January 2006
NEWSLETTER for January, 2006 President’s Corner
Treasurer's Report
by Michael Current January, 2006
by Greg Leitner For December, 2005
Happy Atari New Year! 2006, here we are! Last month's SPACE Christmas Party / Auction was a smashing success on all accounts. How great was it that we had such a strong turnout, including three membership renewals and 15 Dom’s sold!! The only hitch was no dessert (hence the "luck" in potluck!), but I predict that won't happen again! It was great to see everyone, and SPACE seems to be well on track for another strong year in 2006. The December Disk Of the Month included a number of new games that I found for Glen, who was able to make them all work from a single disk. No documentation for any of the programs was included with the DOM because Glen didn't receive docs from me. After looking for such docs now, I was only able to find short manuals for the two games from MatoSimi, Laser Blaster and Monex. These should appear in this issue of the Newsletter. It's too bad I can't find docs for Mental Age, I don't understand this game!
Oh! what a night. A great song and very appropriate for describing the SPACE Xmas party. We had a dozen people including guests partake in a wonderful feast. I always worry when we have a potluck with no set menu, but this one turned out great and everyone had plenty to eat. Thanks to all of you who brought a dish to share. Another surprise is that we signed up three members, one new and two returning. Along with the auction and increase in Dom sales we had our best revenue meeting since our Birthday bash in July 2004. Thanks to our President, Michael Current, who provided the excellent games for our Xmas Dom and Glen who got it all together to make it work, the Club had a record 15 Dom’s sold. Anyone who missed this Dom should try to pick one up at the next meeting. Here is the breakdown for our December 2005 Xmas meeting:
I also must say, Mahna-Malysz by Piotr Fusik is hilarious!
Beginning balance for December 1, 2005:
Digitizing of old SPACE Newsletters has taken a back seat lately. At this writing, the SPACE web site now includes online full-text SPACE Newsletters back to March of 1990. March 1990 was the first postSPACE/MAST split issue; Feb. 1990, which I started working on a while ago, was the final combined SPACE/MAST issue.
Receipts for the December meeting: Memberships Dom’s Auction
SPACE home page counter update: as of 12/30/05, 5:45pm: 4,743 page views since June 7, 2003.
Expense for the December meeting: BBS
Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday January 13, 2006.
Ending balance at December 31, 2005:
Total receipts
699.73
45.00 45.00 36.00 126.00
10.00 815.73
This was a very surprising month and not expected at all. If this is any indication on the direction SPACE is heading I am going to really look forward to 2006. Once again, thank you to all who attended the Xmas party and from Jackie and myself, a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. See you all in 2006. **********************************************
Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For December, 2005
No minutes for the December Meeting were submitted.
******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For January, 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.
******************************************** A-T-A-R-I Answers, Tips And Relevant Information by: Paul V. Alhart 1991.3 Another AtariWriter+ Mod The Atari XL/XE operating system has several changes from the original 400/800 operating system. One of these change allows the user to modify the KEY REPEAT RATE by changing the value stored in memory location 730 ($02DA). From BASIC, POKE 730 with different values to see the effect. The default value is 6 but I find 2 to be more to my liking. It causes key repeats to be much faster allowing you to move the cursor around the screen quicker while editing. The PROBLEM This would be a great asset when editing an AtariWriter+ file, but you can not POKE 730,2 from within AW+. Also the default value of 6 is restored to location 730 whenever your computer is turned on or RESET is pressed.
The ATRACT mode is canceled by the operating system whenever any key is pressed. For aesthetic reasons the programmers of AW+ added a routine that holds the background color to dark blue while still allowing the other colors to rotate during the ATRACT mode. By placing our new code in place of this routine the background color will be allowed to rotate during ATRACT mode (so what?) and our XL/XE machines will have a much faster KEY REPEAT RATE. This AW+ mod will only be effective on an XL or XE Atari. The modified program will still function normally on the 400/800, affecting only the background color during the ATRACT mode, but not the KEY REPEAT RATE. HOW TO DO IT With a sector editor, find the following byte string in the file AP.OBJ (either (48K or 130XE version), A5 4D 10 02 A2 94 and replace it with. A9 02 8D DA 02 EA If enough interest is shown, I will write DefaultWriter+ Companion #4 to make this change to AW+, and put it in a future issue of AIM as a BASIC type-in program. There was some good feedback regarding my RANA article that appeared in the December 1990 issue of AIM. An AIM reader in Pa. is sending me some new information that I will pass on to you in a future article. Remember A-T-A-R-I is written for you. Any comments, questions, or input is appreciated. Contact me at: Paul V. Alhart 524 North Zee St. Lompoc, Ca. 93436 ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 4:35 PM Subject: 8BIT>TURGEN SYSTEM 2 (beta) Released --Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 11:12:41 -0800 Accessor of older transfer utility TURGEN released. New features: * Rewritten to Java
The SOLUTION
* Direct output to sound card
We can change the code of the AW+ program to put our value of 2 in location 730 for us. We don't want to disturb any vital existing code and we want to make the change RESET proof. My answer is to replace the AW+ ATRACT routine with my code. Normally when no keys are pressed for 7 to 9 minutes the operating system enables the ATRACT mode. This causes all the screen colors to rotate at reduced luminance levels to keep images from being "burned" into your screen.
* Better user interface Data transfer from PC to 8-bit ATARI. It creates a Turbo 2000 sound record from file located on PC and sends it to WAVE audio file or directly to the sound card.
This utility can also convert some multi-section executable files to single-section ones. http://www.baktra.wz.cz/software/turgen2.html [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 4:57 PM Subject: LASER BLASTER (manual)
create new tile with higher number. You have to collect at least five tiles with number 1 to create tile with number 5, then at least two tiles with number 5 to create tile with number 10 and so on... There are six tiles with numbers 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500. When you collect at least two tiles with number 500, they just disappear without creating new tile. There is also one special tile called "sh*t tile" which comes after several minutes of play. You have to collect them at least five to make them vanish. These tiles come quite rarely, so they will just stay in the way to score. New tiles come from the bottom of playfield and push old tiles up. The game ends when there is no place for new tiles. Game speed is increased after couple of new tiles will come.
LASER BLASTER (manual) Scoring: Your task is to place and eliminate laser bricks which fall from the top of screen. Game style is similar to Tetris, but rules are different. Every brick can contain 4 types of laser (2 horizontal and 2 vertical), so there are 15 possible combinations of lasers. You have to create continuous laser of minimum 3 bricks which respond by disappearing of that laser. If remains brick without any laser it will disappear too. There are also 2 special bricks. Brick with arrow will eliminate all bricks in column where is placed. Brick with square eliminates one brick under position where is placed. If you eliminate 25 lasers, you'll gain next level which reflects in increasing of game speed. Your score can be extremely increased by combos which doubles score of previous move.
Numbers on tiles represent how much score you can get after make them disappear, so when you collect three tiles with number 500, you will get 1500 points. When you make combo (make some tiles disappear and newly created tile also disappear with other tiles), points of this move will be tripled. Menu controls: START SELECT
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begin new game enable/disable tile interlace
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control mover pick/drop tiles leave game
Game controls: Menu controls: START/FIRE SELECT
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new game info screen
Game controls: JOY Left/Right
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JOY Down FIRE+JOY Left/Right
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move falling brick in given direction brick will fall faster faster movement of falling brick
JOY Left/Right FIRE ESC
Version 1.1 changes: - game now works on NTSC systems too - screen was bouncing (thanks to Randy Pearson for bugreport) - fixed in-game-bug (thanks to Fandal for bugreport) which causes this: when you destroy tiles which are all in first (the most top) line, non valid tile is created (this tile will be corrected in next move). - press SHIFT in title screen to see version info
Have FUN :-) Enjoy this game! MatoSimi MatoSimi http://matosimi.atari.org http://matosimi.atari.org ********************************************** ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 5:02 PM Subject: MONEX (manual)
From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 4:01 PM Subject: ST>TeraDesk 3.70 released
MONEX (manual) Your task is eliminate colored tiles by collecting them using mover. Every tile has own value (number). Mover can hold as many tiles as you want, but they have to be same value/color. When you collect given amount of same tiles, they disappear and
--From: Djordje Vukovic --Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:24:02 -0800 Version 3.70 of Tera Desktop (TeraDesk) open-source desktop is available at:
http://solair.eunet.yu/~vdjole/teradesk.htm TeraDesk is currently the only open-source desktop available for 16-bit and 32-bit Atari computers. Developer's goal is to maintain TeraDesk as a small, simple, fast and reliable desktop, which can run on any TOScompatible Atari computer, clone or emulator and which can be functional and competitive in the modern multitasking environments and all flavors and versions of TOS-compatible operating system(s), while keeping, as much as reasonable, familiarity with the original TOS desktop. Several new features have been added since the last published version, some of which have often been asked for by the users (e.g. the 'auto selector'). Also, a number of bugs have been fixed. Users are advised to read the documentation before running the program ;) Some features of TeraDesk may not be immediately obvious. Have fun. ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 4:40 PM Subject: USBTEST Version 0.6
4) if you can access the device in the SCSI menu. For this you might need to adjust the endpoint numbers for the in/out endpoints. You can get this information on Linux using the "lsusb -v" (from usbtools) command to display the descriptors of all attached USB devices (on windows you can use USBCheck.exe). In the next version of the tool I will implement reading the configuration descriptors and setting the correct endpoints. I will collect all this information and will post the result on the Atari USB Device Driver Matrix Page: http://www.strotmann.de/twiki/bin/view/Microusb/ProjUSBC artAtariDevMatrix Best regards Carsten -------------------Carsten Strotmann ABBUC Programmers Group Wiki http://www.strotmann.de/twiki/bin/view/APG/WebHome Atari USB Project http://www.microusb.org/
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--From: Carsten Strotmann --Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:04:35 +0100 Hello,
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the new USBTEST Version 0.6 disk is online at SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=111428
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New features: * Get Descriptor Routines and Display are now working with more USB 2.0 devices
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* faster Routines to move data in/out of the USB Controller buffer, using Cypres SL811 auto increment
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* USB Storage Sub-Menu
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* Function to send SCSI Device Inquiry
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* Function to read SCSI Device Capacity * Function to read SCSI LBA (Sector) We would like all owners of an Atari USB Cartridge to test USB Sticks and Hard drives with this new release, so that we get an Idea how good the current code is.
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Please test and send us information: 1) if the device can be attached 2) if the device descriptor page can be retrieved
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3) if the Device Strings are printed