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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
xxx@delphi.com 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 -- phpam@cc.newcastle.edu.au
Delphi -- GLOBAL01
.PL 1