least. But then, that's to be expected on a Friday night in January. The three of us who did brave the cold that night had a nice discussion of the 64/128 world.
We discussed the upcoming year's events, with no real determinations being made regarding specific programs, but we did reach some general conclusions. We felt that most people were very interested in telecommunications. We also felt that very few were extremely interested in programming. (There may be members in the club who are, but we focused on the people who are fairly regular attendees of the meetings.)
We talked about other programs that we did over the years and the response to them. I felt that I was probably the only serious GEOS user, and that the general membership wasn't too interested in any more programs devoted to it. Emil said that he might consider blowing the dust off of NewsRoom and doing a demo on it in February.
During the discussion, I was playing music on Stereo SID Player by Mark Dickerson using the Stereo SID cartridge that CMD has resurrected. I also had a pair of small KOSS speakers in place of a full stereo system. This led to a discussion of other things that were new in the 64/128 world. Don asked if there might be an article in a future newsletter regarding the new (and older) developments regarding the venerable 64. I said I would try to put something together in the near future.
If anyone who was not at the meeting has a request or idea for a program, give me a call or post a message on STARSHIP or Prairienet. We still need suggestions!
The January meeting of the CUCUG executive board was held on Wednesday, January 25th at 7PM at Kevin Hisel's house (address and phone number, both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Jim Huls, Dave Witt, Mark Landman, Emil Cobb, Richard Rollins, Craig Kummerow, Fred Cline, Kevin Hopkins, Mike Latinovich, Kevin Hisel, Jon Sago, and Jim Lewis. President Huls opened the meeting by calling on his Vice President.
Dave Witt: Reviewing the General Meeting, Dave said, "The meeting was pretty good."
Mark Landman: Mark said he had talked to the IRS in order to expedite our tax exempt status. He discussed our financial records and our current balance. He finished his report noting we had twelve reups at the meeting and two mail-in renewals.
Emil Cobb: Emil reported that there were 33 people at the January meeting.
Richard Rollins: Richard reported that Vic Serbe will be doing MIDI in a few months. He said he thought Jim Huls did a good job of conducting the meeting.
Craig Kummerow: Craig said he was pleased that in the introduction of officers Jim pronounced his name right. Craig then turned in the money to Treasurer Mark Landman that he'd received for the C64 donation items.
Craig said the January get together was a good meeting. He was disappointed that only three 64 people showed up, so they tabled their plan to discuss the future direction the SIG will take.
Next month, Emil will do Newsroom revisited. Craig says there is real interest in telecommunications and hopes we can resolve the modem problem at the Bresnan Center.
Craig reported that Paul Neubauer said he'll rejoin the group next month. Paul gave Craig a run down on the SX64 repair he's doing for CUCUG. We are in need of a keyboard cable for an SX64.
Finally, Craig reported he does now have a net address. If you'd like to contact Craig you can email him at cwkummer@prairienet.org.
Fred Cline: Fred thought the January meeting was good. Fred calls himself a "User". That's why he's in a Users Group. Speaking generally about the group and what he is seeking from it, he said, "The CLI is over my head, but I enjoy whatever you put on." "I really enjoyed the Gateway trip and the class on DPaint was great."
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin distributed the mail and passed around the exchange newsletters. He brought up the topic of Microsoft's interest in NCSA's Mosaic (see article in this newsletter), which prompted a discussion about the future of Windows and OS/2.
Kevin reported he'd been working this last month on learning HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and exploring Lynx. He brought a version of the January newsletter that can be accessed through Mosaic and Netscape on the WWW. (This version is now online.)
Kevin brought up for discussion a message Jim Huls had put on the BBS about the reception he received from a member of the Bresnan Center staff when he went to renew our room commitment for the new year. KH2 was not the least amused. Others were not so effected. The discussion branched into the possibility of seeking a new meeting site. One recommended was the Electricians Union Hall - Local 601 - in the Industrial Park on north Matthis. It is located adjacent to a building used by Jim Lewis, so we could store our equipment in Jim's facility and just walk it over to the meeting site. The hall is obviously set up for group meetings, as that is its sole purpose. Access to a phone line is also a plus. And, it just so happens that Fred Cline is a retired electrician out of that local and knows the people there. Fred said he would explore the possibilities of using the hall. The group might test the waters with a special telecommunications night later this year.
Kevin reported on the opening of an Office Depot in the building Phar-Mor used to be in out at Market Place Mall. Besides selling computers, they also have a large photocopying center. Kevin said he explored the possibility of printing our newsletter there and we may be able to cut the printing cost even farther than the move to Office One Superstore had gained us.
Finally, Kevin wanted to thank Kevin Hisel for answering his question at meeting and the script he wrote over the weekend has vastly simplified the daunting task of converting those C64 files to MSDOS format.
Mike Latinovich: Mike said, "Good meeting." "Congrats to the new officers." "The new meeting place should be looked at and considered." Mike feels we need to line up some more programs for this upcoming year. Concluding his remarks, Mike told Kevin Hisel he has some of the greatest games on the club disks. He's had great fun playing them.
Kevin Hisel: Kevin said, "We should never ever do a Question and Answer session without seed questions."
Kevin asked how do we stand membership-wise. KH2 reported back that although we are down a little in numbers, we are right about even with where we were last year at this time. KH1 went over his BBS statistics which showed similar overall numbers, but he was concerned that the biggest drop in BBS users was in Amiga using non-members. As this has traditionally been the group we've recruited new members from, Kevin felt that this was not good for club growth.
There was discussion of the preparation and mailing of our annual "Lost Souls" letter for those people we have lost over the last year. This task will be tended to in March.
Kevin reported BBS usage has been up, at 20%.
Disk sales this month were good.
Kevin reported that he had renewed the subscription to the BBS support line.
The BBS is running out of storage space again. We figured we would run out last August, so technically we are ahead of the game. There was discussion of purchasing another hard drive. There was also related talk about a CDROM drive and linking the BBS to Prairienet and all that would entail.
Jon Sago: Jon discussed some of the topics raised at the last meeting. He offered the club a hard drive at a good price if its impending sale didn't go through.
Jim Lewis: Jim said he felt the January meeting went surprisingly well. As to other topics, he said the ones he had meant to discussed had already come up so he would pass on further comment.
Jim Huls: Jim thanked Jim Lewis and Kevin Hisel for their help in the Amiga SIG. He said he thought the second half went well. He was quite pleased that we had no recurring topics from previous Q&A sessions we've held, so we seem to be remaining fresh.
Jim then opened the floor for suggestions for a program at the February meeting. Kevin Hopkins suggested that with all the musicians and gamers we have in the group, why don't we do a night of MOD music. Richard Rollins suggested that we do an evening of how to handle various graphics formats: .gif, .jpeg, etc. Any other suggestions from the members will be gratefully accepted.
Well, I think violence is the easiest way to express a life and death situation and get the adrenaline pumping. I think it is inevitable to have conflict there. And, I think sex is there because it expresses relationships in a quick way of telegraphing ultimate concern.
Johnny Wilson, Editor-in-Chief of Computer Gaming World
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the Bresnan Meeting Center in the Champaign Park District Headquarters (398-2591). The Center is located at 706 Kenwood, 1/2 block south of the corner of Kenwood and John Street, in west Champaign. Kenwood is the fourth south-bound street off of John as you are going west, after crossing Mattis. The Center is in the northwest corner of Centennial Park, northwest of Centennial High School.
ASCII text files of all recent Status Register newsletters are available for downloading on our BBS or our WWW site. Other user group newsletter editors may leave a comment to the BBS Sysop to request free access. To initiate a newsletter exchange, just send us your newsletter. As a matter of CUCUG policy, a newsletter exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
This newsletter was prepared with PageStream 2.22 on an Amiga 3000 25/100 and output to an HP Laserjet IIP plus. Pagestream was donated to CUCUG by Soft-Logik Publishing Corporation.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers(all at area code 217):
President: Jim Huls 892-8730 jhuls@cucug.org Vice-President: David Witt 684-2815 maddog@prairienet.org Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 khopkins@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Treasurer: Mark Landman 398-2910 mlandman@prairienet.org Corporate Agent: Jim Lewis 359-1342 jlewis@cucug.org Librarian/Sysop: Kevin Hisel 352-1002 khisel@cucug.org C64/128 SIG: Craig Kummerow 784-5919 cwkummer@prairienet.org Board Advisor: Richard Rollins 469-2616 RERollins@aol.com
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