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       ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER DECEMBER 1993

         LETTER from AUSTRALIA - No. 6 Sep / 93
        -----------------------------------------

             A week or so ago we were down in Sydney for the weekend
       visiting William.  Nothing for it but we had to go out with him
       to see Jurassic Park which had opened in Australia just a few
       days before.  This was his second time at this movie, the first
       being a few days before on its second day with the whole office
       where he works - yes, all 24 of them, with more than just passing
       interest as graphics programmers and animators.  This leads as I
       found to comments on things like imperfections in matting in of
       the dinosaurs.  All mightily impressed though.  This is not a
       movie review here, but it is worth noting that unlike most movie
       and TV efforts showing computers which range from fantasy to
       excruciating, this one looked for real in scenes where people
       were using computers even to regular Silicon Graphics users like
       Will.  This extended to running the computers in the film with
       modified video boards at 48 Hz frame rate and synchronized to the
       film camera (film uses 24 frames/sec) to eliminate the moving
       black bands or heavy flicker normally seen on TV films of actual
       computer screens.  Your editor Charlie should take well to a
       movie in which almost the first word uttered is "palaeobotanist".

             Last weekend was not a happy one at Funnelweb Farm.  We had
       not seen our resident mother possum for some days, and on
       Saturday morning Val heard a noise at the front door, and there
       was mother with a now fairly large baby on her back climbing
       painfully up the front screen door to a temporarily open space a
       couple of meters deep between the floors.  She had been savaged
       by a dog but the little one was unharmed.  We managed to snaffle
       junior, now old enough to be semi-independent - you wear garden
       gloves while doing so and pop the little critter in a hessian
       potato sack.  Then you can let it peek out while holding the bag,
       which I ended up holding this time.  It took a lot of coaxing to
       get mother possum to drag herself back out of the hole.  When she
       did, Val, with gloves and sack of course, was able to bring her
       down and hold her quietly.  Brush-tail possums usually bite and
       scratch and can do a lot of damage while being able to wriggle
       out of the tightest grip, but this one was so far gone that she
       could only lie quietly in Val's arms and take some water from a
       spoon, even some banana being too difficult, now she could see
       that junior was safe.  The lady from the Native Animal Trust came
       around and took mother possum and son off to the vet.  She was
       very relieved that we had captured the possums first.  The sad
       but expected later news was that mother possum was too far gone
       to survive, but at least the little one will get a chance.  I am
       deeply angry at irresponsible dog owners.  It is supposed to be
       an offense to allow a dog to harm protected native animals, but
       if you do not catch it in the act then there is little that can
       be proved.

             Some have wondered why we have this fixation on funnelweb
       spiders around here.  Just recently there was a repeat showing of
       an excellent TV natural history special on spiders, mostly
       Australian.  I expect that this would have or will be shown in
       the US of A as National Geographic was one of the partners in
       making it, so if you have any curiosity in this area do not miss
       it when it comes to a TV set near you.  The program is called
       "Webs of Intrigue" and is presented by Densey Cline.

             Some things seem to be the same no matter what type of
       computer you have - suppliers who are incompetent or shonky in
       varying degrees.  It is not that many years ago that even IBM
       threatened to leave Australia if computers were brought under
       consumer law that insisted that computers compute as claimed.
       Car warranties just depress me!  I bought at considerable expense
       a Canadian product for my home 486 PC, an ATI Graphics Ultra Plus
       video card.  Though it took a second try to get one that would
       pass its own self-diagnostics (the supplier all the while denying
       the first one was faulty), the hardware generally has a good
       reputation, though murmurs are now surfacing about that too.
       What ATI definitely appear to be unwilling to do or incompetent
       at is software.  Now video handling with DOS on PCs is a
       disgusting mess, with separate drivers seemingly needed for every
       major DOS program.  Maybe ATI has done those adequately, but when
       you get to a more abstracted level the picture is not so good.
       and the OS/2 support is abysmally bad.  Despite ATI advertising
       OS/2 support, what has emerged has been incomplete, very late,
       and buggy.  I am not yet game to install the latest offerings.
       So like most OS/2 users with these cards I scale back to the
       8514/A simulation with the IBM driver, while all that very
       expensive video co-processor remains effectively unused.  I shall
       certainly avoid buying any ATI product again.  Over recent years
       I have bought quite a number of PCs at work, and it seems that
       the process of getting them up and running on all fronts is
       becoming steadily more traumatic.  If you don't test them
       thoroughly then you may find yourself in post-warranty trouble.
       Murphy guarantees it.

             Some have a theory that you rarely if ever find both
       hardware and software competence in the same company.  That's how
       Will got into the Amiga/SCSI business, by working as the
       programmer with a hardware designer who needed software expertise
       to make a real team.  And while on the theme of shonky suppliers,
       Will has several kilobucks of his part time earnings while a
       student tied up with DMI, a San Diego area video board firm which
       never delivered the product and is dragging forever on refunding
       the $$.

             While we are on this subject I should mention that I have a
       unknown, but perhaps very unusual distinction in the TI scene.
       Years ago I actually got my money back from 99er Magazine! Maybe
       I just got in early enough or made the right kind of noises.  We
       had relied on borrowed copies in the early days, and the
       editorial content though never very impressive did seem to be
       improving in the run-up to the 99/8, which I was waiting for
       impatiently.  So I took out a subscription, and then about one or
       two much delayed issues later it looked like losing the plot, so
       I jumped in and cancelled.  Which brings me to the strange case
       of OPA.  There do seem to be some serious unresolved matters
       here.  My friends in the Sydney UG ordered a whole pile of
       TIM/SOBs, paid for and never delivered - this has badly damaged
       the TI scene in Australia.  It seems though that Gary Bowser just
       refuses to communicate about the matter, not even to deny any
       liability.  I have tried recently on behalf of Sydney also with
       no response - I know the e-mail did not bounce.  Yet the strange
       thing is that OPA still appears on the networks and at fairs and
       offers products, even, I am told including the TIM on occasion.
       There seems to be an attitude expressed in that strange letter
       from OPA that appeared in MicroPendium that as money paid for
       orders a couple of years ago went to pay living expenses at the
       time, then customers should not expect to receive product.
       Customers might expect otherwise, and even Ontario law cannot be
       so wide open as to countenance such goings on.  From what I have
       seen of the one TIM/SOB that made it to the Hunter, it was indeed
       a good product, and the Vn 8.1x HRD ROS as supplied by Bud Mills
       has been a real contribution, despite its limitations.  Trouble
       is that nothing else OPA has produced in a long while now seems
       of any real significance.

             On the TI front at Funnelweb Farm, there is both good news
       and bad.  The bad is not intrinsically so, just that I have not
       found much time or energy for programming or much else on the TI
       since releasing the Vn 5 Editor.  The good news is that after
       Geoff Trott's latest ministrations, the HRD-3000 at long last
       seems to be behaving itself.  I may even work up to getting some
       more 128Kx8 SRAMs, if local suppliers have heard of them yet, to
       bring it up to a more useful size.  Am I game yet to retire a
       192Kb HRD to duty as a memory expansion test bed? Maybe it is
       time to look at patching the ROS to handle DSQD equivalent.  With
       the all-seeing benefit of hindsight, it now seems a great pity
       that the HRD design did not originally include both ROM and RAM
       in the initial DSR space.  It needs both, ROM at >4000 including
       power-up check routines for ruggedness and SRAM to carry the
       configurable information that has to be accessible to a standard
       DSRlink search and for more working room if needed.  The
       fragility of the DSR header has always plagued HRD users, and the
       attempt at an EPROM sold in the past was not really successful.

             I have had a browse through the Asgard AMS memory expansion
       user guide on disk, but any opinions of this memory expansion
       scheme formed and expressed here are from that and net-news items
       only, and not from actual experience.  The memory expansion
       scheme itself appears quite livable with, paging in 4K blocks
       from a large pool into the usual TI low and high memory spaces.
       It will not reproduce the full function of TI's own 128K
       expansion, but seeing as these were never released and there were
       so few anyway it hardly matters, and it is otherwise more
       extensible by addition of more memory.  It does reside at a fixed
       CRU base, but this is up high at >1E00 and so avoids the low
       range crush (the TI lived at >1200).  I do question the lack of a
       DSR.  This is promoted as a virtue, but that seems like trying to
       make a feature out of a deficiency, a traditional sport of
       marketeers.  No doubt it saves board area and is cheaper to make.
       Why would the user want to have a DSR even if it cost more? One
       reason would be to provide self-test routines accessible from
       console Basic without requiring even the minimal 32K expansion to
       be operational (this is one saving grace of the Myarc 512K
       Ramdisk card).  Other desiderata might be an identification call,
       and a library of routines either callable in place or
       downloadable preferably as position independent code.  No doubt
       more can be added to this list.  I would agree that the full
       DSRlink mechanism for memory bank selection as in RAMBO on HRD
       cards is more overhead than desirable, but existence of a
       DSRlinked control does not imply that more direct access to the
       low level banking mechanisms is not possible.  The access just
       needs to be clearly and permanently defined, and preferably
       simple and elegant.  As remarked in a previous Letter the real
       problem with banked memory expansion is the decision overhead in
       handling large data blocks.  The programmer with more or less
       trouble can structure code to work in bank sized blocks with
       little run-time overhead.  These things are not trivial either -
       look at how Microsoft with all their billions of dollars and
       armies of programmers have not been able to make 16-bit Windoze
       work without too frequent crashes.  Then again lots of things are
       nicer on the TI which is why some still like playing with it.

             I am not quite so keen on some of the software decisions
       made in the AMS system (mostly those to do with PAD usage and
       which may have been forced by the absence of working RAM in the
       DSR space).  A great deal of work has gone into it, and it may be
       when the RAG Macro-assembler and Linker finally come into their
       own, in these expanses of paged memory.  I have always thought a
       macro-assembler was gross overkill and even counterproductive in
       the standard 32K TI-99 environment, but it and the enhanced
       Linker may well be essential tools for AMS.  I do not care at all
       for the way areas of PAD have been appropriated, in particular
       the violation of the E/A manual specification (p406) of >83D0-2
       as DSR search pointer storage.  The TI system specifications are
       very clear on just what PAD memory a DSR is allowed to trash
       (some cards like the Myarc FDC use more but restore it on exit).
       A hardware device that uses the CRU banking scheme for DSRs and
       claims for itself usage of memory not allocated to such devices
       is making a claim to ownership of the whole system instead of
       being one amongst equals.  A memory expansion is special, but not
       all that special.

             Putting aside all the rival commercial claims which were
       coming hot and heavy a while back, it is clear that the TI-99 has
       long needed CPU memory expansion.  Even when the original 99/4
       was conceived, a plain 64Kb address space was clearly not enough
       for its designers, but the general CPU memory expansion never
       made it out the door before Black Friday.  This has ever since
       cramped the style of programmers and limited the scope of
       applications.  We are never going to have the luxury of wide open
       linear address spaces on the 16-bit 9900 series CPUs no matter
       how extra memory is paged in, but the 99/4a system can support a
       substantial amount of extra CPU memory.  The 9995 CPU in the
       Myarc Geneve can realistically support even more just because it
       is faster, despite its on-chip memory block not being in a very
       suitable place for 99/4 emulation.  Just as an aside I learned
       recently that the 9995s used in the 99/8 were specials with
       on-chip memory disabled.  Back to the main train of thought --
       Myarc for their own reasons never made flexible memory expansion
       available on the 99/4a, limiting it to the generally difficult to
       use all-at-once scheme of the 512Kb RamDisk card, even though the
       technical means now being used in the AMS card were available
       before then.  Realistically at this stage in the life of the
       99/4a the market can support at most one such device, and the AMS
       card appears to have center stage, and I wish them well.  Note
       that I say "appears" as I have seen no external evidence of it
       yet as a real commercial product.

             Since writing the last Letter I have been able to access
       Delphi and pop up on the TI section every so often under the name
       GLOBAL01.  This may be at very odd times because I telnet via the
       Internet into Delphi from my office machine, at lunch time or
       after work Australian time, which tends to make it very late
       evening or early AM in USA.  The connection from Australia is
       usually pretty hesitant - I don't know what Delphi is like on its
       home ground - but an extra layer of packetized communication
       across the Pacific can only make it deteriorate, and I often have
       a long delay before keystrokes register on my screen.  I think it
       has improved a little since the link out of Australia moved from
       satellite to cable.  Sometimes initial access times out waiting
       for the password.  Each time I check any mail and read the Forum
       entries.  So if you have any queries feel free to make them by
       this channel, and I will answer them there as best I can.  If any
       warnings or easy bug-fixes come to light for FW, I will post them
       in the Forum.  I do not currently have any way to capture whole
       files, and typing more than short replies directly on Delphi is
       difficult and inaccurate because of the long key response delays.
       So any long detailed communications are best sent to my Internet
       e-mail address if you have that facility.  I have already
       communicated with various people in USA and Europe at their
       [e-mail] addresses in the last few months, so if you have
       Internet access my e-mail address is at the end of this letter.
       Once I forgot to put the .com on delphi at the initial telnet - a
       local Zeus answered - but thought he was a Vaxstation 3100 and
       not a greek god.

             Perhaps I should end with a philosophical puzzle.  The
       other morning I was out for my morning exercise walk in Blackbutt
       Reserve when I heard a tree fall (real T. Rex sound effect
       stuff), but even though I walked back down the trail a way, I
       could not see where it fell.  Was it real ?

       Tony McGovern
       Funnelweb Farm
       Sep / 14 / 93
       e-mail -- [e-mail]
       Delphi -- GLOBAL01
       .PL 1