Contents

HomePage

NVDI 4 arrives in typical System Solutions style. Two 3.5 inch DD disks with a 32 page manual in an A5 plastic wallet. The first thing that strikes you about the package is the manual, "Atari ST/TT/Falcon 030/Mac", it proudly boasts. Mac? A clue perhaps to which area of computing NVDI 4 now covers. A Mac running MagicMac (required if you want to use NVDI 4 on a Mac) is already many times faster then a Falcon running MagiC 4, even if that Falcon's been fitted with the latest accelerator card. Surely NVDI 4 isn't going to make the Mac appear that much faster, and you're right it isn't. Making an Atari look faster by speeding up its screen display is no longer NVDI's main function. That function still exists, and is still performed with expert skill and reliability, however its font scaling or SpeedoGDOS functions now surpass its previously primary job of acceleration. This is the main reason for including Mac as a choice when it comes to system requirements. It allows the Mac under MagicMac to access Speedo's font scaler thus making MagicMac even more Atari compatible.

I'm not a Mac user and this isn't a Mac mag so lets get back to the Atari. NVDI in this country has always had a GDOS replacement built in. This, as I've already said, has developed into a full blown SpeedoGDOS replacement which has really come of age in version 4. It supports Speedo and TrueType vector fonts as well as the older bitmap fonts familiar to those of you who've had dealings with GDOS 1.1. The difference between vector and bitmap fonts is well known but for new comers to this area here's a very quick run down.

To activate a font it had to be copied to the font folder called BTFONTS. To stop a font from installing you copied the font to a folder called HIDE inside the BTFONTS directory. Not a difficult operation I agree but some of the font file names can be pretty cryptic, so you often had problems identifying the fonts you wished to install or hide. This problem has been addressed with the inclusion of Fontname. A utility designed to ease the font installation process. Fontname can also be used to view fonts and print them.

Printers are obviously a vital part of all modern computer systems and it's great having vector fonts on screen but little point if you can't print out your latest best seller. NVDI 4 caters for all major printers, but for those of you who wish to fine tune it's performance for your particular printer the program Makeprn is supplied. Within this utility every aspect of your printers operation can be adjusted, including colour.

On the down side to all this you're going to need quite a powerful Atari setup. To get full use from NVDI 4 you're going to need a minimum of two megabytes of RAM and a hard disk. Why the memory? Well each letter of a vector font has to be constructed each time you press a key on the keyboard. A painstaking and slow process. The best way to speed this process up is to store each character of the font in memory after it has been built. This will speed up operation considerably but will use memory and hard disk space. The minimum memory cache NVDI will work from is 80Kb but the more you can put to one side the quicker NVDI 4 will operate.

If you're currently using NVDI 2.5 on a floppy based Atari and have no desire to use vector fonts then I'd have to say stick with it.

However if you are using vector fonts with Speedo 4 or 5 I'd say an upgrade to NVDI 4 is well worth the expense.

NVDI 3 users, if you have a colour printer or you're using MagiC (NVDI 4 has been specially optimised for Magic) I'd say an upgrade was on the cards. If you're using a mono printer under standard TOS I'd say an upgrade was only worth it if you're the kind of person who just has to have the latest software, but then if you are that kind of person you'll have it already.

In use NVDI 4 has been as reliable as all its previous versions. To sum up all I'll say is if you're using an Atari you need NVDI in one form or another.

Contents

HomePage