![[STA Logo]](../sta/sta.gif)
Jon Ash - Forum STA 66 Rod Egglestone - Forum STA 67
To spool a printout from Calamus just select the button in the print menu called 'Other'. This will print via the operating system instead of directly to hardware.Heine Svendsen, Indigo 2
James Briggs - Forum STA 66 stapplications @ CiX - Forum STA 67
I see that my letter in issue 66 about the Millennium Bug evoked quite a response! I have found that the problem can be overcome by removing the FMClock from its port and disabling the associated software. The date and time then need to be entered after each boot-up using either:
I have used these and other programs to try to set the clock during boot-up but none work - the clock always sets itself back to 1985. This is a pity since it means that after 1999 I wont be able to automatically show my diary/calendar (which is in my Auto folder) at boot-up. Never-the-less, using either 1, or 2 above it is reassuringly possible to set the clock, and hence the diary/calendar to read the wished for date well into the next century. The only problem is the need to rest the clock each time boot-up occurs.
James Briggs
Could we have an ongoing item to generate a list of programs that are happy with dates in the next century? So far I have found that: Redacteur does accept the year 2000, but Home Accounts 2.3 does not - so I am looking for a replacement, any suggestions?J F Hobbs
I have been in touch with Marpet Developments for an answer to the problem of going into the next millennium. Their answer was short and to the point: "We will look at the problem if there are any ST machines around in the year 2000".Come on lads, let's tell them that Atari machines will outlive all others!
A R Clarke
Under the Julian Calendar (introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC) every 4th year was a leap year. This was quite good, but the errors were still significant. Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed an improvement in 1582, hence the Gregorian Calendar, whereby the end of century years had to be divisible by 400. This is very good, but still not perfect, and the earth's rotation is slowing down. Hence the need for leap seconds.The Gregorian calendar was not adopted immediately. UK held out until September 1752 by which time the errors accumulated under the Julian Calendar amounted to 11 days, so 2nd September 1752 was followed immediately by 14th. There were riots in London because most rents were collected monthly and landlords tried to charge a full months rent for September.
France had changed earlier, with the amusing result that the French and the English insist on different years for Newton's birthday.
Anyone with access to a UNIX system can call up CAL for September 1752 and it will be displayed correctly for UK. The Atari Planetarium also handles Julian and Gregorian dates correctly
David Leaver, leaver@netinfo.com.au
Can you obtain from the makers of PageAssistant a copy of their templates for the Paper Direct collection of pre-printed paper?Paul Matthews
We can supply the Paper Direct templates made by Spar Systems for use with PageStream and Calamus, but the big problem with them is that they only work with US paper sizes. Paper Direct do two ranges of papers: US sizes for North America and DIN sizes for Europe.I managed to get connected starting with the WWW130 package that you supplied me. However, it was not until I acquired HSModem that I achieved anything like reliable operation. The documentation says that STiK needs HSModem (or similar) to work properly, and it isn't lying. It really should be part of the WWW package. Nicholas Flintham makes it available on his site, but initially I found myself in a vicious circle. Without HSModem I could not maintain a connection long enough to download it.Since I use a Mega STe, HSModem gives me the additional advantage of much higher speeds on my serial ports.
The other big problem I faced involved the STiK TCP/IP settings. Transfer speed proved to be very sensitive to these and the recommendations of my service supplier gave about the worst possible result.
I was fortunate to get e-mail working after a fashion early on and the STiK community proved very helpful. I am very grateful to them - I probably wore out my welcome.
David Leaver, leaver@netinfo.com.au
Thanks for the feedback. HSModem is now supplied as part of the latest WWW kit on disks NW.73, NW.73a, and NW.74.
Does anyone remember the name and telephone number of the company that used to make a cable for transferring files between different makes of computers over their parallel ports?Heine B. Svendsen, Indigo 2
I have recently bought and installed Magic 5 on my 4Mb STE. This has caused problems with two programs in particular:
I got in touch with System Solutions (from whom I bought Magic) and they told me this was a 'known problem' with Calamus, and that a patch was available. Unfortunately they neglected to say where the patch could be obtained. Does anyone have any ideas?
Mike Dennison
The Virus Warning dialog in Redacteur usually only turns up when the PRG file has been edited and so changed the CRC of the file - a feature that was added after an early French version of Redacteur was pirated and distributed with a virus built into it. I'm bemused as to how MagiC can be causing this problem - it looks as if MagiC 5 needs some sorting out!Some of the deficiencies of Papyrus 4 have already been recorded such as no word counter and the inability to open ASCII files directly. To these I would like to add the absence of the file delete function that was in version 3. Useful features I would like to have would be a means of producing leading tabs and a special variable date character that can be set into a template that automatically converts to a fixed date when saving as a document. At present, unless the date is manually converted to fixed date after the template is loaded, the variable date is passed on to the document and updates every time the file is accessed thus losing the original date.
Another feature that I would find useful is the ability to change the case of all text in a marked block.
I consider Papyrus 4 to be an excellent document processor and look forward to future versions.
Brian A Wyndham
I have managed to get a SyQuest EZ-Flyer 230mb working with my Mega STe, albeit with a residual problem.The SyQuest is connected via the SCSI port on a SupraDrive FD-10, a gadget that uses 10MB 5.25" floppies and which used to be my hard drive on my 1040. I am presently using HDDriver Version 5.
HDDriver lets me use 512 byte sectors in a 32MB partition, or 1024 byte sectors in 64MB partitions, so I have partitioned the 230MB cartridge into 4 62MB parts, (and a 130MB cartridge also into 4).
HDDriver did not come with a formatter. My Supra formatter didn't really want to know about big partitions. The ADHI formatter worked happily with the SyQuest but produced larger logical sectors than were necessary with HDDriver. Now HDDriver has a utility that is supposed to repartition a formatted drive, but it refused to recognize the result produced by ADHI. I could have used the drive as it stood, but I liked the idea of the smaller sectors. I edited the partition boot sectors with the Supra editor and wrote a little program to zero the modified partitions. This involved a bit of guesswork because there is a bug in some versions of TOS that the HDDriver partitioner overcomes by marking a cluster as bad. Unfortunately the HDDriver documentation isn't sufficiently clear on this point for me to work out which of two possible candidates fixed the bug, so I marked them both as bad.
The residual problem is that when copying a group of folders and files, (say more than 50 files) I frequently get a TOS error message telling that an error occurred, and when I look, one or two of the destination files is zero bytes long.
I haven't encountered any booting problems, but my C drive is on the internal drive.
David Leaver, leaver@netinfo.com.au
I've read on the Internet that it is possible to use Gemulator 96 with a TOS image in place of MagiC. Is this correct, is it legal, and if so how is it done.K Robson
What you have read is correct. An inevitable consequence of making Gemulator 96 work with TOS-clones like MagiC is that it is now possible to use Gemulator 96 with disk based versions of TOS. To do this you need to take a copy of a TOS image, rename it to MAGIC_PC.OS and copy this file into your root directory (not into the GEMSYS folder).
Ideally all versions of Gemulator would have been able to work in this way, but as Atari Corp have repeatedly refused to licence TOS for uses other than in ROMs Darek Mihocka had to develop the Gemulator ROM Reader board so that Gemulator could use a legal version of TOS stored on ROMs.
Is it legal? It would certainly be a breach of Atari copyright for us to distribute disk based versions of TOS with Gemulator 96 - Darek has tried to get Atari to agree to this but they still are not offering licenses for using TOS like this. But if you have an Atari computer it is surely legal for you to copy the ROM into RAM - many utilities require this to be done so that they can patch TOS - and so it is difficult to see how it would be a breach of copyright to also copy the TOS image into the RAM of another computer, in this case a PC running Gemulator 96. So long as you own a computer with a legally acquired version of TOS then it's doubtful that you're going to be in breach of copyright for using a copy of TOS with Gemulator 96. There are utilities for copying TOS from ROM to a disk image file on FaST Club disk D.14.
Have you thought of publishing a list of the latest releases of commercial and popular shareware?We've tried this but it was badly supported and very time consuming. The Yolo Atari Club has been trying to do something like this with their International TOS Software Catalogue at http://virtual-markets.net/vme/yac/. If it gets updated maybe we should carry it on the OnLine disk? I recently bought a PC and put a Gemulator into it. It was my wish to run Signum v3.0 on my PC. Unfortunately, the Signum install program bombs. My Gemulator has TOS v2.6, and I wondered if it had TOS v1.6, like my current Atari 1040 STe, maybe it would work. Could you please explain what programs will and will not run with the Gemulator card and if the TOS version on it will make a difference?Aljo Wijnands
I don't think that the TOS version will make any difference, the most likely explanation is that the Signum install procedure is looking for some type of copy protection on the master disks. One of the few things that can cause problems with Gemulator is programs that use illegal operating system tricks to check for copy protection. Try installing Signum on your real ST and then copying all the files onto your PC.Thanks, that solved the problem.Aljo Wijnands
My main mono art program these days is the excellent ArabesquePro. With it I create original drawings, use it with Textsyle to create cards and posters, edit and modify imported drawings/clipart, and then print the results.The one thing I have not been able to do is import Arabesque creations into other systems, in whatever format they are saved as. Imagecopy does not recognize IMG, Degas or Gem from Arabesque. IMG comes up 'Incorrect Header', Degas and others are simply not recognized
Timeworks simply fails to import even if the item is cut down to block size. Degas and TouchUp simply says 'This is not a Picture File'.
I have in the past tried a cheat by creating a Degas file in Degas as a full screen border. Saving and then importing the file into Arabesque and adding detail into the border saving and endeavoring the get Degas to it take back - Degas was not having that either. Does anybody have any ideas?
J Ash
Not a clue! We do not have a copy of Arabesque here to try out. Are you sure that the files that you think are being saved as IMG and PI? are really IMG and Degas files and not, say, an Arabesque-only format file that is being saved with a IMG or PI? extension? It seems impossible that Arabesque can have been on the market for so long without anyone picking up on such a major flaw. Titan Designs now have the UK rights to Arabesque, maybe they will have a solution - or an upgrade - that will solve this problem for you.I use CAB frequently to check the FaST Club site, mainly just to see if the next issue of ST Applications has appeared. It would be much better if you wrote a few words about next issue on top of your homepage. I am not expecting that you to be able to state the exact publishing date, but some sign of life that appeared at least once a week would be great.Another way to give some sign of life would be to offer some kind of automatic warning by email to those subscribers who often are wondering how it is going with ST Applications. I would pay for it if it was available. But I am not interested in getting the big ZIP file sent to me via email. I can wait for the printed copy if I just know that it is on its way.
Paul Dion
It'd be great to be able to do more with the FaST Club and ST Applications web pages. The problem is that it's very difficult to justify devoting more hours on something that generates very little income. Proposals and offers of help will be gratefully received!I am thinking about buying an Atari Laser Printer to use with my Atari computer, but I am concerned that I will not be able to get spare parts and consumables for it.P Matthews
System Solutions were selling toner for Atari lasers some time ago and can probably source toner and drums from Germany, where lots of Atari laser printers were sold for use with Calamus on the strength of their amazingly fast DMA print speeds. You should also be able to source parts in the UK through suppliers of printer consumables. Atari laser printers were built around standard components; the SLM 604 uses the same print engine as the Mannesman Tally MT906 and the print engines for the SLM 804 were manufactured by TEAC.If you end up paying full retail price for SLM consumables then a drum and toner cartridge will cost well over £200. That's the same price as a HP DeskJet and a third of the price of a 600-dpi HP laser printer.
Jon Ash - Forum STA 67
Jon Ash is not alone with his boot problem from hard disc. I still use a drive B for backups from my Gasteiner (Quantum 52mb) HD. Very occasionally, the computer (STFM, TOS 1.4, 2.5MB) boots directly, but most often, it tries unsuccessfully from B. However, a disc in B does not help it to boot. Pressing the reset button then begins a normal sequence from C.To be honest, I have become so used to resetting that it no longer bothers me. On a machine, with an early motherboard like mine, at least one crash per session is normal, making frequent saving essential.
Phil Horton
David Joyce - Forum STA 66 D G Shipley - Forum STA 66
In Issue 66, David Joyce referred to the newer HP Deskjets as being unable to print the final 1.25" (say 32mm) of a page and felt that one cannot get round this problem on an Atari.Out of curiosity, I had a look at some of the facilities available with NVDI_3 and its driver-creating program MAKEPRN. In the case of the DJ500 and DJ550, the configurations of which can be incorporated into new drivers, the printable height is quoted as 275mm (out of a nominal A4 height of 295mm) leaving non-printable space of only 20mm to be shared between the top and bottom margins.
Facilities are also provided within Papyrus for the creation of new drivers and the "base" configurations are -- according to the handbook -- designed to maximize the printable areas. Looking at the DJ850, there is an annotation "For DIN A4 use HP500 drivers" and it would seem that the printable height for the DJ850 is 280mm with a top margin of 4mm and bottom margin of 11mm. Moving to the DJ500, there is an anomaly since the printable height is only 275mm but again there is an indication of the total of top and bottom margins only absorbing 20mm.
The above remarks are only theoretical since I have no access to a Deskjet. Nevertheless, there do seem to be indications that the printable areas mentioned by David may be improved upon when using applications that can take advantage of NVDI 3 (and no doubt NVDI 4) drivers or if using Papyrus. This could be especially useful when in landscape mode preparing A5 magazine work.
Steve Hill
Can I use a PC SVGA monitor with my ST? If so, will it run all three screen modes?K Ogden
Yes, it is possible to use a SVGA monitor with an ST; you just need a suitable cable. As most modern VGA and SVGA monitors don't support resolutions that require frequencies lower than 30kHz you will only be able to display ST high resolution, ST low and medium resolutions require a horizontal line frequency of 15.625kHz. Older Multisync VGA monitors will display all three ST screen modes, the NEC Multisync 3D was very popular with ST owners in the early 1990's.Ready made cables are available from most places that fix Atari computers, or you can make your own.
Atari 13-pin DIN VGA 15-pin D-type
1 Audio out 1 Red in
4 Monochrome detect 2 Green in
6 Green out 3 Blue in
7 Red out 4 Ground
9 H Sync. 6 Red ground
10 Blue out 7 Green ground
11 Monochrome out 8 Blue ground
12 V Sync. 10 Ground
13 Ground 11 Ground
13 H Sync.
14 V Sync.
For mono mode only you need to connect all the grounds together along with the Monochrome Detect, The H and V Sync. connect straight across, and the Monochrome out needs to be connected to the Red in, Green in and Blue in - all connected together.
If you have a monitor that can support Atari colour modes connect the three colour outputs to the inputs, and disconnect the Monochrome detect; for a full system that supports colour and mono modes you'll need to make a switch box that will allow you to toggle between these two configurations.
You emailed me a little while ago about where I could get some Mega ST keys. Well, I wrote to Best, and they sent me a catalogue and order form, so I sent the form off last week and yesterday a complete set of US keys for a Mega ST turned up. Total cost, including airmail P&P, less than UK20.00.Many thanks indeed for putting me in touch with these people. They provided excellent service, and I shall be writing to tell them so.
Harry Payne
Best Electronics are one of those rare companies that it is always a pleasure to do business with. And as they seem to have bought every last item of scrap from Atari Corp. they never fail to have just the bit that you require, they even have the service manuals for all Atari Computers. You can contact them at:Best Electronics 2021 The Alameda, Suite 290, San Jose, CA 95126, USA. Tel. (408) 243 6950 Fax. (408) 243 8274
Can anyone tell me about PC Ditto? What software will it run? Is it worth buying? Is it still available?G Smith
PC ditto 1.0 (and 2.0) is a software emulator that runs most all software written for the PC-XT 8088 and 8086 computers. It will run DOS 3.3 and DOS 5.0 (to my personal knowledge). It will run WordPerfect 4.1 and possibly 5.1 but not WP 5.2 and above. It runs DBIII and FOX Base OK. All text based application that I used worked fine. But it will not run Windows. The more graphics you used the slower it got. However, I used it for displaying PICTURES that didn't have an Atari compatible viewer. It was great for Quicken 4.2 (didn't use it on the upgrades). My biggest beef with the Atari was its lack (at the time) of good chequebook/ financial software, so PC-ditto worked great.I upgraded to PC-ditto 3.0, included a hardware card with a NEC-V30 CPU. This was much faster and more reliable then the software emulator, it ran at a Norton SI rating of 4.2 (about the speed of an AT 286 clone 286), however, it still was only emulating a PC-XT 8086 8088 CPU, so that reduced the software field. Graphic games worked much better and faster than those run on a native PC-XT with a NEC-V30 processor. (I had an HP Vectra laptop running on a NEC-V30 processor and tested them head to head.)
The primary limitation is the PC-XT world of software. Atari PD is much better than the PC-XT commercial stuff (in my opinion). I have since unplugged the PC ditto emulation and use my Atari for Atari software and bought an IBM for running IBM software.
PC-ditto software emulation sold for $90 US and TOAD still sells it (at a lower price). The PC-ditto hardware emulator sold for $350 US and I haven't seen it for sale anywhere. Mine is wrapped and packaged up. I have taken it to user group meetings just for the fun of it. It really demonstrates the ingenuity and innovation of the Atari programmers.
Ron, whittam@primenet.com
I would like the facility to select a portion of a picture (as in the CD format) in other formats - especially JPG, which preserves the original picture resolution and colours. Cutting from a displayed image only gives screen resolution and if the block is printed, one gets a "blocky" picture! I use Poly Press scanning service to have photographs scanned to floppy in JPG and would like to select portions to print (faces, etc.), using Imagecopy when doing DTP (in colour).W A Yarrow
Another one for the To Do list. See this months news pages for details of the latest beta version of Imagecopy.I am particularly interested in Imagecopy 4 as advertised in Atari World magazine. I notice that the Imagecopy 4 package includes Textstyle. I wonder if it is possible to create greeting cards without having to 'overprint'. My daughter uses Printmaster, the public domain programme, for this purpose on her STE and outputs the result through a Deskjet 510 printer that is connected to my computer. This involves her having to mess around with the dip- switches. I'm sure that Imagecopy 4 offers a much more sophisticated array of features and would appreciate if you could clarify this one point.J Mills
Yes, that's easy with the layout option in Imagecopy 4. There is a set of Imagecopy Christmas card templates designed by Jeremy Hughes on FaST Club disk NW.83 if you want to get ready for next Christmas!Here's a disk containing my latest shareware offerings.
Geneticopoly v4.11 (shareware)
This is the latest version (and probably the last) of my Monopoly-type program, and should replace the copy already in your library.
Lottery v2.14 (shareware)
This is the latest version of my National Lottery numbers analyser/generator.
Blokjack v1.00 (shareware)
This is a desk accessory/stand-alone (depending on the name extension it's given) version of Tetris, which operates in any resolution (colour blocks in low res, mono blocks in medium & high res), with any number of simultaneous players (since my version of GEM can only handle up to seven open windows, though, seven is the limit for me), a variable sized game board (just resize it as you would any window), a choice of ten skill levels and an on-disk high score table.
US States Quiz v1.00 (shareware)
A simple little program, based on the Dolan's earlier effort, to test the player on the names and capitals of US states, using a political map of the USA as the main graphic.
Sorts v1.00 (freeware)
C source tools to assist in the development of desk accessories and sorting algorithms. Template is a full DA-driver program, by the way, and it's the same driver I used to write Blokjack.
Roy Stead
As I am writing to you anyway, I thought you might like a contribution to your public domain library. It's a program called Sound Chip Synth, and unsurprisingly, uses the FM sound chip to generate all-manner of bleeps and so on. The program is sort-of- shareware, in that registered users will be entitled to free bug- fixes, user support and so forth, but that I also don't mind if nobody bothers. The second program on the disk is a MIDI Monitor utility for musicians (it's simplicity itself really), written by myself too. I will be updating the MIDI Monitor for the public domain, but the next revision of Sound Chip Synth is being sold for £5 by Sunrise Electronics.Danny McAleer
Thanks, the software by Roy Stead is on disk NW.81 and Sound Chip Synth etc. are on disk NW.82.
![[Next Article]](../sta/next.gif)
![[Back to Contents
Page]](../sta/back_c.gif)