September 2008
NEWSLETTER for September 2008 President’s Corner by Michael Current September 2008 Something different this month, let's play Know Your Atari Executives! The following executives each had a turn being responsible for Atari Corporation's U.S. operations during some time between 1984 and 1996. Can you number these Atari (US) executives into their chronological order as head of Atari Corporation's U.S. operations? Hint: titles for the position included: "General Manager, Atari (U.S.)", "President, Atari Computer", and "President, North American Operations". In all cases, the person in this position reported to Jack Tramiel and/or Sam Tramiel. ___ David Harris ___ Elie Kenan ___ Sig Schreyer ___ Ted Hoff ___ Chuck Babbit ___ August Liguori ___ Mike Morand ___ Al Montross ___ Greg Pratt ___ Mead Ames-Klein Extra challenge: Can you come up with the dates that these people joined and left Atari U.S.? Answers next month! Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday September 12, 2008. **********************************************
Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For August 2008
It was just about a perfect evening for our August SPACE meeting, and after a great turnout for our very successful July bithday party I was thinking the August meeting might be very sparse. I was wrong as seven members were present for the August meeting and that represents 70% of our total membership. This is why SPACE is still going strong and I thank you for your continued support. We had visit from a former Atari user and he offered to donate his Atari stuff to SPACE for an upcoming auction. Not wanting to turn down a donation I accepted the goods even though some members had reservations. After testing some of the hardware I had to eat crow since the 800XL and a couple of floppies turned out to be bad. The person donating the stuff said one drive might be bad but everything else was working just fine. It looks like he was trying to dump this non-working Atari stuff on us to save money for disposing of it. Well at least we might have an XEP-80 to auction off and he had some Atari manuals as well. I throw them in in the next auction. Here is how SPACE shapes up for the month of August 2008: Beginning balance as of August 1, 2008:
853.38
Receipts for the month: Doms
+ 6.00
Expenses for the month: Web-site
-10.00
Ending balance as of August 31, 2008:
849.38
Not much happening in August as you can see. At least we didn't lose much and we still have a very healthy bank account. I may announce another auction next month as I still have a lot of software for the 8-bit and ST at home. I think with the turnout we keep getting we could have the auction in October and definitely one in December for out Xmas party. Looks like the tacos were a big hit at the SPACE birthday party, and I believe everyone wants to do it again for the Xmas party. While not my cup of tea I am willing to go along with this idea. We can talk more about this in the coming meetings which I hope most of you can attend. See you all in September. **********************************************
Secretary's Report By Steven Peck For August 2008 The August meeting, although short, had a good turnout. Seven members (70% of SPACE, including Greg's nephew, which made eight people) showed up for the meeting, which is an impressive number. Lance was saying that the Coldfire board is now capable of running TOS. It has been in development for some time now, but no one is sure when it will be released, since the economy has slowed everything down. All I know is that the Coldfire will be released as motherboard only in two sizes. One at $399, the other at $799 if I remember correctly. The cases to house the motherboards will have to be bought separately. This is to reduce cost for the motherboards. I had e-mailed Rodolphe Czuba (www.czuba-tech.com) concerning the CT60 Super Booster for the Atari Falcon030 computer, and he told me about TOS for the Power Macintosh. He said Didier Mequignon, creator of the Aniplay movie player for the Atari platform, was re-writing TOS for the Power Mac platform. If this comes to fruition as planned, this will breathe new life in the PowerPC platform as well expand the horizons of the TOS operating system. But, only time will tell. I plan to bring my Atari 7800 to the next meeting so Lance can demo some games for the group. I might bring my Jaguar as well, but I will talk to Lance to see if he has any games to demo for the 64-bit. Let's hope that, this time, there's batteries for the remote controls for the TV. Well, that concludes the Secretary's Report. Keep using that Atari (as will I), and see you at the next meeting.
******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For September 2008
Version 3.97 of TeraDesk open-source desktop for the 16-bit and 32-bit lines of Atari computers is available at: http://solair.eunet.yu/~vdjole/teradesk.htm This release brings fixes to some not-very-critical problems that have been detected, and also a couple of small cosmetic improvements. Work on some other fixes and improvements is in progress. See the development history file for details. Have fun.
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:47 PM Subject: Taylor Ridge Books released as HYPertext Taylor Ridge Books released as HYPertext Aug 08, 2008 05:56 PM GFA-Basic Toolkit - Volume 1 ST Assembly Language Workshop - Volume 1 ST Assembly Language Workshop - Volume 2 Clayton Walnum's Cmanship Complete The TRB Reference Series: AES Quick Reference The TRB Reference Series: VDI Quick Reference The optional disks are also available. Made available via the kindness of Clayton Walnum. Download them here: http://dev-docs.atariforge.org/ Click 'Search Archive' on the left. Enter 'taylor' in the search field. Press return. Enjoy.
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:44 PM Subject: Bits releases new intro (ST) August 23rd, 2008 Bits releases new intro (ST) Summer idleness, nothing new for ages. Then comes The Bits Club to save the day with "Bits #50".
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.
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:47 PM Subject: TeraDesk version 3.97 released TeraDesk version 3.97 released Aug 15, 2008 - 05:31 PM
You know what to expect :)
» Download Bits #50 http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/bits50.zip » Pouet.net page http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51334
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From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:46 PM Subject: ResourceMaster goes freeware (ST)
******************************************** ResourceMaster goes freeware :: Aug 03, 2008 - 06:15 PM : In late June 2008 it was announced that the excellent RSCeditor ResourceMaster (aka RSM) by Armin Diedering was now available as freeware. Since RSM is the only RSC-editor that has been kept up to date recent years, we can only hope that the fact that it now went the freeware route does not necessarily mean that the author will stop working on it. ResourceMaster 3.65 can now be downloaded without any restrictions on this page: http://www.ardisoft.de/Produkte/ResourceMaster/resourcemas ter.html
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 9:50 AM Subject: Highspeed SIO Patch V1.12 released Topic: Highspeed SIO Patch V1.12 released (HiassofT -Today, 2:58 PM) ............................................ A new version (1.12) of the Highspeed SIO Patch is available from my website: http://www.horus.com/~hias/atari/ (http://www.horus.com/~hias/atari/) Changes since the last version (1.10): - a bugfix for Happy 1050 drives (fast writes are now automatically enabled, otherwise data might get corrupted on writes) - added keystrokes to enable/disable/reset the patch and to cold-boot the Atari. so long, Hias
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