October 2008
NEWSLETTER for October 2008 **********************************************
President’s Corner by Michael Current October 2008
Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For September 2008
Auction this month! Don't miss out! Add to your collection, and support SPACE! So how did you do on last month's puzzle? Here are the answers to 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. Challenge: 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. ANSWERS: _5__ David Harris Dec89-Winter90 _8__ Elie Kenan Jul90-Oct90 _1__ Sig Schreyer May85-Sep85 _10_ Ted Hoff Jun94-Jan96 _4__ Chuck Babbit Apr88-May88 _3__ August Liguori Oct86-Sep89 _6__ Mike Morand Sep89-Dec89 _2__ Al Montross Nov85-Jan86 _9__ Greg Pratt Oct90-Dec91 _7__ Mead Ames-Klein Winter90-Jul90 There is a bit of overlap because for a time they had both a General Manager and a President: August Liguori was General Manager from Oct86-Sep89, overlapping with Chuck Babbit's brief stint as President.
On a beautiful September Friday evening I can understand the low turnout for our SPACE meeting. Only four members were present and the meeting was very short. We spent a good part of the meeting talking about discarding our old monitors and computers. It was known that there are a few ways to recycle at no expense. Check with your Best Buy store or your community for these free services. This topic came about because last month we had a former Atari 8-bit user who came to the August meeting to donate his Atari 800XL computer, 810 disk drives and other related 8-bit items. He hurriedly left after dropping the items off and we found out why. I explicitly asked him if the system worked and he assured me that it did. When we tried to boot the 800XL it did not work and so we tried the 810 drives and found them not to be working also. This brought up the idea that people were going to be using the Club to dispose of their old non-working equipment and calling it a donation. It's hard to turn away equipment that is donated, but we sure don't want to have to dispose of other people's equipment that needs to be recycled. As long as there are means of this equipment being disposed of at no charge I guess we should take the chance and accept it. Another person dropped off his 1040st computer with both a color and monochrome monitor and aid it was working just recently. He did say he was having problems with the floppy drive. I took it home and fired it up and the desktop cam right up. I tried to read a disk but it wouldn't read it correctly so I tried hooking up a second floppy and that too would not read. I tried to format a disk with both the internal and external drives and both drives format to the end but they both would not complete the job. I tried a second drive as an external B drive but the same thing happened. I think it is the internal floppy controller causing this problem, and maybe someone with a little knowledge could fix this very easily. The monitors are beautiful and the computer and monitor are immaculate. This person took really good care of his equipment. He had very little software but he had the 520st complete technical manual which looks like 500 pages of technical information. So with all this new stuff I figure we should have another SPACE auction next month. I still have a lot of ST software and some 8-bit software to auction off so I hope we get a good turnout next month. Now for the treasury report for the month ended September 2008:
How did you do? Hope to see you at the auction this month! Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday October 10, 2008.
Since not much was going on for the September meeting I will make this very short. We had one dom sale and no expenses so we had a net gain of $3.00. Our SPACE bank balance stands at $852.38 at September 30, 2008.
With no major expenses forecast in the near future and with the auction next mont and one in December at our Xmas party, we should have a good cushion to pay the room rental of $300.00 for the whole year of 2008. I figure we should still have a balance in the neighborhood of $700.00 at year end and very healthy balance for the next year 2009.
Basically, bug-fixes from the 1.55 beta release announced a couple of days ago. Mainly, a couple of pokey issues have been fixed, one issue in the disassembler, and a couple of issues in Os++, the built-in freestanding operating system you'll also find on this page in source form. From the history:
I hope to see you at next month's SPACE meeting and auction. Until then enjoy the cool days of autumn.
Atari++ 1.55 - Fixed a couple of bugs in the disk emulation, thanks to Konrad Kokoszkiewicz for finding them. Specifically, - Read and write capacity (815 commands) did not check for all supported disk layout types and hard-disk partitions, - Speedy commands were recognized and interfered even if the speedy emulation was turned off, - Disk status wasn't returned correctly for high-density drives - Fixed a parsing/error handling bug if the initial configuration files were incorrect. - Fixed the implementation of ZFR1 in the mathpack patch. - Fixed the implementation of FFRAC in mathpack patch. - Added constants required by BASIC for the patch. - This release comes with a new release of Os++, the emulator operating system. For the first time, this release is complete and includes a math-pack whose functions should be both faster and more precise than the original implementation. Thanks to B. Watson for continuously pushing me – it's done now. - Minor streamlining in the CIO implementation in Os++. - This release adds a STDIO interface to atari++, allowing it to read keyboard or editor input from the command line, and echo-ing output to stdout. This feature can be used for batchprocessing. - Compared to the beta release, this version fixes one bug in the BCDToInt math pack routine (also known as FPI) which did not handle carry-over correctly. - Writing 0 to SKCTL now also resets the pokey timers as it emulates the POKEY soft reset. - Pokey STIMER also resets the poly-counters now, as it should. - Os++ includes minor fixes for the cursor rendering and interaction of S: with E:. Writing to S: now shields the cursor correctly.
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Secretary's Report By Steven Peck For September 2008 Well, another day, another SPACE meeting. We didn't get the turnout that we had the month before (40% of the club members showed up), but we did manage to have a good meeting anyway. There's talk of another auction next month, so get ready. Something good might show up on the auction table that you may want to buy. Anyway, I have been talking to Lance lately, and nothing has been going on in the Atari realm lately. It's like it's totally dead. I will remind Lance to bring his 7800 game demos, as I will bring my 7800 to the meeting. I am also planning to demo my Jaguar minus the CD player. It blew out on me after twelve years of faithful service. Besides, Lance may have some Jag demos as well. Well, that concludes my Secretary's Report. Keep using that Atari, and good luck at the auction.
******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For October 2008
Greetings, Thomas
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: Thursday, September 25, 2008 8:41 PM Subject: atari++ 1.55 final released -From: "Thomas Richter" <thor@math.tu-berlin.de> -Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:04:58 -0500 Hi folks, please find the final 1.55 release of the Atari 8-bit emulator "atari++" at its usual location at: http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~thor/atari++/
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 8:38 PM Subject: 64JPX now available -From: Nick @ 64HDD -Date: Sep 23, 10:29 am Hi all, 64JPX is now available for sale from the www.64hdd.com website. For those who haven't been following developments, 64JPX is a micro based interface which allows connection of Sega, SNES, NES and/or PCanalog controllers to be used with Commodore and Atari compatible systems. In addition to doing the signal conversion, the interface offers a number of "enhancement" modes tailored to various game genre. http://www.64hdd.com/64jpx/ has all the info. Enjoy, Nick
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:14 PM Subject: Ocean Machine by TBL now on Falcon Ocean Machine by TBL now on Falcon 2008
September 23rd,
http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/tmt-sund.zip
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:11 PM Subject: New version of Silkcut Falcon New version of Silkcut Falcon
September 15th, 2008
MiKRO of Mystic Bytes writes: MiKRO of Mystic Bytes writes: Hi again, Hi everyone, Since there were no complaints about VGA/50 Hz and Kalms was so kind he helped me with the last bug, I'm happy to tell you Ocean Machine is here!
after some experiments with 8-bit coding (I failed, I wasn't able to code one simple slideshow :-) I'm back in Falcon coding.
Btw this demo is true delicacy for CT60 users with Nemesis/Phantom/bus boost and ~80 MHz -- on my setup I haven't seen one effect under 25 FPS and 50 FPS wasn't anything special at all! :)
I was thinking about making some update to Silkcut because there was awful bug in the 1.01 version -- fading routine was totally messed up which results in incorrect display of TBL logos + affects framerate as well.
OK, enough crap, enjoy the view :)
So this update fixes it plus adds:
2008-09-24 UPDATE: The video is replaced, now with proper audio!
- VGA 60 Hz support (I really hope no one will have problems with LCDs anymore) - color greetings! (Kalms and me decided it doesn't look *that* bad, esp. on TV) - special version of greetings for 60 Hz (thanks, Kalms!) - much nicer tunnel sequence
» Download Ocean Machine Falcon version http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/tbl-oceanmachine-falcon.zip
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:12 PM Subject: New Falcon game released by Paradize! New Falcon game released by Paradize! September 16th, 2008 Simon Sunnyboy / Paradize writes: Paradize has yet another game release for you. Cooper gave the Falcon a go this time and our new little puzzler, Chainz, is exclusively meant to run on the Falcon.
On the other side, there's some hidden bug (in my port, in the original demo, in the universe, ... :-) which means that tunnel looks either fantastic or jerky. In in week I wasn't able to catch it, I give up, sorry folks. It's just a port after all... It seems the best chances to see perfect effect you have on 66 MHz machine, it's kind of sync problem, that's all I can say about it... P.S. I'd like to ask -- how many of you had problems with that 50 Hz version? I ask because Ocean Machine is much, much more knitted to 50 Hz than Silkcut and citing Kalms: "fixing" that will be a bitch :-) » Download Silkcut for Falcon v1.02
A special bypass allows disabling of the DSP music so you can use Hatari too.
http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/tbl-silkcut-falcon-102.zip
» Download 'Chainz' for the Falcon
» Download Silkcut v1.02 update archive
http://files.dhs.nu/files_game/chainz.zip
http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/tbl-silkcut-falcon-update-102.zip
» Visit the Paradize website
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http://paradize.atari.org/
From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:13 PM Subject: New Bits intro
******************************************** From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 9:10 PM Subject: Torment releases small demo at Sundown September 14th, 2008 Torment have released a small ST-intro at the Sundown party. The intro mostly contain old code, graphics and sound. Never the less, nice with a lifesign from the brits! » Download "Oldcode" by Torment
New Bits intro
September 16th, 2008
The Bits are back once again with a tiny intro. They really should make a bigger demo some day.. Apart from that, you know the drill, it's minimalistic all thru. » Download Bits #51 http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/bits51.zip
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