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Loadstar 128 39
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t.wheels 128
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2022-08-28
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T H O U G H T S O N W H E E L S 1 2 8
Wheels 128 by Maurice Randall
Thoughts by Fender Tucker
As a C-128 person who's mainly interested in producing programs for
LOADSTAR or for use at home, I've never become a regular user of Geos. I'm
sure that if I were interested in desktop publishing, graphics
manipulation, or Mac-like, mouse-driven navigation, I would have gotten
into Geos more. It's easy to see why people who "use" their computers, as
opposed to programming them, like the point-and-click atmosphere of Geos.
Of course, as editor of LOADSTAR 64, which regularly has Geos clip art,
fonts, articles and programs on it, I boot up my Geos 128 system at least
once a month to check out (and occasionally edit) the Geos ware for that
issue. Until recently, I would boot up Geos 128 on a 1571 (drive 8) then
use a 3.5 inch Geos workdisk in an FD-2000 (drive 9). The boot up time is
around 30 seconds. Once I'm in Geos, it takes about 20 seconds to load a
geoPaint document. Then, on the FD-2000, it takes about 9 seconds to scroll
from the top of a document to the bottom.
I've never had any luck in trying to get Geos to work on my RAMLink
(drive 11), although others have solved that problem and regularly boot
Geos from a RAMLink partition. Now, thanks to Maurice Randall's WHEELS 128,
which contains a replacement desktop, DASHBOARD, I can boot Geos up in
about 2 seconds and get into geoPaint in about a second. In addition, I can
access all of the drives on my system, which includes 2 1571s, an FD-2000
and a RAMLink.
The installation process was quite easy. I just followed the prompts
that the WHEELS installation program displayed on the screen. An REU of
some kind is required by WHEELS 128; I'm using my SuperCPU's RAM for the
operating system, but it could be a 1700, 1764, 1750, 1750 clone, geoRAM,
BBGram, SuperCPU SuperRAM, RAMLink or RAMDrive. Once it was installed, I
used the program MakeSysDisk to turn a 1581 emulation partition in my
RAMLink into a Geos workdisk with geoPaint, geoWrite and PhotoAlbum in it.
This is what I boot up every time I want to work on Geos stuff. If I needed
more disk space, I could have used a Native Mode partition on my RL instead
of a 1581 emulation partition. It's all very intuitive and works the way I
expect it to. Before WHEELS 128, very little about Geos worked how I
expected it to.
I'm too unfamiliar with my new Geos setup to go into details about all
of its powers, but maybe if you saw the commands on the six pull-down menus
you would see how much of an improvement WHEELS 128 is over the stock Geos
128 system.
WHEELS Pull-Down Menu
Dashboard Info
select input
select printer
desk accessories
geoSHELL
FILE Pull-Down Menu
open
info
duplicate
copy
rename
delete
print
DISK Pull-Down Menu
open
close
info
copy
rename
format
erase
validate
swap
OPTIONS Pull-Down Menu
copy settings
function keys
save defaults
DA color
BASIC
VIEW Pull-Down Menu
display mode
single window
toggle files
reset Dashboard
DIRECTORY Pull-Down Menu
change dir
make subdir
open sysdir
open parent
open root
Now I can navigate my system as easily within Geos as I could outside
of Geos. Of course, if I didn't have JiffyDOS I probably wouldn't even have
partitions or subdirectories. To me, these only make sense if you can use
JiffyDOS commands. The standard BASIC 7.0 commands don't handle partitions
and directories very well, if at all.
Did I run into any snags at all? Well, yes. I found that geoPaint
wouldn't work right. I couldn't click on a document icon and have geoPaint
automatically booted. And I even had trouble booting geoPaint directly
until I had gotten a "disk full" error. Very strange. However, the next day
I got a "patch" from Maurice and a different version of geoPaint to try.
The patch installed very easily and quickly and when I replaced the
geoPaint file with the new one, geoPaint worked perfectly.
The patch was necessary for only those WHEELS 128 packages mailed out
in its first two days. All copies of WHEELS 128 now work fine and don't
require the patch.
Ideally, someone who is a knowledgeable Geos fan would write up an in-
depth review of WHEELS 128 for publication on LOADSTAR 128. Since no one
has sent me anything like that, I'm breaking the news that WHEELS 128 is
available in this little "thoughts" article. WHEELS 128 is the brainchild
of Maurice Randall who has spent over 250 hours on this project in the past
few months alone. The 70-page manual is very well done, probably the best
DT Publishing job done with geoPublish that I've ever seen. I don't think
it could look better even if it were done on a Mac or PC. WHEELS 128 sells
for $40 plus $4 shipping and handling for orders from North America. S&H is
$6 otherwise.
Maurice Randall
% Click Here Software Co.
P.O. Box 606
Charlotte MI 48813-0606
WHEELS 128 - $40.00 plus $4.00 S&H
LATE BREAKING NEWS: Maurice is sending me an assembler/linker program he
wrote called Concept that works under WHEELS 64 and 128. I plan to put it
on LS #177. It's a free program so you can probably find it online and
elsewhere. I'm hoping that because of this programmers' tool, Geos
programmers out there will write some interesting, useful Geos programs I
can publish this year. Any 80-column specific programs would be found on
LOADSTAR 128.
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