SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for May, 2006 President’s Corner by Michael Current May, 2006 Hi all, are you enjoying your spring? At this writing, the ornamental apple tree (at least that's what I call it) outside my window is in its usual spring blooming glory, a blazing deep pink color that's just stunning. The rest of the year it's a pretty boring little tree, but for a few days... Things seem to be relatively quiet on the Atari front, although I'm about to send a whole bunch of software to Glen for consideration for SPACE DOM's. If I can make sense of the Polish, it seems a Polish commercial software developer called ArSoft has just released their entire library of 8-bit Atari titles. So, hopefully some of them will make good DOM material, that will be up to our ever-dedicated volunteer DOM Librarian.

I had thought after missing the February meeting for our trip to Florida that it was going to be the only month I would ever have to miss, but know I will have to miss the June meeting also as my son, and new SPACE member, Tony, is getting married on Saturday and the Groom's dinner is Friday evening. It would be a lot easier on my pocketbook if I came to the meeting since I have to pay the bill for the dinner. Anyway, this is the last of my kids to tie the knot, and he found a great partner in Dara so Jackie and I are very happy for the both of them. Now for the treasury information for the month: Beginning balance for April 1, 2006:

845.73

Receipts for the April SPACE meeting: Doms 15.00 ST cd-roms 30.00

I think that's it for this month. Hopefully I'll see you all again soon!

Total receipts for April

SPACE home page counter update: as of 4/30/06, 9:30am: 5,287 page views since June 7, 2003.

Expenses for the April SPACE meeting: BBS for April 2006 10.00

Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday May 12, 2006.

Total expenses for April Ending balance for April 30, 2006:

Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For April, 2006

As happens every year our April SPACE meeting fell on Good Friday and that usually means we have a small turnout for the evening. We ended up with six members present and I thought that was pretty good. There hasn't been much going on lately so the meeting was rather short, but we still had a good discussion on various computer related topics. Allen brought in a couple of rare Atari items that he picked up, and he had copies of E-bay items that were for the 8-bit Atari computers. Some of these items sold for quite an unbelievably amount. It makes me think about possibly selling some of my more rare Atari items, but I just can't do it. I will probably hold onto my 8-bit stuff forever.

+45.00

-10.00 880.73

Our treasury keeps growing due to the fact that we still haven't received the rent bill since July 2005. We owe the City of Falcon Heights for ten months at $25.00 per month. I thought I better contact them before it gets any worse and maybe have them bill us through June 2006. That would reduce our Treasury by $300.00, but it would also leave us with over five hundred dollars and no rent bill until sometime in 2007. The only other big expense we would have is the Newsletter expense and we haven't been billed for that since February 2005. Since I will be gone in June we decided to discuss the July SPACE Birthday Party next month at the May meeting. I hope you can all make the May meeting so I have a good understanding of what everyone wants to do for the July party. See you all in May.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For April, 2006

No meeting minutes were Received.

******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For May, 2006

************************************************** 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 1991.7

Paul's Most Excellent Journey On a recent drive from the East Coast to the West Coast I did something different. I took a couple issues of AIM along with me. Sure I wanted to show Mom that I finally got my name in print, but that wasn't the only reason for taking them. By using the information from the User Group section of AIM, I was able to contact lots of other fellow Atarians on my trip across the States. Besides being able to share valuable information regarding user groups, software, hardware, etc., it was like having an old friend or two in every state. While spending some time with my Mom in Rochester, N.Y. I was fortunate enough to get to meet Bob Puff. Bob is probably best known as the author of BobTerm and the Arc/UnArc utility programs used on the AIM 8-bit disk of the month. Bob also, as of June 91, has taken over the reigns as president of Computer Software Systems. CSS has a full line of hardware/software enhancements for the 8-bit Atari computer and disk drives. I had seen CSS ads in magazines, but never any of their hardware out here on the West Coast. After Bob demonstrated a few of the companies products I was impressed. There really are companies still supporting the Classic 8-bit Atari. One of their products is "The Black Box". This little beauty not only gives you a parallel and serial port, a machine language monitor, and a whole lot more, but also allows connecting a hard drive to your 8-bit. After seeing the

Black Box in action I can only say that I was truly amazed. CSS has just printed up their new catalog that includes detailed descriptions of their entire product line. Give them a call at (716) 429-5639 and ask for it. Its FREE. Be sure to tell them you heard about it in AIM. On another stop, in Nevada this time, I hooked up with an old friend from my past. He confided to me that he had an Atari 800XL and 1050 disk drive. It was all in a box in the closet. He thought it was only good for games and his mentally/ physically handicapped son found the Nentendo much easier to use. "Did I hear someone groan?" Well, after telling them how the Atari could be used for education, productivity, music, art, and communications as well as entertainment I had their interest. As soon as I got home, I put together some P/D educational software I had and mailed it off to them. I am happy to report that their Atari is now back on the desk where it belongs and opening up a whole new world for their son Jeff. Jeff is 18 and just learning to read, so easy to use educational software and the Atari could make a real difference in his life. If you know of any appropriate software you think could be of assistance PLEASE let me know. I had hoped to drop in on a few user group meetings during my travels. The meeting dates never seemed to match up with my nightly stops however. To make my next trip an even MORE Excellent Journey I WILL consider meeting schedules BEFORE I plan my route. I'll also be sure to have the latest issue of AIM sitting on the seat beside me. If there is room I'll take my trusty Atari and modem along too. I guess a few blank disks wouldn't take up to much room. And a printer would be nice and......... Help Jeff Use your Atari to do a good deed today. Fire up that disk library program you have and see what good software you can find that may be of help to Jeff. If it is P/D or Shareware, put it on a disk and send it along to AIM for use on their 8-bit disk of the month. Any information or software donations can also be sent to me. I'll be happy to forward them to Jeff and his family. Thank you, Paul V. Alhart 524 North Zee St. Lompoc, ca. 93436 ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 8:46 PM Subject: EMU>atari++ 1.45 ready --From: Thomas Richter --Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:10:09 -0700 Hi folks, Please find a new release of the Atari++ emulator for Linux and win32 in its usual location, this time release 1.45: http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~thor/atari++/

This release is mainly a bug-fix release that addresses a couple of problems that have been pending for quite a while. Most notably, the release addresses incompatibilities to the latest GNU and Microsoft compilers, fixes a couple of bugs in the H: handler (append mode didn't work, binary load had problems) and in the Os++ emulator Os, namely in the FMS. Then again, I had one bug report concerning timing of the HSCROLL register (got fixed) and another one concerning P/M DMA that is likely to be fixed now. Thanks Sebastian for reporting these. I think it is also time for another new "stable" release. Thus, if you find any bugs in this one, I would be pleased to collect your reports. Similarly, new feature requests are also welcome, but probably won't make it until 1.50. So long, Thomas ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 8:48 PM Subject: ST>XaAES alpha update

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 8:47 PM Subject: ST>AtarICQ 0.168 is released --Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:10:54 -0700 Following the recent progress in XaAES, aICQ is now available in a new release where some things have been adjusted to work and look smoother together with XaAES. For example, aICQ is now rendered okay also when the AES draws textures as background on 3d-objects. In addition to this, the tabs has been equipped with a discrete 3d-look that should kick in if you run AtarICQ in >=256 colour mode. Users with scrollwheel mice might be interested in knowing that aICQ now responds to WM_ARROWED, and also supports XaAES WHL_AROWWHEEL mode causing in which the AES sends extended WM_ARROWED messages to further optimise the scrolling. In addition to the above, a couple of bugs has also been found and fixed. (For more details, see below) To skip the details, and go to download site: http://www.ataricq.org ----- New in AtarICQ 0.168 ---

--Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:11:32 -0700 Since a couple of somewhat serious issues in latest alpha release has been found, there is now an alpha update available for you to download. It also has a couple of new additions. These are the most important changes:

* Fixed bug causing COPS's CPX windows to disappear right after opening. * New AES keyboard combo, CTRL+ALT+P, will restore palette to system default in colour modes 256 or less. * New AES keyboard combo, CTRL+ALT+D, make a snapshot (needs external app, see readme.txt) * Fixed a glitch where using CLOSER widget to close Taskmanager window released all information it contained. * Taskmanager showed selected entries as black text on black background - fixed. +even more fixes. See docs for details. URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

* aICQ's message window is now tweaked to look at its best when the dialog background is using a bitmap texture. As a result of this, the feature to configure the background fill colour from within the preferences has been removed. If you wish to tweak the background colour to a solid fill colour, you should however be able to do so using your favourite RSCeditor. * Small adjustment made to popups, fixing appearance under latest XaAES. * Scrolling behaviour changed slightly: When the slider is not located at its bottom position, the text will not scroll to bottom when new messages are coming in. If located at bottom => follow bottom. * In addition to the above, aICQ will now need the slider to be located at its bottom position in order to consider messages to be read. * The TABs in the message window are now equipped with a discrete 3D-look when your setup can use >=256 colours. The active tab will also be enlarged slightly to further allow you to distinguish it from the unselected ones. * AtarICQ will now redirect WM_ARROWED messages to the vertical sliders in both contact list and message window. When a mouse scrollwheel is rotated XaAES sends WM_ARROWED messages even to windows that don't have a native slider. This means that at least under XaAES you can now use your scrollwheel to scroll inside aICQ windows. AtarICQ also supports XaAES extended scrollwheel messages, using the WHL_AROWWHEEL mode.

* A bug that would cause display problems in the text input field in the message window has been fixed. It would only hit if the user had installed a custom system font, which had different char width/height than the original Atari font. Should be fixed now.

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:36 PM Subject: ST>Studio Son 2.09 beta FR --Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 09:29:02 -0700

* Discovered a nasty bug that would cause very bad memory corruption upon certain incoming messages. The reason was that certain clients are using a single ascii-13 to indicate a rowbreak. Should be fixed now.

One year of very hard work to release a new version of the audio editor Studio Son. I have spent a big part of this year to improve the features of this program. Mainly the optimization of the filtering process and the addition of the resampling function.

Have fun! :) URL: http://www.ataricq.org/

Up to date, this version is only in French.

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

You can find 68030 and 68030+68882 versions in the archive:

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http://doyeuxyvan.free.fr/studioson/std209b/STD209B.ZIP

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:35 PM Subject: ST>Yet Another Eureka Release

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

--Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 09:31:34 -0700

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:37 PM Subject: ST>New XaAES development snapshot

The software "Eureka" is updated and released on its WEB page. It is a "2D Graph Describer and 3D Modeller". You will fetch it at :

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--Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 09:31:09 -0700

http://eureka.atari.org/eurka604.zip That is the Complete Common Edition

A new set of binaries are yet again available, and this time the appearance is in focus!

http://eureka.atari.org/eurka020.zip Is the Complete 68020 Edition

*The object renderer can now draw textured backgrounds in =>256 colour modes. Textures can be applied to window widgets, menus/popup menus and 3d-objects.

http://eureka.atari.org/eurkafpu.zip Is the Limited FPU Edition http://eureka.atari.org/eurklite.zip Is the Lite Edition, working on early ST with 720kb floppy http://eureka.atari.org/lib_dgem.zip Are Dynamic Libraries Extensions for Eureka

*XaAES can now also draw nice gradients to provide some eye-candy to eg. window title backgrounds and the likes. *The way XaAES handles/arranges iconified windows has been improved a lot and can also be configured in great detail

http://eureka.atari.org/tiny045.zip Is the OpenGL Extension (requires previous package)

*As usual, a lot of fixes and adjustments where you'll for example might notice that the taskmanager now can be accessed even when wind_update() has been locked

What you can do with this release is browsing through 2D and 3D objects, without any prior knowledge. That also makes 10 years that Eureka comes on internet.

+Loads or smaller fixes and adjustments. Have fun! URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net

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

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