SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for August, 2006 President’s Corner by Michael Current August, 2006 I think last month's July SPACE party was a smashing success once again. It was great to see everyone, as always. Here's hoping for many more! I've caught up with checking out our DOMs from the last few months. Last month's was definitely my favorite. The three new games from Europe were awesome, Scorpions, Flowers Mania, and Cubico. Scorpions is diabolical as European puzzle games often are, and I played both Flowers Mania and Cubico quite a while. So is there a strategy to Cubico, or is it more a matter of luck? I can't figure that out! It's still a lot of fun all the same. Speaking of DOMs. This month, if all goes well, which remains to be seen, hopefully our DOM will feature TAFHC, The Atari Federation Hackers Challenge. This disk is by Paul Alhart, author of the A-T-A-R-I column currently being republished in the SPACE Newsletter. This issue of the Newsletter features a description of TAFHC. Are you up to the challenge?

Who among us do you think can solve The Atari Federation Hackers Challenge? Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday August 11, 2006.

Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For July, 2006

What a great turnout for our 24th birthday party. Nine members and four guests made for another successful pot luck. The food was excellent and everyone had their fill. Thanks to all who brought a dish to share. I was glad to be back after missing the June SPACE meeting. I was really glad to get the Doms for June and July. If you haven't gotten them yet I would strongly suggest that you do. Glen with the help of Michael is putting together some of the best Doms to date. You will definitely find something new and help the Club at the same time. Here is the bank info for the month ended July 31, 2006; Beginning balance at July 1, 2006:

Just trying to get the software onto one of our DOM has been a challenge! I was not able to locate it on the Web. It was on an Atari Interface Magazine disk, but my AIM disk collection starts with the next issue. So, I emailed Paul Alhart. Turned out he has no Atari computers set up currently, so no way to email the disk image to me. He decided to mail me the original disk! Today I made several copies of the disk, and I tried making a DCM image, to transfer to the PC with Ataridsk to email to Glen. That all seemed to go okay, but given the nature of this particular image, I wanted to test to make sure it was a good copy. So I used Ataridsk to transfer it back to the Atari, to Un-diskcomm it. Bad image! Hmm, what went wrong? Rather that try again, I decided to just make another duplicate copy of the disk, to send to Glen in the mail. So at this writing, I don't know whether TAFHC will actually appear on this month's DOM, it will depend what happens at Glen's end. Such excitement!

524.09

Receipts for the July SPACE meeting: Memberships Donation Doms Total Receipts for July 2006

60.00 15.00 51.00 +126.00

Expenses for the July SPACE meeting: BBS Ending balance at July 31, 2006:

-20.00 630.09

I guess we need more parties. This is the exact amount we deposited after the December SPACE Xmas party. Go figure!! As you can see we are on the way up again with our treasury, and with no major expenses due until after the end of the year we should be in very good shape going into 2007. I was going to announce an auction for the August meeting but I decided to hold off until the September SPACE meeting so that I can go through the material we

have collected. Thanks to Al, we have an Atari St 1224 color monitor to add to the list. Anyone else who has some things to donate it would be good to get them next month so that I can add them on to my list. Thanks again to all who made the Birthday party a real success, and I hope to see you all at the August meeting next month.SPACE members. Hope to see you all there.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For July, 2006

No meeting minutes were Received.

******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For August, 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 1992.1 Software Hacking It all began when I got my first 1200XL back in 1983 and started typing in all the magazine programs I could find. There was a little voice in my head that constantly said things like "What does that CHR$(125) in line 100 do? Change it to CHR$(124) and see what happens." Latter on, as my knowledge of programming progressed the voice got me to start tampering with commercial programs by asking "Why should you have to load a TRANSLATOR program just to get this program to run?" or "Why not make this program's default settings fit your system?" It wasn't long before I was a hard-core software hacker, modifying software for other members of our computer club as well as my own software.

Like most computer clubs, ours has the usual problem of low meeting attendance during the summer months. Also, I noticed other members of our club were interested in software hacking too, even if they didn't all have the knowledge or nerve to tamper with their own favorite programs. Putting these two facts together inspired me to write The Atari Federation Hackers Challenge. "The Challenge" is a disk full of tricks and traps and a multi-part secret message. The idea was simple. The club sold the disk as a DOM at a regular meeting and offered fame, fortune, and assorted prizes to the first person that was able to call me and quote the entire secret message correctly. What wasn't so simple was hacking through "The Challenge." It was almost four months till we had a winner. Members that came to the regular meetings received a HINT of the Month. Meeting attendance set all time record highs that summer and everyone learned a little bit more about their Ataris and what makes them tick. The Atari Federation Hackers Challenge is included on this months AIM 8-bit DOM as TAFHC.DCM. Use Bob Puff's DISKCOM3.UTL program from the March/April 1991 AIM-DOM to decompress this file to a freshly formatted AtariDOS 2.0 compatible single density disk. Hack away for your own enjoyment (No prizes are offered this time). I will print the solution to the Challenge here in my monthly A-T-A-R-I column in a few months. Your club may make a contest out of "The Challenge" or get ideas from it for their own Challenge. You'll be surprised how many members will show up at club meetings when they are challenged. NOTE: Cash awards help too. RULES: There are NONE. You may use any hardware, software, or books you have to help try and solve "The Challenge." REQUIREMENTS: The only things you NEED to solve "The Challenge" are: (1) 8-bit Atari Computer. (2) Disk drive (3) Atari BASIC. (4) Knowledge of your Atari and its O/S. TIPS: "The Challenge" does not write to disk and you should not either. Use a write-protect tab to be safe. GETTING STARTED: "The Challenge is auto-booting. Boot the disk with BASIC installed. You will see a short animated title screen after which DOS is loaded. From the Atari DOS 2.0 menu you will get your first hint that something is wrong. A directory listing will indicate that

the only thing on the disk is DUP.SYS and there is only 001 free sector. HAPPY HACKING

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From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 10:18 AM Subject: EMU>mmSAP 1.0sl1.54 fixed version released

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--Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:41:51 -0700 From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 10:53 AM Subject: 19 issues of ST-Log Magazine at AtariMagazines.com --From: Kevin Savetz <kevin@savetz.com> --Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:46:31 -0700 July 27 will be the 10th anniversary of the Classic Computer Magazine Archive (www.atarimagazines.com). In celebration, today we're announcing that the site now offers the full text of 19 issues of ST-Log Magazine. This includes more than 600 articles and a gallery of the magazine's covers. http://www.atarimagazines.com/st-log/ ST-Log was devoted to Atari's 16-bit ST line of computers. It began as an insert in ANALOG Computing magazine in 1986. It spun off as a separate magazine for about three years, before being folded back into ANALOG again in 1989. ANALOG and ST-Log were sold to Larry Flynt Publishing in 1988. The Classic Computer Magazine Archive has permission to share the 19 issues published by L.F.P., from April 1988 until STLog ceased publication in 1989. In addition, AtariMagazines.com recently added a cover image gallery for Compute! magazine, with a nearly complete collection of covers from 1980 through 1988. (The site offers the full text of nearly 100 issues of Compute!.) http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/ The site launched July 27, 1996 as "The Digital Antic Project" with the full text of two issues of Antic magazine. The site was later renamed to The Classic Computer Magazine Archive and added articles from STart, Creative Computing, Compute II, Hi-Res, Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games Magazine, and Tandy Whiz Kids comic books. -Kevin Savetz - comp.sys.atari.announce moderator Classic Computer Magazine Archive http://www.atarimagazines.com & AtariArchives.org http://www.atariarchives.org & FlightSimBooks.com http://www.FlightSimBooks.com

New and final version of mmSAP. Now statically linked against libSAP 1.54 instead of 1.51. mmSAP is now able to play more SAP tunes. http://www.baktra.wz.cz/english.html [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 10:19 AM Subject: EMU>STSound GPL v1.2 released --Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:42:20 -0700 Arnaud Carré 'Leonard' released STSound GPL v1.2 YM format music player for Win. Fixes and improvements: - new low pass filter routine (faster and no more dynamic allocation), - LZH depacking multi-thread safe, - Rare bad division crash fixed. Thanks to Alexandru Simion, - memory leak fixed with old format (YM2 and YM3). Thanks to Alexandru Simion, - GetInfo time reported in second and millisecond now, - Both project files for VisualC++ 6 and .Net 2003. URL: http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 10:54 AM Subject: ST>EasyMiNT 1.6 released

More info on the RUN! Software homepage under "Produkte" and "Service/Download" http://www.run-software.de

--Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:54:19 -0700 EasyMiNT has finally been updated in order to support the latest CVS versions of FreeMiNT/XaAES! The new update includes the packages for FreeMiNT, XaAES and also Teradesk. If you never been into MiNT, this program can be described a standalone installer for SpareMiNT RPM-packages. In other words, a good introduction to MiNT :)

The page is in German, but there are very comprehensive docs in the archive in both, German and English! Please do read them! Cheers, Ingo =;-> **********************************************

New in this release:

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 10:20 AM Subject: ST>STYMulator v0.2

* You can choose now between FreeMiNT 1.15 and 1.16

--Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:42:44 -0700

* New versions of XaAES and Teradesk could be installed * Added lp.xdd which creates a printer device under /dev * Update of the rpm packages basic, standard, devel, libs, net * RAW partition support added again The files can be found on the authors website:

Grzegorz Stanczyk aka gRzEnIu has updated STYMulator to version 0.2 with latest ST-Sound library v1.2. STYMulator is a chip music player for Linux that supports YM music format dumped from ATARI ST. URL: http://atariarea.krap.pl/stymulator [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

URL: http://atari.st-katharinaapotheke.de/home.php?view=1&seite=0&lang=en&

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 12:00 PM Subject: ST>The XaAES online documentation

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

--Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 16:44:48 -0700

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From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 10:14 AM Subject: ST>RUN!Only and RUN!Lib update --From: Ingo Schmidt --Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2006 10:36:15 -0700 Hi! RUN!Only and RUN!Lib have been updated! Most striking feature is probably the possibility to redim fields. Apart from that lots of bugfxes and little improvements have been made.

GokMasE has announced: We have recently been working hard to supply a thorough and accurate documentation for XaAES. Chances are that even advanced users will be unaware of certain features and shortcuts, and since XaAES has had such a tremendous development lately, chances are that new users might be interested to check it out. Hence the need for proper documentation! The docs might seem too include details some will find trivial at times, but there is a reason for that too - by covering such information as well, the documentation can also serve as a reference for the GUI components. Nowadays it is absolutely fair to say that XaAES despite its alpha status is a very stable and mature project, that definately has reached the original goal - to offer a free replacement for the AES in MultiTOS.

Many would say that it even leaves N.AES behind. You will find the online documentation on the XaAES website: URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org http://www.atari.org] **********************************************

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