SPACE Newsletter

NEWSLETTER for November, 2006 President’s Corner by Michael Current November, 2006

surprises. It would be nice if we could have a few more members for this auction. Plus we have elections to vote on. Our Treasury looks like this for the month ended Oct 31, 2006: Beginning balance at October 1, 2006:

Welcome to November, time for the SPACE Annual Meeting! As you know, each year at the Annual Meeting we elect members to the club positions of President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer, collectively known as the Executive Board. We also take the opportunity to ask once again for volunteers for the positions of Membership Chairman, Newsletter Editor, DOM Librarian, BBS Operator, and Webmaster. New blood is ALWAYS welcome with any of these positions. With our numbers so small, every way that you can contribute your time to SPACE is tremendously important to the continued vitality and viability of the club. Please consider doing your part! If THAT isn't enough to convince you that you must make the SPACE meeting this month, how about this month's auction! It should be a good one -- we've received a fair amount of hardware, software, and literature recently; see Greg's article for a few details. Don't miss out! And oh, don't forget, we'll have to make plans for a December holiday party this month as well! Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your SPACE Annual Meeting, Friday November 10, 2006.

Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For October, 2006

Just like the September meeting we had six members show up for the October SPACE meeting. I guess when you consider that we only have ten paid up members now a six count isn't all too shabby. Because I wrote the minutes for the October meeting I don't want to duplicate what I write in the Treasurer's report. I would like to have another SPACE auction next month at the November meeting because I got hold of some hardware from a long ago member, Harry Connor. We will have an 850 interface (no power supply), two 1050 disk drives (complete with power supplies), games on cartridges and a few disks. I am going to see what I have at home to add to the auction (for sure the Chipmunk disk copier) and maybe a few other

Receipts for the October SPACE meeting: Memberships Doms Total receipts for the month: Ending balance at October 31, 2006:

679.09

30.00 30.00 60.00 739.09

As you can see with no expenses and at best just $10.00 for the BBS we really have improved our bank balance. With an auction next month and the BBS being our only monthly expense I would expect our balance to be even higher at the end of November. I find it stunning that this Club can maintain a balance like this with only ten members. Your support for SPACE is without a doubt an accomplishment that Clubs with many times our number could only dream of having. Thank you one and all, and let's keep the Club rolling by showing your strong support at next month's meeting.

Secretary's Report By Nolan Friedland For October, 2006

Submitted by Greg Leitner. We started the October SPACE meeting at 7:30 PM, right on schedule. In the absence of Nolan, our SPACE Secretary, I am filling you all in on the minutes of the meeting. Since not much was going on at the September meeting I just touched on the fact that the auction was fun but we sure could have used a few more members bidding on the items. We took in only $18.00 for that auction and along with membership renewals and dom sales we had receipts of $51.00 and with no expenses in September our bank balance stood at $679.09. We had ten paid up members, and a nice dom from Glen. Without Nolan we had to forego the BBS report but I am sure he will fill us all in next month. No old business but in the new business area of course we had our yearly SPACE rendition of volunteers for the Board. Of course like always there were no new takers so the old Board

was suggested to stay on again for 2007. We will make it official next month at the November meeting. Also under new business, Lance announced a new TOS version for the ST series that would be much faster and backwards compatible with the Falcon, Mega and 1040 ST's. That really got my attention and I hope it becomes a reality. We closed the October SPACE meeting around 8:30.

******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For November, 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 1993.1 Macros with AtariWriter I have been using AtariWriter and AtariWriter+ for many years. Besides my monthly column, I use AtariWriter+ for writing letters, program documentation, and even used it to write my book "The Rana Repair Guide". Not only are its commands easy to remember, they make sense to me. For this reason, adapting to Word Perfect on the PC at work was not easy for me. The commands are not easy to remember, and none of them seem to make any sense. After several days of frustration with the program and the manual I discovered the power of Word Perfect's macro function. I wrote a set of macros for Word Perfect that emulate the commands of AtariWriter+. These familiar commands allow me to once again put my concentration on what I am writing and not on HOW to write it. Over time I have found macros are also useful for inserting often used text such as return addresses or hard to spell words. Macros can save time as well as eliminate frustration. Back at home I was starting to feel frustrated again. If AtariWriter only had a macro function too, I thought. Well, in a way it does. It is the MERGE function and is accessed with the OPTION + L key combination. Short text files that can include most screen and printer formatting codes can be saved to disk and MERGEd into you document. No longer do I have to type my name and address on the top of business letters and then use PRINT PREVIEW to make sure everything is aligned properly with right justification. Now I just type "(OPTION

L) ADDRESS" and it is all done for me. Another macro selects my printer's downloaded font and signs my letters for me. Although somewhat limited, these macros can be used to enter text as well as any formatting changes that can be made during text entry. These included, setting margins and type fonts, centering text, and most anything that can be accomplished from the Global menu of AtariWriter+. CONTROL+ O printer commands can also be included. My daughter recently needed to use several characters from our printer's International character set for a Spanish paper. Instead of having to look up the printer codes for these characters every time they are needed she now lets the macros type them for her. Here is how to create your own macros. Start by creating a new file and type in your macro's text and/or codes. When you get everything formatted the way you want, save this file to your work disk using the SAVE ASCII (CONTROL + S) function. Use a file name that will be easy to remember. Any legal filename will do. NOTE: It is not necessary to use SAVE ASCII, but it will save 2 single density disk sectors if you do. An ASCII SAVE doesn't save the Global parameters. These are not used by the MERGE function anyway. This method will also allow macros to be shared by AtariWriter and AtariWriter+. Now when you want to call your macro, just type OPTION + L followed by the filename of the macro you want to use. What could be easier? Remember, you can create as many macros as you have room for on your disk. Experiment and come up your own macros to make your life easier. After all, isn't that what you got your Atari for in the first place? Here are a few macro ideas for you to try. A macro that sets the margins and font for double column printing. A macro that includes your name & address or other letter head. Macros for hard to spell or hard to remember words or names. ex. Macro "BOB" could be Robert Prozilinski. Macros for special printer characters like "1/2" or "1/4". Macros to configure your printer for special fonts or type styles. Macros to emulate Word Perfect... Just kidding! Although I have been writing A-T-A-R-I for 8 years, this is the first of my columns to appear in Atari Classics. A-T-A-R-I began as a monthly news letter column for my local computer club, The Atari Federation, back in 1986. It was also seen in AIM for the last two years. I am proud that it will now be carried by Atari Classics. I welcome any and all feedback, questions, or suggestions for future columns.

About the Author:

http://www.baktra.wz.cz/software/turgen2.html

Paul just completed his 25th year as an electronics technician at Vandenberg A.F.B, Ca. Starting with an Atari 1200XL in 1983; he now has 9 8-bit Atari computer systems in his home. Paul started repairing disk drives for club members in return for help learning programming, and has since written several programs and utilities. A few were published in Antic magazine back in the good old days and several appeared on the AIM disk of the month. Paul will be happy to help with any 8-bit hardware/software questions you may have. Write him at:

URL: http://www.baktra.wz.cz/english.html

Paul V. Alhart 524 North Zee St. Lompoc, Ca. 93436 ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:55 PM Subject: 8BIT>ASMA 3.1 + ASMADB

[This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:54 PM Subject: EMU>Atari++ 1.50 released --From: Thomas Richter --Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:54:42 -0700 Hi folks, A new release of the Unix/Win32 Atari emulator is available for download at http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~thor/atari++/ Credits for this release go to:

--Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:55:07 -0700 ASMA 3.1, the biggest update ever, has come! 188 new tunes, many fixes and changes. And not only that. We are proud to present you ASMADB, the search engine to browse through the collection on-line (additional information in FAQ)!!! Last but not least there are new players available - ASAP, mmSAP and sapemu. URL: http://asma.atari.org/

- Sebastian Pachuta (again!) for pointing me at some bugs in the player missile timing logic. It is still not perfect, but much closer than before. - Bennet (beipdev@yahoo.com) for providing me with very detailed information about the antic DMA timing that got incorporated into the 1.50 release. What's new this time: Apparently a lot, thus a new tenth digit in the release counting:

[This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:56 PM Subject: 8BIT>TURGEN SYSTEM 3 Released --Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:55:38 -0700 (TURGEN SYSTEM 3 is a utility which transfers data from PC to 8-bit ATARI using Turbo 2000/SuperTurbo) * New SuperTurbo plug-in, allows faster data transfer (2725 bd instead of 2270) * Improved and simplified plug-in system, ready to generate any kind of Turbo * Documentation improved and fixed * Users can sample their own pulses to reach better speed * Version 3 is now experimental but should work fine * Source code available Additional link for atarians from former Czechoslovakia:

Atari++ 1.50 - This release is mainly a bug-fix release that addresses a couple of issues especially on 64 bit systems: - Fixed various erroneous varargs usages, mainly active during error handling, that caused crashes on AMD64 systems. - Fixed reference to the linux joystick device. Newer kernels place this device at /dev/input/jsx instead of /dev/jsx,fixed. - The H: device handler wildcard matcher now also finds files whose extender consists of blanks. - The joystick handler contains now a workaround against some faulty implementations of the emu10k1 (SoundBlaster) gameport interface and got basically selfcalibrating by using the second unused joystick axis. - The DMA timing got reworked heavily. Thanks for that goes to Bennet (beipdev@yahoo.com) for providing me with more detailed information. - The way how horizontal timing is organized changed heavily, and the timing constants for ANTIC and GTIA changed. Thus, new items in the menu will adjust the timing, and old ones got removed. - The player/missile generator changed a bit and is now aware of some internal GTIA reaction times. Thanks for providing examples for this goes to Sebastian Pachuta (thanks again!)

- Some heavy bugs got fixed in the X11 interface that could have caused conflicts with at least some window managers because it re-opened windows to fast. These problems are now avoided by using a more careful logic. - An out-of-bounds memory write in the mathpack emulation got fixed. - Error handling in the complete menu and error requesters itself got improved. - Errors from the X11 subsystem are now captured and reported in a more user-friendly way. - The complete user menu creates now string-gadgets for numeric values whose numeric range is too large to be fine-tunable by a slider alone. - Improved the speed of the X11 true-color output by enlarging the output/color buffer. And, hopefully, the file server of the TU will make it for a couple of days, this time... (-; So long, Thomas ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 8:57 PM Subject: EMU>mmSAP 1.3 is out

with Teradesk launched as desktop. Also note that the sysdir is 1-17-cur for this particular version of FreeMiNT. In order to use this version of FreeMiNT/XaAES you should have at least 4Mb of RAM. If you have an Atari with 020 or better CPU you are advised to use the latest alpha release instead of this 000-specific build. URL: http://xaaes.atariforge.net/ [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 8:59 PM Subject: ST>libhyp based HYP View Web Service updated --Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:32:24 -0700 A small but in eyes of others quite significant feature addition gives uses the ability to browse ST-Guide .hyp files that are hidden within various archive files stored all around the Atari related WEB. This is supposed to be a major step up in its overall usability level. Just use the software package URL to see the documentation.

--Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:31:38 -0700 * Separate archives for both variants were removed. Now there is only one archive but two compile scripts.

For example: http://libhyp.atari.org/hypview.cgi?url=http://users.skynet.be/a tarix/zview.zip

* GUI improved. SAP tune info is encapsulated with scrollpane, so program window keeps its size and does not expand wildly.

http://libhyp.atari.org/

* New configuration option - Expand SAP tune info at startup.

**********************************************

Enjoy listening to new ASMA 3.1 tunes with mmSAP Additional link for atarians from former Czechoslovakia: http://www.baktra.wz.cz/software/mmsap.html [This news item courtesy of Atari.org - http://www.atari.org] ********************************************** From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:57 PM Subject: ST>FreeMiNT/XaAES on the ST --Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:56:10 -0700 As many of you certainly are aware of, FreeMiNT/XaAES have not been running on 68000 machines since XaAES was turned into a kernel module. Reason for this was mainly the lack of test equipment, a problem that has been cured since. Today’s very early pre-alpha binary of FreeMiNT/XaAES consist of 3 subdirectories, and if copied onto the root dir of your boot disk it should enable you to boot right into XaAES

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

From: Michael Current [hunmanik@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 9:22 PM Subject: SPACE Bylaws As amended by the membership, September 13, 2002

Section 6. The President shall preside over club meetings. In the President's absence, the Vice-President shall preside. In their absence, the Secretary shall preside. If the first three are all absent, the Treasurer shall preside.

BYLAWS FOR THE SAINT PAUL ATARI COMPUTER ENTHUSIASTS CLUB OF SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

ARTICLE IV TREASURY

ARTICLE I NAME AND OBJECT

Section 1. An accounting for all incomes and charges to the SPACE balance sheet shall be published in the newsletter each month.

Section 1. The name of the Club shall be the Saint Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts, or SPACE.

Section 2. Prior approval by the Executive Board is required if the club is to incur any expense.

Section 2. The object of the Club shall be to bring those with a common interest in Atari computers together for the purpose of sharing hardware, software and information related to Atari.

Section 3. The Treasurer shall be responsible for the duties of managing the club's monetary assets.

ARTICLE II MEMBERSHIP

ARTICLE V NEWSLETTER

Section 1. The number of members of SPACE shall not be limited.

Section 1. The club shall publish the SPACE Newsletter on a monthly basis.

Section 2. Any person or family interested in Atari computers shall be eligible for membership upon payment of the annual dues for the first year.

Section 2. All currently paid club members shall receive a copy of the Newsletter by mail each month.

Section 3. The annual dues shall be $15.00, payable on the anniversary month of the member's joining date. Section 4. Unused portions of dues are not refundable. Section 5. Any member found to be in violation of the rules or spirit of the club may be expelled by a majority vote of the Executive Board. Section 6. The Membership Chairman shall be responsible for collecting membership dues and managing the current membership list. ARTICLE III MEETINGS Section 1. SPACE meetings shall be held at 7:30pm on the second Friday of each month, at the Falcon Heights Community Center, unless otherwise directed by the Executive Board. Section 2. Club business cannot be conducted without at least one Officer and one other member present.

Section 3. Newsletters shall also be sent free of charge each month to other Atari clubs which are able to return the favor. Section 4. The Newsletter Editor shall be responsible for the duties of collecting articles from the membership, publishing, and distributing the Newsletter. ARTICLE VI DISK OF THE MONTH Section 1. A new SPACE Disk Of the Month (DOM), readable by a standard Atari 1050 disk drive, shall be produced on a monthly basis. This is for the purpose of raising funds for the club. Section 2. DOMs shall include shareware, freeware, or public domain software or other files for the Atari. DOMs shall not include pirated commercial software. Section 3. The price of the DOM shall be $3.00. Section 4. DOMs shall be available for sale at each club meeting, and may be sold to members and non-members.

Section 3. All club meetings shall be open meetings.

Section 5. Other clubs may trade DOMs with SPACE on a one-for-one basis.

Section 4. Minutes of each club meeting shall be recorded by the Secretary and published in the club newsletter.

Section 6. The DOM Librarian shall be responsible for the production and sales of the DOM.

Section 5. The Annual Meeting shall be held each November. At the Annual Meeting, Officers shall be elected and volunteers for other ongoing club duties shall be secured.

ARTCILE VII BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM

in conflict with the bylaws, in which case the bylaws shall take precedence.

Section 1. A Bulletin Board System (BBS) supporting Atari computers shall be made available by the club. The BBS provides an online forum for Atari discussions, and an optional communications medium for club matters.

ARTICLE X AMENDMENT OF BYLAWS

Section 2. The BBS System Operator shall be responsible for maintaining a friendly and welcoming environment on the BBS. Illegal software or offensive language shall not be tolerated. ARTICLE VIII WEB SITE Section 1. The club shall maintain a home page on the World Wide Web. The site shall be primarily designed to attract new club members, and provide online access to club information. Section 2. The Webmaster shall be responsible for maintaining the web site, and keeping the information presented there current. ARTICLE IX OFFICERS AND EXECUTIVE BOARD Section 1. The Officers of the club shall be President, VicePresident, Secretary, and Treasurer, and shall be referred to collectively as the Executive Board. Section 2. The Executive Board shall collectively supervise the affairs of the club, shall be responsible for proper and orderly club operations, shall be responsible for upholding the rules of the bylaws, and shall at all times make decisions with the best interests of the membership in mind. Section 3. The officers shall be elected by a majority vote of those present, or by acclamation if only one person is running. The term shall be for one year, or until a successor is elected. The term of office shall begin at the close of the annual meeting at which the officer is elected. Section 4. The Executive Board shall actively seek volunteers to fill the following positions: Membership Chairman, Newsletter Editor, DOM Librarian, BBS Operator, and Webmaster. These volunteers shall be subject to the approval of the club membership. Section 5. The Executive Board shall also seek volunteers for other ongoing administrative duties, such as meeting location arrangements and post office box maintenance. Section 6. Officers shall be subject to a Recall Vote if a majority of the membership so decries. The Recall Vote shall not take place until it has been announced in the newsletter. Section 7. The rules contained in the current edition of "Robert's Rules of Order" shall govern the club unless they are

Section 1. A Quorum shall be defined as either a minimum of 50% of the entire membership, or 10, whichever is smaller. Section 2. Provided that a quorum is present, and provided that the amendment proposal has been communicated to the entire membership in writing in advance, the Bylaws may be amended at any meeting by a two-thirds vote of the members present. Section 3. Voting shall be by consenting AYE or NAY if a two-thirds vote can be confirmed, or by a show of hands for a precise tally. Section 4. Proxy voting is not permitted for Bylaws amendment votes. ARTICLE XI CLUB DISSOLUTION Section 1. The club may elect to disband itself by a majority vote of the current membership, provided the proposal has been printed in at least one issue of the newsletter. Section 2. In such an event, the Executive Board members shall be responsible for the proper and orderly closing of accounts, arrangements, and all normally ongoing club activities. Section 3. Any remaining material assets of the club shall be distributed evenly among the membership, as best as this is possible. Historical club materials shall be preserved if possible. Section 4. When all outstanding charges are paid, the Treasurer shall distribute any remaining club funds evenly among the final group of club members.