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Text File | 1986-06-19 | 14.0 KB | 339 lines

7 Sommers 2781 HARDWARE NEWS.2782 Atari has several thousand of the longawaited hard disk drives piling up in warehouses. Target shipping date is still the end of May so the drives should be in stores by the time you are reading this. We'll see. Expect to see the Atari 1200 baud modem late in June or early July. Our sources in- dicate that the MS-DOS emulator has received FCC approval. The hardware seems to be in fine shape, but the software still needs tuning. Probably won't see this until the fall. The situation with the blitter chip is just the opposite. Software emulation of the blitter is done but bugs still remain in the hardware. If the chip makes it through the next production run, we might see this pro- duct in four to six weeks. No significant progress to report on the CD-ROM front. Atari still talking with potential suppliers. A new monitor is on the way, the SPI3000. This will be the same as the current color monitor with one significant difference -- a built in disk drive. Final price is not set but should be in the neighborhood of $500. The EST, the next generation ST, will feature a very high- resolution monitor (1280 x 960?). However, monitors with this kind of resolution, currently priced at about $1,000, are very expensive. Atari is searching the world to see if it can find a supplier who can make a more economical high resolution monitor. Don't look for the EST before, at best, early next year. Hard drives, MS-DOS emulators, networks, color digitizers and other potential per- ipherals are all going to need access to the single DMA port. How are they going to get it? By using an OctaBUS. This device will plug into the DMA port on one end and provide four (or eight) additional DMA ports on the other end. Several 3rd-party manufacturers are working on such a product right now. Price will probably be between $100-$150. 2781 SOFTWARE NEWS.2782 Artists are certainly getting some nice tools for use with the ST. First we had NEOCHROME followed shortly thereafter by DEGAS. Audio Light has entered the fray with a terrific new product called N-VISION. Soon, two more products will be available. DEGAS ELITE will be a major upgrade to DEGAS and Atari will release NEOCHROME Version 1.1 in June. The new version of NEOCHROME will be priced around $50 and include several enhancements such as ellipses and arcs and multiple fonts (with the ability to rotate and size characters). Atari really liked the database man- agement program dBMAN offered by VersaSoft. In fact, they liked it so much they purchased the rights to the program from VersaSoft. Now, Atari will be marketing this popular database package. If you are anxiously waiting for Personal Prolog from OSS, you'll have to wait awhile longer. The first release of Personal Prolog will be OSS's first product for the MacIntosh. The ST version won't be ready till the end of the summer. OSS also informs me that they have dropped plans to produce Personal Diskit -- there were already too many programs around performing similar functions. 2781 COMDEX.2782 I recently attended the spring edition of COMDEX (Computer Dealer's Expo) held in Atlanta. Atari once more followed the formula devised by Sig Hartman at the November COMDEX. By providing ST software developers with floor space within the large Atari display, Atari was able to effectively demonstrate the great variety of software available while at the same time helping those who are developing programs for the ST. And programs there were! Atari released a 350-page paperback book listing about 300 programs available (or soon to be available) for the ST produced by nearly 100 different companies. Faced with such a volume of software, I didn't attempt to examine in detail every program being displayed. Indeed, it would be difficult here to even just list the names of the programs. So let me just hit upon some highlights. The ST has plenty of languages. Already programmers of BASIC, C, PASCAL, FORTH, or ASSEMBLY have several competitors to choose from. FORTRAN programmers will be happy to know Prospero has released Pro Fortran/77 and MODULA-2 fans will soon have an upgrade from TDI for their language. Accounting has now made it to the ST. DAC Easy -- a popular, and inexpensive, accounting package from the IBM PC world -- is now available on the ST. Sierra's One Write series will provide some more sophisticated accounting modules thoroughly integrated with GEM. Several "SideKick" clones were shown; these programs provide a number of simple but useful functions that pop up on demand when needed. BI had a "Lightning" clone called, aptly enough, "Thunder." I really like this one. It was a real-time spelling checker -- it would catch your typos or spelling errors as you typed. OS 9, a multi-user, multi-tasking opera- ting system, was up and running on the ST. I noticed the OS-9 booth had a copy of Volks- Writer for the ST. No, this popular word- processor from the IBM PC world has not been ported over to the ST, but there is a version that runs under OS 9. Speaking of operating systems, the CP/M emulator was on display as was the MS-DOS emulator. Unfortunately, in the case of the MS-DOS emulator, the only program available and being demonstrated was MultiPlan. But imagine what happens to the quantity of available ST software when you add the existing CPM, OS 9, and MS-DOS libraries. We won't even try to imagine what would happen if the Mac-emulator ever gets off the ground! There was much more on display that we will try and tell you about as the products are actually released and come onto the market. There is one new product, however, that I think you should be warned about. It is a game called "Cards" from MichTron. It includes five individual games (BlackJack, Cribbage, Poker Squares, Klondike, and Solitaire). If you are into card games, stay away from this one! It will capture you and steal every free moment you have. Instead of going to sleep, you'll find yourself booting this one up for "just one game." But don't believe it! You're liable to go weeks without ever getting a full night's sleep. Look for a more detailed review next month. 2781 TINY THRILLERS.2782 We seek to generate both an audience and an authorship for "tender tips" or as we call them, "Tiny Thrillers" about the mighty-mite ST electronic space craft. This is not to usurp John Demar of QMI, PO Box 179, Liverpool, NY, who has done a piece available on the BBS circuit. Rather this is because of John. We would like to stimulate local courage in transmitting your creative discoveries about the care and feeding of the ST to local users, and also, if you wish, to John per the address above. He whets our appetite with a number of "insights" on "how to", e.g. when you wish to read the directory of a disk you have just replaced in the drive, without "mousing it", just hit [Esc] and the new directory will flow in over the old. (If you have "desktopped" so that you have two windows with both drives on the screen sized to your needs, click on the one you wish to refresh and then hit [Esc]. That from John Demar, now to encourage your local participation, these two "Tiny Thrillers" from CN correspondents. SELECTION WINDOWS: How often have you tried to switch directories in the Selection Window of a program, and after typing in on the Selection line, "B:\*.*" or A:, as the case may be, you click and watch the new directory flash on, and flash just as quickly off the screen? A "Tiny Thriller", instead of clicking on O.K. or pressing return, click on one of the programs in the old menu, and watch the new drive contents slip into place and stay there. BLOCK FILE COPY: Power, at any price, (once you have your ST), is reaching up and pulling down a dotted line with the mouse to the left of a window of files, watch them black out, and then drag them over to copy to another disk or drive or whatever you wish, e.g. folder. To do it without having to later go back and "trash" those files which were in the block and which you didn't really want but couldn't avoid, first, draw down your block of desired files to copy, but stop at the one you don't want. Then reposition the cursor at the next desired item and holding down the [Shift] and [Alternate] keys, simultaneously, press the [Insert] key, but deftly. Voila! The file blackens and you proceed to repeat the magic with any other files to be dragged smilingly to their new home. Now, many of you know these tricks. Most of you do not. We didn't. So please don't assume that your "discoveries" are known to all. We have discovered the opposite is usually true. Please, therefore, drop them off in writing (to Frank Sommers, 4824 Langdrum Lane, Chevy Chase, Md 20815) or electronically on the new local ST BBS, or by telephone. We'd love to give credit where credit is due, so please leave your name and general location to be included with the "Tiny Thriller". MAC WORLD, the Mac mag, runs such items monthly as a separate article, and interest is high. The guideline, might be, "All You Wanted to Know about ST, and Nobody to Tell You". 2781 ARMUDIC-ST2782. The new WAACE ST BBS (703) 569-3227 is now a reality. The download files (two DSDD drives) are already full and the message base is growing daily. Hopefully, when the hard drives are released, we will be able to upgrade and have 20 megabytes available for the Atari community. A subscription fee ($15/year for all WAACE members, i.e. anyone who gets this newsletter through their club or via a direct subscription) will get you up and running. To register, send your check (payable to NOVATARI) to Ted Bell, 9705 Shipwright Dr., Burke. VA 22015. 2781 SWITCHBOARD.2782 We recently received the SWITCHBOARD BBS from SST Systems ($34.95), and asked Ed Seward to take a quick look so we could tell you something about it in this issue. Ed's report: This unusual BBS software is set up as a ten-story building with up to 100 rooms per floor. This type of structure allows for a variety of privilege authorizations. The latest version for the ST, version 3.1, allows up to 256 accounts and 256 messages or pieces of Email. The manual or Sysop mode contains the following commands: S - (S)earch for pending messages or accounts M - (M)odify messages and accounts D - (D)elete messages and accounts N - enter a (N)ew message B - go (B)ack to the BBS program E - (E)xit SWITCHBOARD The program disk is not copy protected allowing one to use a backup copy for safety. The program disk contains CONFIG.TOS and EXPAND.TOS to initially configure the BBS and to later expand it.