Floppyshop 2/Floppyshop - 2.zip/Floppyshop - 2.iso/diskmags/0022-3.564/dmg-0085/295.txt

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INFO-ATARI16 Digest         Wed,  7 Mar 90       Volume 90 : Issue  295

Today's Topics:
                             Flaky 1040st
                                G-Dos
                          Gemini on old STs
             Geneology Programs -- a summary of responses
                   MicroEMACS 3.10 -- shelling out
      PD/shareware Fortran compiler for Atari ST needed (2 msgs)
                             PD disk util
                      software for the atari ST
                 STE DMA sound (documentation posted)
                                  TT
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 7 Mar 90 16:18:58 cst
From: Jeff Cantwell <[e-mail]>
Subject: Flaky 1040st
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

Help!  My 3 year old 1040ST seems to be getting a bit flaky lately.  I
get frequent bombs when trying to run software that used to be fine.
Mostly I get three bombs (address error), or two bombs (bus error),
and an occasional TOS error #35. I am also getting messages that the
disks are unreadable or may be damaged, but after several tries, or
rebooting they work fine. I am using commercial and public domain
software that has not been any problem in the past, such as
Starglider, WordPerfect, ABCD, Daleks, etc. These reside on different
floppy disks.  I just have the one doublesided floppy drive (no hard drive),
and I have never performed any maintenance on it.  Could I simply have
a dirty disk mechanism or do I have more serious troubles?  If so, is there
a drive cleaning kit available for the ST? I have also considered the
problem of heat, but leaving the machine off all night and trying
programs in the morning does not help at all.

By the way, I did recently detect an unidentified virus with ST Virus
Killer version 2.01 from George Woodside, and promptly killed it and
disinfected all my disks.  The effect of the virus was to erase a
disk.  I lost one disk, and then temporarily lost but recovered
another. They all are clean (virus-free) now, according to the
program.


Jeff Cantwell Vanderbilt U.

INTERNET: [e-mail]  BITNET: CANTWEJR@VUCTRVAX















------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 22:04:34 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Steve Whitney)
Subject: G-Dos
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

In article <Z8-#%
 writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> MILLER TODD C writes:
>> You can get AMCGDOS.ARC from terminator.cc.umich.edu (35.1.33.8).
>>> This seems to be a PD version of GDOS.  ....
>
>I am very interested in obtaining a PD version if possible.  However
>I do not have ftp access to terminator & none of the archive sites seem
>to have it in their catalogs.  Anyone tell me how I could get hold of a
>copy or do I have to buy G+Plus?
>
>:- John
>

I've seen a number of these requests and replies, but it seems that no one
has yet pointed otu the difficulty involved with GDOS clones.  In order to
_use_ GDOS for anything other than screen fonts, you will need device
drivers and fonts.  The device drivers are not public domain, and are not
provided with G+Plus.  (I don't know if AMCGDOS has GDOS driver clones or
not, but I would _guess_ that it doesn't.)  If you just want to draw fonts
on the screen, you just need GDOS or a clone and fonts, otehrwise, you'll
still have to buy a commercial product in order to get any use from it (just
to get drivers).

If you knew this already (as many of you undoubtably did), sorry for repeating
it.

                --Steve


Steve Whitney   "It's never _really_ the last minute"       (())_-_(())
UCLA Comp. Sci. Grad. Student                                | (* *) |
Internet: [e-mail]              UCLA Bruin-->
GEnie:    S.WHITNEY                                           `-----'

------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 16:48:45 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!gos.ukc.ac.uk![e-mail]  (David Clear)
Subject: Gemini on old STs
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

I know Gemini doesn't work with TOS versions before 1.2. The question is,
why? Is there any chance of Gemini ever being released for older TOS versions?

I've seen it on a STE and it looks good. However, unless Atari feel like
sending me Rainbow TOS free of charge, I haven't a hope of using it myself.
Ugh... The pains of being a student with no money...


Dave.

--
% cc life.c                      | David Clear <[e-mail]>
% a.out                          | Computer Science, University of Kent,
Segmentation fault (core dumped) | Canterbury, England.

------------------------------

Date: 6 Mar 90 14:35:37 GMT
From: att!dptg!lzsc![e-mail]  (HC Johnson)
Subject: Geneology Programs -- a summary of responses
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

I recently requested from the net information on Geneology Programs.
I have and Atari, but also emulate MAC and PC.  So I was interested with
all three as sources.  This started when My Uncle sent me a data base on
FHS (Family History System, IBM).  It worked, but seemed clutzy.  (see
other comments below).  I downloaded both GEN_PLUS and RELTREE (both ST)
from Genie.  GEN_PLUS is build on a data base program and kept crashing.
RELTREE also screwed up quickly on my entries.  It seemed very confused
about establishing families.

All three were much more interested in index numbers rather than names
as keys to the system.  I did not like this.

The Major responses were that The Mormon Church underwrites a program
Personal Ancestral File (PAF).  This is availiable for IBM and MAC.
($35 and THEY pay the shipping).  I bought the MAC version.  Its very
nice.

Below are comments from the many responders.  I thank you all for writing.

Howard C. Johnson
ATT Bell Labs
att!lzsc!hcj
[e-mail]


=======COMMENTS from WRITERS ====
The best genealogy program on the market is

        FAMILY ROOTS
        Quinsept, Inc.
        P.O. Box 216
        Lexington, MA 02173
        1-800-637-ROOT or [phone]

I have it and it's a pleasure to use and it'll do anything you'd
ever want to do in terms of genealogy. The support is also
great and there is even a Quinsept User Group to help out. Give'em
a call and they'll send you information on their line of genealogy
software (which runs on everything from IBM PC, Macintosh, Apple ][,
Commodore 64/128, TRS-80, etc. all optimized to their platform, but
with exchangable databases)


I recently downloaded (from CompuServe; GO ROOTS), a shareware program called
"Brother's Keeper."  I have tried several "free" genealogy packages, and until
now, have found them cumbersome to use and unable to handle "special"
situations (e.g. multiple spouses).

There are many genealogy packages available.  There are several tolerable
PD packages out there, but for $35 you can buy a first-rate package called
Personal Ancestral File (PAF) that the Mormon Church publishes.  You can
order by phone - call the Latter Day Saints' Family History Library in
Salt Lake City and they can probably direct you to the right people.

(The Mormons are heavy into genealogy for religious reasons, but they are
remarkably nice about helping all us J. Random family historians, too...)

COMMSOFT up in the Bay Area somewhere publishes Roots III, which is arguably
the cadillac of genealogy packages.  If you buy it from them it will cost
around $300 (depending on what utilities you order), but you can save $50
by ordering from one of the mail order catalogues.

I used PAF until I had about 2500 people on file, then switched to Roots
because I wanted the fancy footnoting and book-generating features it has.
(That's right - Roots III will turn your data into a formatted, publishable
family history...)

MAC & IBM PC:
There are two good ones.  One is Personal Ancestral File from
    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons)
    GEnealogical Cept
    Ancestral File Operations Unit
    50 East North Temple St
    Salt Lake City, UT 87150

Costs $35 for which you get a reasonable manual, 3 or 4 program disks and
extra disks and labels for your data and backups.  It's a great bargain for
the money.  Quite a competent program, easy to use, well developed with no
tremendous bugs in it.

The other one that's really excellent--much more flexible and adaptable is
Roots III.  However, it costs $300.

MAC:
I have written a genealogy stack for people who do much research.  It will keep
track of family, individual, and pedigree records, as well as having
templates for raw data, such as marriage, birth, census, etc.  It is called
Genealogy 1.1 and is available on any of the main online services.  For
keeping record of formal data in family record and pedigree form, as well
as some research notes, I recommend the Personal Ancestral File program
put out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I haven't used the stack, but there is a geneology hypercard stack
in the info-mac/hypercard directory at sumex-aim.stanford.edu.  If
you don't already know, you can do anonymous ftp to that site.  Hope
this helps.  You may want to seek out someone who has used it, though.

I recently posted this same query to the net and was inundated with replies.
99% said use "PAF- Personal Ancestor File" from the Church of the Latter Day
Saints (the mormons).

It is only 35 dollars (plus shipping) and is really great.  Though it
is a port of a PC program it is very well done.  Very Mac'ish.  Entry
and editing are extremely good. There are lots of output options.
It is oriented towards printing Pedigree charts (ie show me a tree
of my ancestors).  It can print descendant charts (more like
traditional family trees) but thse are printed as nested text, not as
a tree.

On the PC there is a shareware program called Brothers Keeper that
will take the files generated by PAF (these files have aparently become
the standard genealogy interchange format) and print a traditional
family tree.

THe only drwaback is that the database entries are weighted towards Mormons.
Their are entries for baptism, bonding-to-spouse, and other christian/mormon
rituals.  THere is a commercial product (name escapes me at the moment but it
is advertised in the back of all the usual Mac Magazines) that is supposedly
a liscenced version of PAF that has been extended to better support non-mormons.
The problem is they want more than $150 for it, which seems a bit out of line
given the price of PAF.

IBM PC PROGRAM:
I am using a shareware program called Family History.  The entry is
simple.
Editing is no problem, just reference the record number assigned by
the program which corresponds to the individual.  To make your own
life easier, print out a list of names and record numbers so you do
not have to constantly refer back to the screen which provides that

The software package I have is PAF 2.2 from the LDS church.  It doesn't have
any fancy pull-down menus and stuff like that but it sure does the job.

------------------------------

Date: 6 Mar 90 18:09:33 GMT
From: mcsun!unido!infbs!tubsibr![e-mail]  (Udo Hafermann)
Subject: MicroEMACS 3.10 -- shelling out
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

[e-mail] (Mark Roddy) writes:

>Yes, 3.10 as distributed CANNOT SHELL OUT. [...]

For all gulam users:  We didn't find it difficult to build a "suspend"
facility into the uEmacs (activated by ~Z, naturally), which exits
into a loop reading and executing gulam commands in gulam's original
environment.  Typing "fg" returns you into uEmacs as you left it.
Very useful, and just a few lines of code.

------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 21:28:50 GMT
From: silver![e-mail]  (Vincent Schonau)
Subject: PD/shareware Fortran compiler for Atari ST needed
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Steven W. Klassen) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Wayne Ngai)
writes:
>>Is there any existing PD/Shareware Fortran compiler for Atari St in existence
>>Is so, could someone please mail me a copy?? Thanks!!!
>>
>>wayne
>
>If you get any responses, please post a summary to the net.  I'm also
>interested in Fortran for the ST (but not interested enough to pay
>big bucks for it) and there are likely others.


I have a copy of a PD fortran interpreter (compiler? I am not sure I am a
Fortran-knownothing), that I obtained from the dutch usergroups on a disk..
I think the documentation was in German.....

-Vincent.



+ Vincent Schonau  || Yeah.  So.  I am a bum.....what's your point?           +
+ -----------------------------++---------------------------------------------+
+ Bit: vschonau@iubacs, Inter: [e-mail], sl198004@silver>
>.ucs.indiana.edu  ||     Opinions? Who needs opinions? Ask someone else!     +

------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 19:59:56 GMT
From:
 wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!tiger!
 [e-mail]  (Steven W. Klassen)
Subject: PD/shareware Fortran compiler for Atari ST needed
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Wayne Ngai)
 writes:
>
>Is there any existing PD/Shareware Fortran compiler for Atari St in existence?
>
>Is so, could someone please mail me a copy?? Thanks!!!
>
>
>wayne

If you get any responses, please post a summary to the net.  I'm also
interested in Fortran for the ST (but not interested enough to pay
big bucks for it) and there are likely others.


Steven W. Klassen                       +-----------------------------+
Computer Science Major                  | Support the poor...buy fur! |
University of Waterloo                  +-----------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 7 Mar 90 15:23:28 MST
From: ASQB-SEP-A HQ USAISEC <[e-mail]>
Subject: PD disk util

I'm looking for a PD (or otherwise) disk editor.  I had dl'd dvist.uue from
our Sperry 5000/85 to my ST and unarced it.  Unfortunately, I wasn't paying clos
e enough attention when I got an out of disk space before arc had finished
dearcing and I hit <delete> instead of cancel.  Ouch!

To make matters worse, while trying to recover the file with Disk Doctor
(original 85/86 -- who knows if they ever had a newer version) I quit in mid-
stream because I thought the data in the sectors was starting to look a little
strange.  Wrong move.  I now have half the file back -- I guess that is better
than nothing except I've already dearced past that.

Back when I was using my Radio Shack Color Computer with OS-9, there was a
great disk editor that let you read sectors into a buffer and then write them
out to another disk to recover as much of a file as you could -- really nice.

Anything like that out here?

I know where all the sectors are but how the FAT table points to the next
cluster and how to change that is still beyond me after reading the docs in DD.
(Well I guess not how it points to it, I understood that but rather how to make
it human readable and then make the changes).

I've looked at DLII to see if that will help but if it can do what I
need it isn't apparent.

Mark Rhyner
Compter Systems Engineering
USAISEC
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 7 Mar 90 17:30 EST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: software for the atari ST

does anyone have an updated software for the atari ST, despite most of it
comming out of Europe, I feel trapped and all alone, also does anyone know
of any Bulliten boards in the Buffalo/Rochester area that supports shareware
for the atari ST??
thanx..

------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 08:57:51 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!edcastle!hwcs![e-mail]  (Neil Forsyth)
Subject: STE DMA sound (documentation posted)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Bruce Szablak) writes:
>Hmmm, from what I been reading, the main complaint is how Atari is trying
>to restrict technical info on the ST to those who have forked over the
>developers fee. Perhaps this is the REAL reason the publicly available
>docs are "shit!"

Of course the reverse is true in the UK.
Being a registered developer I get to read about the workings of the new STE
in a magazine instead of being told by Atari that there is this new machine
coming out Christmas '89 and would I like some tech details on it.
I spent last December writing, phoning and pestering Atari UK to get 2 year
old developer documentation on the ordinary ST.

I do think that in paying the developers fee you are entitled to information
and support that the ordinary user is denied. What do I mean by that?
Well by information I mean advanced information on unreleased products
such as the TT and special hardware such as Moniterm cards etc.
Support? Phone, newsletters bug fixes, the whole thing.

I have been told, by Atari UK, that the whole developers support is under
a major reorganisation and details will be announced in the near future.

As for posting of development documentation to the net perhaps suffering
typos I quote from Rainbow TOS release notes:-

        "The xxxxxx() call is incorrectly documented"

        "The documentation for the xxxxxx is wrong."

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
! DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, the above comments are entirely my own !
!                                                                             !
! "I think all right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of    !
! being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this country with      !
! being sick and tired. I'm certainly not and I'm sick and tired of being     !
! told that I am!" - Monty Python                                             !
!                                                                             !
! Neil Forsyth                       JANET:  [e-mail]                 !
! Dept. of Computer Science          ARPA:   [e-mail]                 !
! Heriot-Watt University             UUCP:   ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!neil          !
! Edinburgh, Scotland, UK                                                     !
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: 7 Mar 90 21:04:58 GMT
From: ogicse!blake![e-mail]  (Enartloc Nhoj)
Subject: TT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

According to many "officials" at ATARI...
some who have written to me personally,

**  The  TT  will be available in TWO WEEKS! **

Question:  which ones will have SIMMS and which will have SIPS..?

Question 2: will the TT boot only into low-res?

Question 3: will i need folderxxx.prg?


-kevin

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End of INFO-ATARI16 Digest V90 Issue #295
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