July 2010
NEWSLETTER for July 2010 President’s Corner by Michael Current July 2010 It's July, and you know what that means! Time to celebrate another year of SPACE! We've been here since 1982, and we have no plans to stop! We will have a potluck party, featuring tacos by popular demand, so be sure to bring a dish to pass and enjoy the fixin's. We'll also be holding another exciting auction, so bring the Atari gear you want to sell, and bring your cash ready to buy those Atari items you just can't do without any longer. You never know what might turn up available in the auction, and you never know who might show up for our anniversary party. Don't miss it!! Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting and party, Friday July 9, 2010. **********************************************
Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For June 2010
Well it's final. I guess it will be tacos again for the SPACE Birthday Party next month. Jackie and I will bring all the taco ingredients plus the pop, plate, napkins and silverware. Lance will bring his usual which leaves side dishes, munchies, and desserts for the rest of SPACE members. Anything you can bring to share will be greatly appreciated. Don't forget the auction next month along with the party. I have mainly software, magazines and books this time around, but there will be some great deals especially if you are looking to fill in your magazine collections. It was nice to see an old member of TAIG show up at the June meeting. His name is Mark and he is a graphic designer, and it was good to hear an old 8-bit user talk about his Atari experiences. Now if we can just get him to sign up.
Here is how things shape up for the month ended June 30, 2010: Beginning balance as of June 1, 2010:
741.30
Receipts for the June SPACE Meeting: Membership Doms Total receipts for the month
15.00 + 12.00 27.00
Expenses for th month of June: Newsletter-twelve months
- 68.20
Ending balance as of June 30, 2010
700.10
We just made $700.00 and to compare to last year we were at $704.25. Looking at things in that perspective we aren't doing too shabby. With the auction coming up I hope we can keep pace with last year. If we had all members current in their dues we would actually be ahead of last year. Now that we have the SPACE Newsletter paid up to date we only have to worry about the monthly web-site bill of $10.00 until the end of the year when we will be getting the room rental bill of $300.00. Last year we ended up around $680.00 so we have a ways to go to match that balance by the end of this year. We can do it if all of our members pay their dues and buy the monthly Dom. Bring an appetite with you next month and fill up on those delicious tacos. Gee, I can hardly wait! My mouth is watering. I don't know if I can wait a whole month. Well I have to run, I have an un-taco meal waiting for me even though I really insisted we have tacos tonight. I guess Jackie just didn't buy it. She knows me only too well!! See you at the Party!!! **********************************************
Secretary's Report By Steven Peck For June 2010
No minutes from the June meeting were submitted in time for this newsletter. ******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For July 2010
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.
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From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1:43 PM Subject: The Last Word 3.11 RC1 2010-06-28 The Last Word 3.11 RC1 End of development for disk based WP... ...until the VBXE disk version and the all-conquering cart version, that is. After several false-starts with hideously buggy version 3.11 betas, largely thanks to dwhyte's detailed bug reports, here's Release Candidate 1 of the final standard disk version of the word processor: Info http://www.atari8.co.uk/ Direct download http://www.atari8.co.uk/downloads/LW311RC1.ZIP CHANGES AND FEATURES 1. The status line is replaced by a progress bar during most disk I/O operations. This is because previous versions kept a raster interrupt running during SIO calls, which resulted in screen corruption if DOS turned off DLIs during critical, high speed disk transfers. Thanks to AtariAge forum member Rybags who came up with the idea of using a progress bar. I think it ties in nicely with the motif on the loading screen.
2. The colour customisation dialogue has been completely redesigned. The old one was a bit of an afterthought and was hard to navigate. In RC1, you press <CTRL+K>, then cycle through the different regions of the screen (which flash when selected) with the left and right arrow keys, and alter the colour of the chosen area with the up and down arrow keys. <Return> accepts the current scheme, while <Esc> cancels it. 3. In print preview and print views, formatting or I/O errors don't dump you straight back into the editor. Instead, the preview freezes with an error message so you get some idea of what went wrong and where. Tracing formatting errors in INCLUDED print files could previously have been a real PITA. One particular user - who has a document with about forty included files - will probably find it helpful! 4. The "Where's the Cursor?" command (a concept first seen in TextPro and refined here to work across linked files and banks) now properly reports formatting errors and missing INCLUDE files. 5. The contentious ICON bar of LW 3.11 Beta 3 has been relegated to extension status. Load with <CTRL+;>, ICON.EXT. It's also on the disk as "LW.EXT", so will load at boot-up if RAM permits. You access it with the <Esc> key as before. 6. Accessing the icon bar with <Esc> is possible because the <Esc> key is now the third editor extension key (along with CTRL+T and SHIFT+CTRL+T). I did this so the old Escape key functionality could be restored via a suitable extension, but with the key also available to run an (optional) menu system. The rest of the 3.11 stuff is mostly still there, including: * Faster editing via a much more sophisticated screen update routine * Faster font rendering achieved by pre-bit shifting 80 column fonts on the fly after loading * Tagged multi-file rename operations with wildcard support * Many keyboard shortcuts are Windows compatible * CTRL+key characters can be typed easily using International Lock mode (toggled with SHIFT+CTRL+CAPS) * Polish Fonts
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* XBWDOS Compatibility BUG FIXES IN RC1 (SINCE 3.11 BETA 3) 1. The print formatter was comprehensively wrecked in the 3.11 betas. Thanks to David for bringing this to my attention; cue much frantic debugging. Problems were mainly confined to headers and footers when using extended memory, and printing included files. Fortunately these rather catastrophic and embarassing errors have been fixed in RC1. 2. A file could be left corrupted in RAM following an incomplete save (disk full error). I was unable to duplicate this error during testing, but I have made changes which should prevent data loss. 3. The program no longer crashes on loading when using SpartaDOS X with the TD Line turned on.
From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 9:59 PM Subject: Hatari v1.4.0 has been released Posted By: npomarede Date: 2010-Jun-12 13:52 Summary: Hatari v1.4.0 has been released Version 1.4.0 of the Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon emulator Hatari has been released. - Sound emulation improvements for Falcon (crossbar, dma sound recording) as well as for STE (LCM1992 emulation with volume/bass/trebble adjustements) - Better video emulation for some STE overscan modes used in recent demos - Better DSP emulation in Falcon mode - IDE / Gemdos HDD emulation's improvements
Serious and trivial bug reports appreciated (and expected). Enjoy! This post has been edited by flashjazzcat: Yesterday, 2:51 PM atari8.co.uk: The Last Word 3.11, XEDIT, RIF SpartaDOS Utilities, MA65 Macro Assembler for SpartaDOS Atari 65XE (1MB, IntSDX, VBXE2), 130XE (Stock), 800XL (1MB, IntSDX, UltraVideo 1.0), 800XL (Stock), XEGS (128K), XF551, XM301-SIO2SD, 520STFM (1MB), 4160STE (with Satandisk)
- AVI recording at full frame rate - Huge improvements in the built in debugger (conditionnal breakpoints for CPU / DSP and many more) - Use cmake as a common build system for Linux/Windows/OS X - Many more small fixes http://hatari.berlios.de/
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From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:07 PM Subject: VBCC GEM shell release
From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:06 PM Subject: New cracktro from Aggression
VBCC GEM shell released June 22nd, 2010 Orion_ of Paradize has released a GEM shell for the VBCC compiler/assembler.
New cracktro from Aggression June 7th, 2010 Aggression is back after what feels like forever.
This is the description from Orions website: This is a GEM frontend for the VBCC compiler in a form of a Desktop Accessory. It allows you to create project files to automatically compile your programs in one click with a nice GEM interface. » Download VBCC Shl http://files.dhs.nu/files_coding/vbccshl.zip » Visit Orions website http://onorisoft.info/
!Cube of Aggression have coded a nice ST-cracktro for D-Bug's recent Prince of Persia harddisk fix. The cracktro also features an original chiptune by !Cube. » Download the Prince of Persion cracktro http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/aggr_pop.zip » Visit the D-Bug site to download the full game as well http://dbug.atari.org/ ********************************************
From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 9:55 PM Subject: Micro-SpartaDOS 4.5 Micro-SpartaDOS (MSDOS.COM) ChangeLog (WHATSNEW.DOC) -----------------------------------By Jiri Bernasek - BEWESOFT Continued by Pecus & Pirx -----------------------------------MSDOS45.COM - Warsaw, 2010-06-12 Post-release update. Bugs fixed: * in rare circumstances of a fragmented disk (specifically when the gap between consecutive sectors was between 128 and 254 secs, the loading failed) Thanks to KMK for the bug report! New features: * MSDOS recognizes a special entry in MSDOS.DAT configuration file. For the special file "* " (it is asterisk followed by 10 spaces) the long name space is decoded as a number of settings for a given directory. Version 4.5 uses 4 hexadecimal numbers. First three are values of colors in this sequence: letters, playground, frame ($2c5, $2c6, $2c8). Fourth turns off TURBO for the given directory when it equals to "00". Example: * 020E0A01 This entry does NOT turn off the turbo, but sets colors like POKE 709,2:POKE 710,14:POKE 712,10 The configuration entry ("*" file) should be the first one on the list of files. Turbo is turned off after reading the directory contents (directory itself may read in turbo mode). Please note that MSDOS.DAT files are fully compatible throught all versions and we will strive to
retain this compatibility. * Support for all drives (1-15) Keys [Ctrl]+[A] to [Ctrl]+[O] select drives A: to O: (1-15, SpartDos style). Old style (pressing keys [1]-[8]) work just like it used to. Pressing keys [1]-[8] displays drives AtariDOS style (D1:, D2:). When letter keys are pressed, display switches to A:, B:, etc. style. * MSINI3 - a new version of the long name editor now supporting color schemes and turbo switch. Few additional bugs fixed: - crash on no Sparta - bad rewert to edition - some typos Enjoy new color schemes including Blues, Copper Plate and Bitter Lemon. Please note the avertised web page is not active anymore :). Available: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/164418microspartados-45-release/ ******************************************** ******************************************** ********************************************