SPACE Newsletter

I NEWSLETTER President's Corner by Michael Current

July, 1999

July, 1999

1

Secretary's Report by Mike Weist July, 1999

Space Minutes, June 10, 1999 SPACE celebrates our 17th birthday this Friday, July 9, can you believe it?? I've only been a member for 4 years, but this chili started in 19821?! Incredible, but we're still here, and still going strong. Come help celebrate, as the club will pick up the tab for a pizza party at the annual birthday party. We'll order enough for however many people show up by 7:30, so be there on time! I visited the JagFest in Rochester on Friday, June 18. It was a smallish event, but not as lame as I feared. In fact, I thought it was fairly cool, and I don't even own a Jaguar! There were maybe a dozen of them around, along with a few other things like the 7800, a 2600, and the Lynx. Not that many people, but this event lasted for 12 hours so I'm sure different people showed up all day. My personal highlight was playing 7800 BallBlazer with Randy. He won, but it was the joysticks! Just before the June meeting Michael Schmidt came up with the 1994 revision of the club Bylaws, which needed to be merged with the 1993 edition we started with this year, and the change we've made so far. I've done that, and the result is both on the web site and I should have some paper copies as well. As it turns out, we haven't lost any ground. In fact, the change I was suggesting two months ago was already made in 1994! (So we didn't have a vote at the June meeting.) So at this point, we can continue where we left off, with Article IV. My modified suggestions are: --I'm thinking the Secretary should be an elected officer position, like President, Vice-President and Treasurer. -Specify in Section 2 that the Secretary shall produce written Minutes for each meeting, and these shall appear in the Newsletter. -Drop the Paper & Educational Software Librarian volunteer position. What about the BBS Operator position? Maybe between 7:30 and when the pizza arrives we'll have time to discuss some of these ideas, and especially any of yours? See you there!

Michael Current, Space club president, opened meeting at 7:35 PM. Michael asked for a secretary report for the May meeting. Mike Weist, club secretary, recapped the minutes printed in June newsletter Michael Current next asked for a treasurer report. Greg Leitner, club treasurer, gave a report Greg stated the club took in $125 from the May auction. The club also had 4 DOM sales and 1 membership renewal. The total income for May was $155. The club paid out $10 for the BBS cosfto Lance Ringquist. The treasury balance stands at $1521.83. Greg also stated that the treasury balance could be at $1600 by July meeting. Greg said $57 will be paid out for post office box charges. Mike Schmidt. newsletter editor will be paid $26.40 for three months of newsletters(April, May, June). Greg said that quarterly room rent of$195 will be paid out at the end of July or first part of August. Lance Ringquist was not present at meeting to receive payment of $10 for BBS service tonight. Michael Current asked for a membership report. Glenn Kirschenmann, membership chair, stated that the club currently has 19 members. Michael Current asked for Disk of the month report. Glenn Kirschenmann, DOM chair, stated that the DOM had basic programs from a Gennessee Atari club and from 5 1/4 disks from Greg Leitner, club treasurer. OLD BUSINESSMichael Current, Space club president, stated that he received 1994 bylaw change copies from Glenn Kirshenmann and Mike Fitzpatrick. Michael stated he had copies of the 1994 bylaws changes for anybody that was interested. Michael stated that recent changes to the bylaws stand. There would be no discussion or changes to the bylaws tonight. Michael will study the copies of the 1993 and 1994 bylaws for future bylaw changes consideration.

Michael Current said the Rochester Jagfest will be next Friday, June 17, 1999. The show opens at 10 am. It will be held at the Holiday Inn in Rochester. Michael will attend the show. Michael Current talked about the Space 17th birthday party that will be held at the July Space meeting. Several ideas

were discussed about what kind of party the chJb wanted. Michael said a BBQ would be nice but it would take preparation and it may rain. Greg Leinter said a potluck would be nice. Mike Weist said eating out somewhere would be nice . It was finally decided to order in pizza at the Falcon Heights City Hall. NEW BUSINESSNONE

E-Mail Postings From Michael Current, SPACE President

From: "Dean Garraghty" <dgs@clara.net> Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit Subject: NEW LOW PRICES FROM DGS Date: Thu Jun 24 07:13:59 1999

Meeting adjourned at 8: IO PM

n~

Treasurer's Report

by Greg Leitner - - July, 1999

I was hopping for a good turnout for the June meeting but it wasn't to be. As Jackie and I were getting ready to leave for the meeting from Inver Grove heights, we noticed teenagers in the Simley High School parking lot with graduation gowns on. I then realized that we had another conflict this time with many graduations taking place throughout the Twin Cities. I know this will happen to me next year when my son, Tony, graduates from Simley in the year 2000. It is certain to be on the second Friday in June next year. I already know that I will be missing the August meeting this year because one of our friend's son is getting married that day. So I know that we can't always make all of the meetings. With the eight members present at the June meeting we were still successful in taking in more than we spent The Auction went well again and we cleared $ 110.00 profit for the evening. Also, we had DOM sales of$18.00 and one membership renewal of$15.00. So in all we had a deposit of $143.00 and the only expenses we had was three months of the SPACE Newsletter and the P. 0. Box renewal fee. These expenses were $26.40 and $57.00 respectively. Our Treasury increasoo to $1,581.43 for the month ended-June 30tli; 1999. Now for next month. We decided to have a go at a Pizza Party for the SPACE Birthday meeting in July. This time I will wait to order the Pizzas until the official meeting start time which is 7:30. The Club will pick up the tab for the Pizzas and I will bring the beverages. Other members have signed up for the utensils and napkins and desserts. Come and have a good time and don't be shy in bringing your spouses, kids and/or friend The Auctions will be discontinued for a while and I think we are probably in need of a break. This will give us more time to discuss Club business or just converse more after the meetings. I am looking forward to that as I have been quite occupied with the Auctions and haven't had time to talk to some of you. Please come to the July Birthday Bash and let's celebrate a great year that we have experienced since the last Birthday Party. See you all there.

We are pleased to announce that we have been able to reduce the cost of some of our Atari 8-bit products, as follows: QUICK Complete Package - GBPI0 (US$20) Screen Aided Management (SAM) Complete Package GBPlO (US$20) QUICK ED Character Set EditorGBP3.00 (US$6) RubberBall-game ---GBP2 (US$4) Bombi gameGBP2 (US$4) Minesweeper game - GBP2 (US$4) Glaggs It! game - GBP2 (US$4) Pack of all 4 games above - GBPS (US$ IO) Most of these savings are around 30% off the original costs. These new prices are permanent, not just temporary special offers. Full details of all these products are available in our new on-line catalogue, which is now in two parts: Public Domain Catalogue, and Commercial Software Catalogue. Both are selected from the 'Catalogue' option from our website at: http://www.dgs.clara.net The prices shown above include P&P for UK orders. US orders are subject to a small shipping charge of 10% of order value, minimum US$5. This is for Air Mail, which takes around 5 days. Recently, it was stated by somebody in this newsgroup that QUICK is Public Domain. I can assure you that is it IS NOT. Dean Garraghty

dgs@clara.net

Subj: CGE '99 update Date: 99-06-25 16:39:45 EDT For immediate release Contact John Hardie, Sean Kelly & Keita Iida info@cgexpo.com 516-568-9768 http://www.cgexpo.com

Subj: APE and Prosystem '98 Beta Available Date: 99-06-17 17:08:27 EDT From: "Steven J. Tucker" <ail23@FreeNet.Carleton.CA>

LEGENDARY HARDWARE PIONEERS TO PARTICIPATE IN HISTORIC ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION

Excellent stability under even the heaviest system loads, runs as a real windows device driver in the background. No more sputtering or timeouts when running programs.

June 10, 1999

Runs in the system tray and uses 0% of the CPU when idle, even on a 486 system. Does not use more than 3-4% of available CPU time even when loading from the Atari at highest possible speed.

VALLEY STREAM, NY -- The founding fathers of some of the most popular videogame machines and computers will get together for an unprecedented panel discussion during this year's Classic Gaming Expo '99(tm) (CGE). Tney are expected to share their experiences in how their systems came to be and shed some light on the trials and tribulations in designing game hardware. The panel will consist of such legends as Ralph Baer (creator of the Magnavox Odyssey), Jay Smith (GCE Vectrex), Jerry Lawson (Fairchild Channel F), Jay Fenton (Bally Astrocade), RJ Mical (Commodore Amiga, Atari Lynx & 3DO) and Joe Decuir (Atari 2600, 400/800 computers & Commodore Amiga).

Final beta test versions of Ape '98 and Prosystem '98 are now available for registered users of APE. A few of the new features in APE '98 vs. the dos version are:

8 independany PC-MIRROR drives, as well as the complete big disk support your used to in APE. Each independant PCMIRROR drive can also act as an independant APELOADER drive if your OS supports booting from drives other than drive l. A file browser with built-in support for viewing the complete directory tree of any Atari/Mydos or Spartados image, and extracting files.

"It is an absolute honor to be in such great company," said Jerry Lawson, fonner Chief Hardware Engineer at Fairchild and creator of Channel F, the first ever programmable and cartridge-based game console. "I look forward to telling my story behind the Channel F , but I'll also be there as a fan, just like everyone else in the conference hall."

Advanced printer support. Print from your Atari to any windows printer driver, using truetype fonts, direct to the pc printer port, to a file, or to a print monitor window.

The panel discussion is scheduled to take place on Saturday, August 14, at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Van Burnham, author of the forthcoming book "Supercade: Context and Aesthetics of the Videogarne Age 1971-1984" (The MIT Press) and Senior Production Manager of Wired ?-1fagazine, will moderate the round table.

The prosystem has been completely rewritten and includes batch support of 1-4 drives for every operation. Need to image a bunch of disks? Just hook four drives upto your Prosystem interface and press start. Need to format a box of disks? how about formatting all 4 drives at once to make things easier and faster?

"We are delighted that the leaders for just about every major U.S. game machine will be represented in the panel discussion. I would be hard pressed to think of any other time in history when such an all-star cast of gaming's greatest hardware pioneers have come together in one location," stated Sean Kelly, Co-Promoter of Classic Gaming Expo.

To get your beta copy just e-mail me with your registration information and I will send you the dpownload URL and password. Any information regarding bugs or new features would be greatly appriciated.

Conceived and coordinated by three of the individuals responsible for coordinating last year's highly successful "World of Atari" event, Classic Gaming Expo(tm) is the industry's only annual event that is dedicated to celebrating the roots of electronic entertainment, bringing together industry pioneers, gaming enthusiasts and the media for the ultimate in learning, game-playing and networking. Classic Gaming Expo(trn) is a production of CGE Services, Corp. (www.cgexpo.com) #4#1END #4#1-

Plus many other new features like the nice GUI and ease of use. Check it out if you have Windows and are using APE.

Thanks Steve * * * Author oflmagic and APE The Atari Peripheral Emulator! * * * * * *Tum your 8-bit Atari into a powerhouse with APE!* * * * * *Ape Homepage: http://www.nacs.net/--classics* * * !! Request my *FOR SALE* LISTING OF CLASSIC VIDEO GAME STIJFF !! 2000+ Lines ! !

Subj: Atari disk image conversion utility Date: 99-06-1111:38:17 EDT From: Jindrich Kubec <kubecj@asw.cz> Hello! I've finally released my ACVT utility. It's replacement for all those DCM2ATR, XFD2ATR, ATR2XFD etc. programs. This program can handle four well know Atari formats ATR, XFD, DCM and SCP and can convert between them. It also can repair few broken A TR/XFD images.

-xfd -atr -scp -dcm options are output type modes. Default is atr. -batchmode: turns on multi file processing mode. Only input files are specified on command-line (Unix-like compatible regexp expressions are allowed when compiled under DJGPP). Output filenames are created automatically. -autorepair: automatically determines the best repair method. -norepair: doesn't ask for repair options and considers input file invalid.

Here is readme: -errstop: in batch mode ends on first error encountered. Acvt vl.00 (c) 1999 Jindrich Kubec <kubecj@asw.cz> Latest version can be found at http://www.asw.c:z/~kubecj This program is-provided 'as is', no warranty will be taken for any damage cause4, by it or by any use of it.

-over: overwrites existing files. Otherwise returns and error.

f.

-test only loads input images and displays their state. History:

The whole package is placed under the GNU Public License, for further information on redistribution see the included file "GPL.TXT".

Date

Author

Version Description

5/22/1999 kubecj 5/25/ 1999 kubecj 5/29/ 1999 kubecj

0.10 0.15 0.20

Converts between four basic image formats. Currently supported are: A TR - SIO2PC images XFD - XFormer images DCM - DiskCommunicator images SCP - SpartaDos SCOPY images

5/30/1999 kubecj 6/1/1999 kubecj 6/2/1999 kubecj 6/2/1999 kubecj

0 .30 0 .35 0 .39 0.40

6/2/1999 kubecj

0.41

It's replacement for DOS version of Steven Tucker's lmagic. It's in fact better because: 1) It's free. 2) It comes with source. 3) Therefore it could be ported to another architectures. 4) Contains less bugs. {Hope so.) ?) Can repair some invalid images.

6/3/1999 kubecj 6/4/1999 kubecj

0.42 0.43

6/5/ 1999 kubecj

1.00

Thanks go to: Ernest Schreurs for his DiskCommunicator dissection and paper about DCM format. Chad Wagner for DCMtoATR utility (DCM driver is still loosely based on his code).

Maybe check pass count in DCM images?

Description:

First version SCP save added DCM save added, decompression corrected Code cleanup Invalid DD ATR repair added Invalid DD XFD repair added Invalid ATR length repair added Added cached read for DCM decompression Code cleanup Added checks for DCM..., check formulti-arc First public version

To Do:

Known Bugs: DCM record 0x42 is not decompressed, code is present, but commented out and untested. I need some sample first.

Usage: Acvt [options] sourcefile [destfile] sourcefile is Atari disk image (ATR,XFD,SCP,DCM). destfile is output disk image. If omitted, output filename is created automatically.

Function for actual conversion is stupid. In fact in order to convert ATR to XFD there is created Atr object, loaded in, and same Xfd object is created and all the data are duplicated. With 16MB SpartaDOS Atr images it's simply too much.

Compiling Tools: For PC executables DJGPP is used. It could be found at http://www.delorie.com. Sources were written/tested on GCC/lntel only. There should be only slight problems to port it to different architectures/environments. Makefile should need only slight changes.

Jindroush <kubecj@asw.cz> See http://www.asw.cz/~kubecj for Atari 8bit utils!

Television I P O E R E T S L A I C E P S

T N B B P S S Y S L A C OL N AOFRROLGMWRMJKO

L A N O I T A C U D E I OR 0 K D R A MA I Z S K P N N S T S Y K D E E C F I K O I Q GR H B Y C T MR J C B P S X B A

0 U T A I B E C V P A E T F C Subj: Professional AKI board now available! Date: 99-06-17 11:56:39 EDT From: MacFalk2@aol.com Theres a new professional maded board for the "AKI" (Atari Keyboard Interface) available now!

WS N Y E D E WG C P V

S T I N

M E Y Y

S O D E

MM M S O P C O

I D E O

M A L I

O S L D

R I E S

F O D M C Z Q K P L U b

D O G G I A S R A Y C P GK E MDQRUNETWORKCAG

N WC A B L E S Y H R D WH I

Some of the features: - connects any standard PC keyboard with your ATARI - full plugable, only 4 soldering points needed (only if POKEY is socketed) - option for a separate macro memory (up to 8Kbytes) - output pin for switching several OS-Roms or Ramdisks - the 'hanging key' software bug is removed For some pictures and a short description of the new board look at: http://www.macfalkner.de -> atari projects -> AKI bye, MacFalkner

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-CLUB OFFICIALS

DISCLAI:NIER-

President: _ Michael Current l507~663-9029 Vice President: Greg Leitner 651 455-6550 Published by the Saint Paul Ata ri Computer Enth usias'.s _ Michael Weist 651 777-6794 . (SPACE). an independent organization with no business Secretary: Glen Kirschenmann (612)786-4790 a!filialion with ATARI Corporation. Permission is grnnlec DO~! Librarian: Paper Librarian: . Vacant XXX-XXXX to any similar organization with whi_c h SPACE ex char.ge; Software Librarian: . Vacant XXX-XXXX newsletters l o reprint material from lhis news\eller . We c0 Membership Chairman: Glen Kirschenmann (612)786-4790 SPACE Treasurer Greg Leitner (651)455-6550 however ask lhal credit be given lo the authors and l o ::?A':~ SPACE Newsletter Editor: Michael Schmidt (612)757-4192 Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do r: ot necessarily rerlecl the views of ·sPACE, the club office ~s. club rr.embers or ATARI Corporation.

Saint Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts (SPACE)

You can find the Cl-ub's _home page a l: http: //www. library.car1et on. e du/sp ace /

meets on lhe second Friday of each month at 7:30 PM

in the Falcon Heights Community Center at 2077 West Larpenteur Ave. Doors open at 7:00 PM.

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SPACE BBS

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Co-sysop: Open Position Supporting: ATARI 8 - Bit Computers - ATARI ST Computers·

S.P.A.C.E. P.O. Box 1'20016 New Brighton, MN

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