September 2010
NEWSLETTER for September 2010 President’s Corner by Michael Current September 2010
Please check out the recent additions to the SPACE digital newsletter archive (the newly-added 1989 issues) and make sure the quality of the files is ok to you. Let me know what you think! Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday September 10, 2010.
Welcome to the Back to School edition of this Newsletter! For those of us whose lives correspond to the traditional academic calendar anyway. Do you recall that I used to be digitizing old issues of our SPACE Newsletter for making available on the SPACE web site? Well, after several years' pause (well, maybe more than a few years!), I'm back at it. We were complete back to March 1990 (the first issue after the SPACE/MAST split) for a long time, but as of the other day, I've added some new scans I've made recently, now making the digital archive complete back to June 1989. And I've already made a couple additional scans that I haven't posted to the web site yet. All of my old scans were actually OCR'd and HTMLized versions of the Newsletters, making the content extremely accessible to search engines like Google. But that was an extremely labor-intensive way to go, and it was going to be even more impractical once I got back into the era when the Newsletters were quite substantive with a lot of small type. So from February 1990 back they will all be PDF files. I've spent quite a while looking for an optimal system for making the PDF files, both in terms of efficiency of labor as well as holding down the file sizes. I have settled on 150dpi full color scans for color pages (the front and back cover pages in this era of the Newsletter), and 300dpi black and white line art scans for the rest. I am able to scan each page directly to a single-page PDF, then I use a Windows utility called "PDF reDirect" to append them all together, in order, into a single PDF file version of the whole issue. Final file sizes are ranging from 2MB to 4MB or so, with most closer to 2MB, not bad. And plenty screen-readable, with the bonus(?) of them looking very much like the original paper versions, for that authentic reading experience. But not text-searchable, unfortunately.
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Treasurer's Report by Greg Leitner For August 2010
I can't believe you will be reading this letter in September. This year flew by so fast and especially the summer. My wife and I are alreay planning our Xmas shopping and with our Disney trip the second week of December our family Xmas will be a little more hectic. And with our trip in mind it would be a good time to let all you know that I won't be at the SPACE Xmas party this year which means we will have to make plans well in advance. If you want tacos this time around you will all have to figure out how to coordinate the preparation and expense for the food. The pop, ice, table fixings will all have to be hashed out. So I don't think it would be too early to start discussing the Xmas party at the September meeting. We had a great meeting in August with seven members present, and we now have twelve paid up SPACE members. I haven't kept a log on our membership counts but I bet it has been a long time since we counted twelve. This Club is beyond amazing as my treasurer's report will show! Beginning balance as of Aug 1, 2010: 805.10 Receipts for the August meeting: Memberships Doms
30.00 12.00
Total receipts for August 2010
42.00
No expenses for the month Ending balance as of August 31, 2010:
847.10
See what I mean!! How can a small Club of just twelve members keep going like this in the economy we are still battling? Do you know that our bank balance at this time last year was $787.25? You have all played a valuable part in keeping SPACE extremely solvent in these trying times. With a few memberships coming due in the next couple of months and a another auction although much smaller before year end, we may get close to the thousand dollar mark. Of course that would be if I don't get the room rental bill before the end of the year and we all know that is our biggest expense of $300.00. Wouldn't it be nice (sorry Beach Boys) if we reach year end with all expenses paid and we still had around $700.00 in our Treasury? That would be simpy amazing and that really says something about our SPACE members and all the support you provide. Long live SPACE!! Try to make the meeting next month. Those of you who missed the August meeting lost out on the chance to see a Jaguar running movies. Lance, Steve Peck and Nolan proved all the experts wrong when they said it couldn't be done. Maybe they will bring the Jaguar in again for a future presentation because they were really proud of their accomplishment and they prove that you are not always limited by what the mfgs. say their hardware is capable of providing. Kudos to Lance, Steve and Nolan. See you all next month. It's definitely worth coming because you just never know!! **********************************************
******************************************** BBS Corner By Nolan Friedland For September 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: Sunday, August 29, 2010 8:27 PM Subject: The Last Word 3.2 Released 29 August 2010 The Last Word 3.2 Released The gestation period is over. Nine months after the last non-beta release of The Last Word, version 3.2 is finally finished and available to download. The Last Word 3.2 includes: a.. Better file management features b.. Improved print formatter c.. Progress bars during disk I/O d.. Revamped keyboard layout e.. Improved customisation tools f.. Redesigned colour selector g.. Better SpartaDOS X integration h.. Configuration profiles i.. Numerous bug fixes j.. Updated 70 page manual k.. Collection of 55 fonts l.. Examples and support files Download the full package including DOS 2.5 and SpartaDOS X disk images and together with manual, font collection and font catalogue here: http://www.atari8.co.uk/ ********************************************
Secretary's Report By Steven Peck For August 2010
From: Michael Current [michael@mcurrent.name] Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 9:07 AM Subject: Altirra 1.7 released -from: phaeron -date: Sat Sep 4, 2010 9:11 PM
No minutes from the July meeting were submitted in time for this newsletter.
I've finally gotten a bit of a break, so I've released version 1.7 of my 8-bit Atari emulator, Altirra: http://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html
This version supersedes all 1.7 test releases. There won't be surprises for anyone who's been following those, but here are some highlights since 1.6 (full changelist is on the website): a.. Display is now accelerated on secondary monitors. b.. Support for emulation of flash cartridges and MyIDE. c.. Keyboard tweaks. d.. Portable mode. e.. Video recording. f.. Many fixes to undocumented CPU instruction execution. g.. Debugger stability fixes. h.. Disk write corruption fixes. i.. Several compatibility fixes and improvements to the HLE kernel. I've also updated the Hardware Manual, which now documents a few other corner cases such as the asymmetry in two-tone mode. I also corrected all of the cycle count numbers in the doc to be one lower to match the HPOS counter, with missile DMA at cycle 113 rather than cycle 0. Altirra itself still uses 0 for now since it's a big change to fix that, which I wasn't going to try for 1.7. Thanks for everyone who has tested the emulator, given feedback, submitted bug reports, etc. If you have suggestions, feel free to drop me a note. I've got a big backlog already, so I don't know what I'm going to be doing for 1.8, but I've love to hear what you think. I have some known hardware issues I plan to address, like bits 6/7 of PACTL/PBCTL, but I was thinking of also trying to address some UI issues, like not dumping into the debugger by default on a crash. ******************************************** ******************************************** ******************************************** ******************************************** ******************************************** ********************************************