SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for June, 2006 President’s Corner by Michael Current June, 2006 The other day I was contacted by Mr. Jon Snyder, who was looking for copies of some of the software programs he wrote for the 8-bit Atari long ago. Namely, AROP and Syntron2. Why ask me? Because these are mentioned in our SPACE Newsletter from Feb. 1992, in the DOM article by Joe Danko where Joe described the contents of the SPACE DOM from Oct. 1991. Would we be able to help reconnect these programs with their programmer? I emailed Glen, and within a couple days Glen came up with the files from the DOM, and emailed them as attachments to me, as well as to their original author, Jon Synder. How happy he was! And how great to be able to help out an old Atari programmer, thanks to our active club, our living DOM Library, and our active and capable DOM Librarian. Plus, how great to have payoffs like this for having digitized so many of our older Newsletters, so that information like this is out there where people can find it. You never know what treasures might be buried in our Newsletters! Makes me feel like I need to create the time to get going with that digitizing project again! Going back in time, I'm still stuck at Feb. 1990. I do hope to get back to it eventually, though perhaps not until I get this masters degree finished up. SPACE home page counter update: as of 5/26/06, 10:30pm: 5,433 page views since June 7, 2003. Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday June 9, 2006.

Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For May, 2006

What a lousy day of weather we had on Friday for our May SPACE meeting, and as I am writing this on the Sunday after I can say that Saturday was even worse. I guess the lawn will have to wait to be cut later in the week. Thanks to the seven members who were in attendance in May. Maybe the weather turned out to be a good thing for us as there wasn't much else you could

do even thought it was fishing opener and Mother's Day weekend. Not much going on again in the Atari world, but with Lance there you know some things will come up, and it seems that Lance has either heard of, talked to or met just about anyone related to the subject of Atari computers. It makes a big difference at the meetings when members like Lance, Glen, Michael and Rich are there to share their Atari knowledge with the rest of us. Sorry I won't be able to attend the June SPACE meeting as most of you already know that my son, Tony, is getting married that weekend and we have rehearsal dinner that Friday night. Because the SPACE birthday party would normally be discussed at that meeting we decided to talk about it at the May meeting. It was once again approved by the members present that we would have another pot-luck with me bringing the pop, plates, napkins, silverware and another main dish. Anyone else can bring something for all to share, and I will talk about the party more in next month's newsletter. Here is the breakdown for our Treasury for the month ended May 31, 2006: Beginning balance for May 1, 2006:

880.73

Receipts for the May meeting: Memberships Doms

15.00 21.00

Total receipts for May 2006:

36.00

Expenses for the May meeting: Newsletter for 14 months Room rental for last half of 2005 Room rental for first half of 2006 BBS for May 2006

82.64 150.00 150.00 10.00

Total expenses for May 2006:

392.64

Ending balance for May 31, 2006:

524.09

As you can see we really did some serious damage to our treasury in May, but at least we are caught up on all our major expenses. Except for the monthly BBS bill we shouldn't have any other expenses for the rest of 2006. This really gives us a good chance to build our

bank balance right back up. I don't know if we can reach the $800.00 level again but if all our members continue to renew their memberships in a timely manner and you keep supporting the doms like you have been doing lately then we will be fine for this year and well into the next. I will miss you all next month but I will be there for the July Birthday meeting. See you then.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For May, 2006

No meeting minutes were Received.

******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For June, 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 1992.2

Hardware Hacking When I was young I loved to take things apart. I wanted to see how things worked or in some cases see why they didn't work. My Grandfather kept me well supplied with old machines and gadgets to tinker with. I always assumed he did this because he shared my "What makes it work?" interest. Most likely he was really trying to keep me too busy to think about dissecting Grandma's new TV. In any case, I eventually learned to put most of the things back together and even get some of them to work again. I also learned that with a little modifying or "hacking", some things could actually be coaxed into working better or more to my liking, than before. At last, true justification for taking good new functional things apart. Like Peter Pan I would never have to grow up.

I never did out grow my hacking urges. My brand new Atari 1200XL wasn't in the house more that 15 minutes before I had it apart and spread all over the living room floor. I wasn't yet sure how it worked, but I was sure I could make it work better. Over the years since then my entire system has been apart and modified many times. Nothing has been spared from the printer to the drives, and yes it does work better now, or at least more to my liking, than ever before. My latest hack I call an Atari 2000XL+. An 800XL inside a 1200XL. "Why?" I have always liked the 1200XL keyboard the best. No other model, or other brand for that matter, has a keyboard I like better. I had also been using an 256K 800XL to test out the Ultra Speed Plus O/S from Computer Software Systems. When it finally dawned on me that I could not part with Ultra Speed or my 1200XL keyboard it was the only thing I could do. A little investigation showed that this would not be just a simple plug in mod. The 1200XL keyboard has built in decoder chips while the 800XL has its keyboard decoder chips on the mother board. Room was another consideration as the 1200XL & 800XL mother board layouts are completely different. Besides hacking, a lot of hack sawing on the case and RF shield was required to get everything to fit. The end result however is a computer that looks like a stock 1200XL except for a cartridge slot added to its top face. I was surprised to find that the 1200XL function keys are supported by the 800XL O/S and still work as before. I am using the 2000XL+ to write this article and it sure feels good to have my favorite old keyboard to type on again. What's next? How about warp-speed for my Rana disk drives? or expanding the RAM in my printer buffer? Whatever it is I'll let you know but first I need to take time and tell you what the Ultra Speed Plus O/S is and why I couldn't live without it. Look for a review of US+ in A-T-A-R-I in the near future. Till then, enjoy, and keep those cards and letters coming my way to let me know what you want to hear about. Thank you, Paul V. Alhart 524 North Zee St. Lompoc, ca. 93436 ********************************************** rom: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 9:03 PM Subject: ST>Editor for .st and .msa diskimages --Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 09:50:25 -0700 Michael Bernstein has announced: I have a small and simple editor for diskmages in the download section of my homepage to allow editing of diskimages on Atari computers. http://www.mbernstein.de [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org]

********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 9:29 PM Subject: ST>Lua for TOS --Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 09:25:13 -0700 kRadD has announced: At the ATARIADA last week I released Lua 5.0.2. I\'s a port of the famous scripting language including interpreter and compiler binary. The source is also available. The port was done using Pure C. Lua will be the basis for my NonConForm Rapid Game Development library for the Falcon. It worth to goole around to see what other projects did using lua, to get a feeling what the language is good for. URL: http://twh.homelinux.org/zope/kradd/releases/lua/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 9:43 PM Subject: Memo Pad --From: "eric" --Date: 21 May 2006 19:11:17 -0700 Hello, I had started an ATASCII editor for Windows a few years ago and then got occupied with other things. After seeing Lee's ATASCII viewer I was inspired to go back to mine. Mine still does not have editing ability but it is able to view and convert end-of-line characters. I call it Memo Pad and you can download the first release here: http://joyfulcoder.com/software/memopad/ Thanks, Eric **********************************************

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