Wow. It's been exactly 1 year since we started working intensively on Bernie ][ The Rescue, and since that April 96 a lot of things have changed for us. We have been so overwhelmed by your support, curiosity and kindness that I believe it would have been a great mistake not to go full steam ahead with Bernie as we once almost agreed upon in August 96.
Since its introduction on December 22, life has become somewhat hectic and friends are wondering why we're not returning their calls. I must admit that I have rarely been *that* busy (and hearing Andre moaning and groaning on the phone shows me I'm not alone), but Bernie has been endless fun for all of us. The whole crew here would like to thank you for sharing our enthusiasm, your feedback, your understanding that sometimes things go belly up, your patience, and last but not least your shareware fees. The latter one is a huge encouragement, and we'll do our utmost to meet your expectations.
So long,
Henrik, also (possibly) speaking for: Andre Horstmann (the real Bernie-man) and Urs Hochstrasser
'Nuff of that drivel! we have wrapped some really cool new thingies into Bernie's barrel and are pretty excited to present you:
Bugs fixed:
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- Sound bug fixed that resulted in sounds playing more samples than allowed
- Sound bug fixed that doubled the pace of two oscillators
- fixed bug with incorrect file length when creating disk images
- Awful lot of other things fixed
Known Quirks:
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- We have found one system that could not deal with "real" 800k ProDOS disks properly while PC Exchange was enabled. In the IIgs Finder, the disk icon was toggling between "online" and "ejected" mode. If you happen to encounter this, we kindly ask you to get in touch with us. We have tried very hard to reproduce this phenomena on our systems, but to no avail. If you are affected by this, please disable PC Exchange.
Virtual disk images, shared volumes and HFS disks are not affected.
- The same system was suffering from an awkward, very noticeable performance hit when sound support was still enabled from the previous session (and thus turned on by default in the current session). Once again, we were unable to reproduce this despite numerous attempts on development and test systems. If this problem is occuring on your system, please disable sound support before quitting Bernie. Also, please drop us a line so we know what's going on. (Note: once Bernie is running, you can activate/deactivate sound support without risking degraded performance. It's just when sound support is active and Bernie is loading.)
So much for the bad news. :-) To make you smile again, we have the following lovely gifts for you:
New Features:
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- Superfast, new emulation core! Experience twofold performance boosts and more!
- SpeedNanny for total control over emulated speed
- Creates "2img" disk images
- Mounts folders (worksets), incl. proper alias resolving
- Autotypes "2img" disk images
- Completely revamped Power Mode with pretty snobbistic fade in/out
- Define startup workset
- Copy text screens
- Function keys for fast access to advanced features
- Featuring now: Hypercard and SynthLab!
- New interrupt queueing mechanism for much improved sound reproduction
- New web pages
Whops, this list grew rather long!
The first thing you'll notice is that Bernie will fly. And because Bernie is often way too fast for playing games, SpeedNanny lets you adjust emulated speed in 0.2Mhz increments.
Next, we have made substantial changes in the sound department. Bernie is now paying more attention to what's going on in the sound chip, allowing for more precise reproduction of audio. We have also raised the buffer sizes - while this increases unwanted quantization somewhat, it should not be within audible range and relieves the PowerPC from a lot of interrupt overhead. Zany Golf, SynthLab and quite a few other titles now are playing along like the original did. Because Bernie is now emulating sound interrupts way more faithfully than before, users with low-end Power Mac systems may notice slower performance. However, Bernie is simply emulating now what's actually happening in the Ensoniq.
Function keys are very handy when you're in Power Mode and can't access other windows or menus. The layout is as follows:
F1: Undo (n/a)
F2: Cut (n/a)
F3: Copy
F4: Paste
F5: Joystick toggle
F6: Mouse toggle
F7: Sound On/Off
F8: PowerMode On/Off
F9: Speed Nanny On: 2.6 Mhz
F10: Slower
F11: Faster
F12: Speed Nanny Off
Shift-F13: Power Off-On (Cold Reset)
Shift-F14: Shutdown (Quit)
F15: Halt
We will offer keyboard layouts for Saratoga and Adjustable Keyboards soon - if you would like to have one, check the Bernie home page (http://www.magnet.ch/emutech/Bernie/ ) for announcements of this kind.
We have also updated the BoneWeb - turn to http://www.magnet.ch/emutech/ for late-breaking information
Online Support
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Yes, we do online support. Actually, we do online support ONLY.
For support, please *post* your questions on comp.emulators.apple2 or comp.sys.apple2 (whatever is appropriate). We monitor both newsgroups.
If you think you found a bug, would like to complain about something, please keep in mind:
- for bug reports, add the text [BUG] to the subject line
- for complaints, add the text [USUCK] to the subject line
- for feature requests, add the text [FEATURE] to the subject line
Include the brackets - the brackets are required for successful mail filtering.
Please send your mails to both andre.horstmann@mail-com.net and emutech@magnet.ch .
--
F.E. Systems, formerly Bright Software, is a renowned provider of productivity and entertainment software for Apple IIgs computers. We have pioneered telecommunications software (first software-only videotex decoder) with ShadowDial, symbolic mathematics with Symbolix, user-friendly text editing with ShadowWrite, mind-challenging action games with The Gate (IDG editor's choice award), and Apple IIgs software emulation for Macintosh with "Bernie ][ The Rescue".
