SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for June, 2005 President’s Corner by Michael Current June, 2005

Come to the meeting this month to help plan next month's birthday celebration! Digitizing of old SPACE Newsletters continues at the pace of about one issue a week. The SPACE web site now includes SPACE Newsletters online complete back to June of 1992. SPACE home page counter update: as of 5/27/05, 4:30pm: 3,779 page views since June 7, 2003. Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE Meeting, Friday June 10, 2005.

Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For May, 2005

The kind of weather we have had for the past few days gives one a kind of blah feeling. On the Friday night for our SPACE meeting it was exactly that. A heavy mist is the best way to describe it and that was quite an improvement over the soaking we got on Thursday. Anyway, five members joined in for the May 2005 SPACE meeting, and the topic of our July birthday party took the spotlight. I feel as Treasurer that I must give my honest opinion as to how I see the future of SPACE going forward. With only nine paid up members that is not enough funds to even pay for six months of room rental. So I feel strongly that the Club should not contribute to the Birthday party this year. Instead we should consider either going back to a pot-luck party or maybe just bring in snacks for all to share. Come to the June meeting to help us decide and please if you have a better idea we would love to hear from you.

Now for the SPACE treasury report for the month ended May 31, 2005: Beginning balance for May 1, 2005

600.73

Receipts for the month: Doms

+9.00

Expenses for the month: BBS

-10.00

Ending balance for May 31, 2005

599.73

As you can see the month of May was a wash and we hanging in there at about $600.00. The first half room rental will be coming in a month or two and that will be $150.00. If everything keeps on like it has we will only have enough funds to continue until the end of next year 2006. I can't see an auction anytime soon and with our membership dwindling we really need to count on our sale of the Dom each month. Glen puts so much of his time in the Dom each month it pains me to see only a few sold each month. Come on, it's only $3.00 a month and if we sold one to each member per month we would have enough to funds to survive for as long as we want it to. So what do you say? Let's all make this Club work. All it takes is your presence, a paid up membership annually and one Dom each month. That's our ticket for survival. See you in June.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For May, 2005

The May 2005 SPACE meeting began at 7:35 p.m. Greg welcomed everyone to the meeting then I read the Secretary's Report for last month. For the Treasury last month we sold 10 DOM's for a total of $30 and one ST CD-ROM sale for $10. The only item paid was $10 for the BBS. As of the start of last month's meeting

our bank balance stood at $570.73. After the income and expenses for last month we ended up at $600.73 - A gain of $30. There hasn't been a bill for the room rental received as of yet for the first half of the year, but one is expected around June or July. SPACE has another excellent DOM this month. Side A is full of pictures - a total of 36 - with not even one free sector left on that side. Side B contains a number of German games and programs, including a program titled "Gebruiksaanwijzing" and an interesting renumbering utility.

Meeting started at 7:40 p.m. Greg and Michael welcomed everyone to the meeting and then I read the Secretary's Report for last month. For the Treasury there were 4 DOM's sold for $12 and $10 paid out for BBS. We went from a balance of $568.73 up to $570.73 - A gain of $2. We haven't received a bill for the room rental as of yet, but when we do it will probably be for first half of the year.

The current membership count is now 9 paid up members. In BBS News this month. Website counters as of the start of this month's meeting are as follows: BBS website - 2,436; Telnet BBS Listing - 2,177; Dialup BBS Listing - 1,092. As was voted on last month the backup BBS is in use and functioning normally. Not much activity to speak of on the BBS this month. The BBS website, however, is seeing an increase in usage. There are now 17 users registered on the SPACE Forum - 2 of them are new. The website has been updated in several areas, including a SPACE Members Only section where members may download and listen to the meetings. The SPACE Mobile and PDA websites have also been updated. The first broadcast of SPACE Radio has not yet been determined however it will be soon. More details on SPACE Radio next month. An email was received from Ron of Prestonsburg, KY with an addition to the Telnet BBS Listing. Ron's BBS is run on real Atari equipment - an Atari Mega ST2 using BBS Express! ST software. Permission was given to Ron to use our Telnet and Dialup BBS listings as references to his users. The reactivation of the spacebbs.noip.com BBS address proved unsuccessful. Within a short amount of time a lot of unsolicited Internet traffic was being received. Shortly after disabling it Internet traffic returned to normal. Nolan, our BBS Operator, will look into getting another domain to use for this purpose. For right now the BBS may be logged on to by going to the BBS website. Users may log in to the BBS, create a new account, read email, etc all from the website.

In BBS news, the website counters are as follows: Main Website Counter - 2,022; Telnet BBS List - 2,005; Dialup BBS List - 982. There is still quite a bit of activity on the Forum with 1 new user. With the up-and-down status of the BBS and hard drive failure, the backup BBS will be used until further notice. The two additional SPACE sites - one for a PDA device and a mobile phone are now working in full. More content has been added to the BBS website and a SPACE Radio section. Also, the SPACE Forum was defaced mid-March. Updated forum software was downloaded and immediately installed. Michael also made the "Test" SPACE Forum area registered only as well due to him finding some posts that shouldn't have been there. The SPACE meeting was successfully recorded live last month. This made it possible for Michael to listen to the entire SPACE meeting. It was voted on to allow SPACE members access to the recorded monthly meetings. SPACE Radio is in the works - more details next month. There are 12(?) paid up members with quite a few that could renew tonight. New and Old Business - (?) There was another another fantastic DOM yet again this month. (?) Meeting adjourned at 7:50 p.m.

There was no Old Business this month. In New Business, we briefly discussed what we might want to do for the SPACE Birthday Party which is coming up in July. SPACE may decide to hold a potluck instead of buying the food this year, but as of this meeting it is not currently known. The meeting adjourned at 8:20 p.m.

The following are the Minutes submitted for April: Secretary's Note: These minutes are from the April 2005 SPACE meeting and are not complete. Technical difficulties and the absence of a pen contributed to this. A question mark next to the item means information is not complete or known.

BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For May, 2005

************************************************** If anyone has any comments, suggestions, ideas, or submissions for the BBS Corner column or the SPACE BBS web site, you may email them to me, Nolan Friedland, at the address shown on the back of this newsletter under the "CLUB OFFICIALS" section.

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A-T-A-R-I Answers-Tips-and-Relevant Information by Paul Alhart May 1990 This being my first "serious" column since The Atari Federation teamed up with AIM, here is a little background for all my new AIM readers. A-T-A-R-I is almost three years old now. It pretty much covers whatever I want to talk about with a heavy slant toward the 8-bit folk. Your questions and comments, however, are always welcome.

Back about 1984 I bought an Atari 1200XL for my daughter. Having worked several years as an Electronics Technician in the Aerospace industry I was already well aquinted with the hardware aspects of computers. I was also aquinted with that group down the hall that were known as PROGRAMMERS. In my book, programmers were a strange sort. Sure they talked funny and their hair was always a mess, but coming to work in T-shirts, faded jeans, and shower clogs was too much for me to handle. I made up my mind to NEVER become a programmer. Needless to say, that lasted about a week. After typing in a couple short programs I was hooked. I wanted to do more. Much more. But working with main frames all day didn't give me much insight into my Atari. The IBM didn't have Player Missile Graphics. The DEC didn't use Display List Interrupts. What to do? I decided to hit the books.

September 1981 Part 1: The Display List October 1981 Part 2: Graphics Indirection November 1981 Part 3: Player-Missile Graphics December 1981 Part 4: Display-List Interrupts January 1982 Part 5: Scrolling February 1892 Part 6: Atari BASIC March 1982 Part 7: Sound April 1982 Part 8: Generating Sound with Software May 1982 Part 9: Even More Color June 1982 Part 10 Ergonomics Also check out: January 1980 Indirect Addressing for the 6502 January 1981 An Introduction to Atari Graphics November 1982 Computer Animation with Color Registers If you know of any other obscure writings that you feel the rest of us Atarians should know about, let me know and I will pass the word in a future column of A-T-A-R-I. Write me at: A-T-A-R-I Paul Alhart 524 North Zee St. Lompoc, Ca. 93436 ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 9:16 AM Subject: 8BIT>Atari SAP Music Archive 2.9 --Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 14:50:02 -0700

There has been a lot written for and about the Atari computer, and I have a good percentage of it in my personal library. The writings that helped me the most with getting to know my Atari in those early days were gleaned from Byte magazine. Byte magazine? Today Byte treats Atari as if it were a four letter word. Not so back in 1981. Starting in September 1981 Byte ran a 10 part series called "The Atari Tutorial." Many of the tutorials were written by Chris Crawford while he was working at Atari and were based on the now famous Atari book "De Re Atari." The tutorials go much further than De Re Atari did. Besides being much easier to understand by the novice, each tutorial gives practical examples laced with simple type in programing examples in both Basic and Assembly. For anyone new to Atari, or you seasoned Hacks that want to know even more about what makes you Atari tick, these writings are a MUST HAVE. Check out your local library to see if they have back issues of Byte. It will be worth the effort.

Zdenek Eisenhammer has announced: A new version of the popular Atari XL/XE music collection has just been released. It brings 69 new songs (so the total is 1900 POKEY tunes now!), many credits fixes, bugfixed songs and removed duplicates. URL: http://asma.atari.org/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:06 AM Subject: 8BIT>Flop 48 disc magazine --Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 09:16:18 -0700

NOTE: For all my local readers. The Air Force run Tech Library in building 7015 here on Vandenberg AFB has all these issues and more on microfilm. You can get a hard copy of these articles just for the asking.

New issue of Czech 8bit Atari disc magazine FLOP has been published.

Following is a list of the tutorials and other articles of interest that were published in Byte magazine in the early 80s.

[This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org]

http://flop.atari.org

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From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 4:19 PM Subject: 8BIT>TURGEN, Turbo 2000 generator 1.0 released --Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 08:57:31 -0700 Michael Kalous has announced: PC-->ATARI data transfer utility. From atari file located on PC creates a WAVE sound file which conatins Turbo 2000 record. The wave file can be recorded to a cassete or CD-AUDIO. Click at the following link and scroll to TURGEN 1.0 My web pages are in Czech but the program is in english.

In addition to the pre-made boot roms, advanced users can use the powerful open source Maxflash multicart firmware development scripts to create and share their own highly customized boot roms, containing a mix of officially supported software and their own hard disk utilities, games or other software. Pre-ordering begins now, with shipments starting 05/19/2005. Pre-order pricing is $49.99 per cartridge for the first 100 cartridges. (about 39 Euro currently) For complete product information and the order form go to: http://www.atarimax.com/myide/documentation/

URL: http://www.baktra.wz.cz/Software.html Highlights: [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:06 AM Subject: Atarimax MyIDE+Flash Cartridge Now Available

Complete MyIDE interface with gold plated IDE connector and disk activity LED. Built in user reprogrammable flash boot rom. Complete ready to run, pre-approved Mr. Atari boot roms available. Open source rom development kit, roll your own boot roms including any programs you like! Hobbyist oriented design, no surface mounted parts. Highest quality color labels. Full MyIDE technical support from Mr. Atari!

--From: Steven Tucker --Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 09:37:14 GMT

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I happy to announce that in co-operation with Mr. Atari, the "MyIDE+Flash" IDE Interface Cartridge is now available.

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 9:17 AM Subject: New XaAES development snapshot

The "MyIDE+Flash" Cartridge is a professionally produced IDE interface cartridge for all 64k Atari 8-bit computers.

--Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 14:50:54 -0700

The new MyIDE+Flash interface combines Sijmen "Mr. Atari" Schouten's popular "MyIDE" interface with an Atarimax 1Mbit reprogrammable flash cartridge.

A new development snapshot of XaAES has been made available on the un-official XaAES page. More than anything, this update offers really good stability. In addition to that, you could also expect:

GokMasE has announced:

The cartridges built in 1Mbit flash system allows you to utilize the interface and your hard disk setup in any 64k XL/XE computer, using the built-in boot OS, without modifications to the existing hardware or operating system.

* Scroll lists has been inplemented, used internally for eg. the XaAES "about.." window as well as the file selector.

Official technical support and boot rom development is provided by Mr. Atari, the creator of the MyIDE interface.

* File selector can now have "tree view" style. The contents of the current dir can also be presented in realtime, as loaded.

* Menu bar handling has been bugfixed. Both a problem with a visual glitch as well as a stability issue has been cured.

# ARROW-up when at first entry will wrap to last entry, and ARROW-down when at last entry will wrap to first entry in the fileselector.

* Code to handle window widgets has been reworked, as has the window manager. The latter has been prepared for possible future extensions regarding appearance settings.

# When typing in the inputfield and a partial/full match of a directory is indicated, entering this directory by pressing enter will now clear input filed. Allows for easier keyboard navigation. Need feedback on this issue!

* Setting AES window borders to a value of >=4 will result in a 3d-style border being drawn. Expect better configurability regarding these things further down the road.

# Aniplayer 2.22 didn't respond to keypresses, should be okay now

* Keyboard combos should work much more reliably now. Changes has been made to both kernel and XaAES.

# Much better/stable swapping of desktops

URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org]

# Much better/stable menubar swapping

# Check for, and attempt to remap, conflicting shortcuts in AES objects loaded via rsrc_load() # Bugfixed shel_write(), so that correct defaultpath is set for starting programs. (Fixes "TOS selfextracting archive extracted to wrong place" bugs)

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From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 3:57 PM Subject: ST>New XaAES development snapshot --Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 09:48:02 -0700

# Keep button-waiter until all mouse-buttons are released. This fixes problems with SoundBlaster Milan. URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org]

GokMasE has announced: **********************************************

Following the alpha release of May 4th, we have now uploaded a new development snapshot that cures some of the problems that were present there. In addition to that, some other things were taken care of as well. This should be the most stable XaAES build this far!

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Most significant changes:

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# Support for resource files that does not follow documentation, previously causing XaAES to not detect all CICONs at times. (zBench & rscview are two of them)

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# Update lock (aka screen lock) should not stop mouseevents (move/button) from being delivered. As a result of this XaAES is now a lot more responsive under such circumstances (most noticeably with AES-lupe)

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# Fixed a problem where wind_get(WF_TOP) would return the handle of the popup window during menu/popup navigation. This cures problems with Everest and ResourceMaster.

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