James Briggs - Forum STA 66
stapplications @ CiX - Forum STA 67
James Briggs - Forum STA 68
J F Hobbs - Forum STA 68
A R Clarke - Forum STA 68
David Leaver - Forum STA 68

• The year 2000 is a leap year.


• January 1st falls on a Saturday.


• The only years in this century that meet the requirements of 1 and 2 are 1972, 1944 and 1916.

The only programs that I have tried where date input is required at start-up have rejected 1972. If we are to accept that the day is not critical then the leap years 1984 (Sunday Jan 1st) and 1988 (Friday Jan 1st) would appear to be the most acceptable years to use, to take us up to 2016 or 2012.

J F Hobbs

Michel Tavir

SyQuest EZ

Ralph WIlliams - Forum STA 67
David Leaver - Forum STA 68

W L Baker

Perhaps Ralph Williams could try this, or maybe there is a better solution?

K L Yull

Hard Drives

Wally Smith

A more cost-effective option may be to go for a second-hand hard drive -- they sell for as little as £40 but are very popular as all die-hard Atari users put a hard drive near the top of their must-have-next shopping list. It may even make sense to buy a second-hand Atari set-up, keep the hard drive and any useful software, and then sell on the rest of the hardware and software.
The third option is to consider buying a replaceable media drive such as a Syquest EZ drive or an Iomega ZIP drive. One of these complete with an Atari interface cable should cost around £250. One advantage to choosing this route is that you will be able to use the drive with any computer that you buy in the future.

C & P Rossiter

Derek Smith

Atari Laser Printers (etc.)

P Matthews - Forum STA 68

Jon Ash's alleged review of PAK68 has evidently vanished without trace. No mention of it in STA 68, nor any word of explanation. This review was supposed to have been in STA 67, but did not seem to be.

Your advice to Paul Mathews (Forum, STA 68) on Atari Laser consumables is a tad optimistic. In June last year I sent System Solutions a cheque for an SLM804 drum on the basis of their assurances. Oh yes, they'd get one from Germany. Lots of people using Atari lasers, y'know. And I thought so, too. During the ensuing months I wasted a good deal of money phoning them up and receiving an ever-thickening flannel. There was no end to what they weren't going to do, and it was no problem at all. Needless to say, the drum never came. Nor did any letter of apology or explanation, far less the return of my uncashed cheque. I have also sent cheques to two other companies on the promise of drivers for FWP and HP lasers, and run up more phone bills, but again... promises, promises. Nobody keeps them any more. Words are the cheapest currency in town.

Finally, I have spent the last six months in a determined effort to brain wash myself into the conviction that I could go out and buy a Windows NT PC, and that yes, I could learn to love it like my ST. Just when I've almost completed this task, Dave Howell puts the fear of God back in me with his Atari Life article (STA 68). But then why, if the PC is such an abomination, if its OS is designed to mutilate and even lock out end users... why is the ground not thick with the bodies of PC'ers who have committed suicide? Why are the pages of PC World relatively free of letters from embittered PC owners?

Could it just be, as a matter of policy, that nothing complimentary about the PC world is allowed to appear in the pages of STA? As a source of blood-curdling statements about the PC, STA is surely second to none. Trouble is, I find them all totally credible.

Another Atari clone on the way! Could someone do a piece on the size of the Atari clone market? How can these ventures be commercial? And what madness is it that causes the latest clone makers to write a whole new OS, with a whole raft of new bugs and compatibility problems to contend with? Surely TOS is the main benefit of owning an ST? It's small, reliable, and unchanging. It does not require an 80MB partition on your hard disc, and vendors don't leer when you suggest you could get away with less than 32MB RAM... 64MB would be better, Sir. Didn't I read just recently that the Hades had only just clocked up a user base of 100? Who is going to distribute and support these clones? Where can you get the Canadian clone? Where can you see it? Has anyone bought one yet?

No, I'm not having a nice day.

Dr. John F. Reilly

ST Applications doesn't set out to be anti-PC, we just print the letters and articles we receive. I guess that there is bound to be a tendency for readers who have used a PC and hated the experience to write about it in STA, and for readers who fell in love with their PCs to rapidly stop reading STA altogether!

Using a PC does not have to be a nightmare, and it is pretty simple to lock yourself out of an ST set-up by simply installing a corrupt or incompatible accessory or Auto folder program. Install MagiC and all the latest system patches from Germany and you can quickly create an Atari set-up that is a maze of incompatible utilities and badly written INF files.

The big culture shock for Atari users who move onto a PC is that you soon realize that you no longer know the purpose of many of the files on your hard drive; it is this feeling of being out of control that alienates users. The manner in which applications scatter files around unrelated directories is bewildering and you really need an un-install utility to keep track of what is going on. Added to this you have the tiresome manner in which applications fail to give the user any real choices over which of their clip art, font and wizard files will be installed; and, worst of all, the infuriating manner in which applications install themselves as the default application for all file types that they are able to load, so overwriting your last settings.

You can use toner cartridges for the TEC LB 1301 with an SLM804, as they're identical to the ones used by Atari. The drum unit is also identical. Other compatible printers that use the same printer engine and consumables include the Toshiba PageLaser 6, as well as some old printers made by Olivetti and Manesman Tally.

Best of Both Worlds

MagiC Mac adamantly refused to accept it and subsequent dire screen warnings sent shivers down my spine! Apparently, this phenomenon only occurs with the Performa 5400 - a relatively new Macintosh model. Happily, within a few days, Anthony Cambray at System Solutions solved the problem - sending me a supplementary 'upgrade' disk that worked like a charm.

Papyrus 4 is deservedly highly regarded in Atari circles and matches anything I've come across in the PC and Mac worlds for user-friendliness, flexibility and effectiveness. Supported formats include TIFF, JPEG, Targa, PhotoCD, GIF, and more. What more could one ask for?

Combined with NVDI 4 and Ease, MagiC Mac occupies what is in effect its own folder within the Mac's operating system. It's a robust program and, incidentally, accepts Imagecopy 4 as an accessory. As the saying goes, "I'm enjoying the best of both worlds!"

Keith Markland

Papyrus

The update to Papyrus is well worthwhile simply because of the greatly improved Toolbar controls, and the ability to view pages side-by-side (somewhat similar to Calligrapher, except that the Papyrus windows are fully active) is a real plus. Other improvements have been made which have less appeal for me, but which others would obviously value more highly. Overall, the update is attractive at £39 and I have no hesitation in recommending it, though one should mention that a hard drive is essential for Papyrus 4, whereas version 3 could just manage on floppies; the need for at least 2.5MB RAM remains, of course.

Whilst writing, I wonder if anyone has managed to use a Panasonic KXP 6500 laser printer with an ST (more particularly, with Papyrus)? I see that this printer is well reported on in the PC press - somewhat better results than the HP LaserJet 5L and cheaper to run - and I really shall have to take a decision on a replacement for my old dot-matrix printer! Once again, the question of printer drivers raises its ugly head and I must confess to some doubts as to my ability to construct a driver even though some facilities for this are present in Papyrus.

As an aside, and referring to John Ash's review of the Epson 500 in issue 66, I have noticed a couple of other reviews of high resolution colour ink-jet printers in which mention is made of a need to re-align the print heads when changing ink cartridges. And, again, the re-alignment is carried out using software that cannot be used on Ataris. (Possible solution: lug the printer down to a shop selling PCs and hope that they will load up the software, hitch up one's printer and carry out the procedure? But be very careful not to jar the printer on the way home!)

Steve Hills

But now, as we just started using Papyrus 4.25, it refuses to open (issuing the same message) some files which Papyrus 3 has no problems opening whatsoever. As one of these files is our company catalogue (52 pages), we think things are getting slightly out of hand.

We have temporarily resolved the problem by reading the file into v.3, making successive blocs, saving these on the Clipboard and pasting them in new, separate files (still in v.3), then saving the latter on disk and eventually loading them, still one at a time, in v.4.

There are also some things that we'd like to see taken care of in a future upgrade:

• A search-and-replace function within tables


• The demise of the [CTL]+[DEL] shortcut for rows in tables is profoundly regretted.


• A module that converts PAP files into HTML files.

Michel Tavir
Tingo Tanca
tingo@compuserve.com

One Of The Family

The school where I taught had several BBC B machines and I volunteered to teach word processing to 15-year olds. Exciting times, especially when the whole network shut down for no apparent reason! I learnt a lot about the intricacies of the BBC operating system. I scribbled down odd commands that the IT teacher used in a little red book and whenever I didn't know what to do I tried them out. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. Eventually, commuters seemed to be a good thing and I thought I would buy one. But what sort?

I didn't spend long thinking about it. The same IT Teacher recommended the Atari. I don't know why. Two months later he ordered a dozen Amigas for the Art Department and any hope I might have had of printing my work out on a decent laser printer evaporated. I was by then stuck with a 9-pin dot matrix.

I went to a little shop in Bath which was offering the best deal at the time. A year or so later I went back to buy something else and the shop had turned into a junk shop - the assistant pretended that the original owner had disappeared (though I thought I could see him out the back repainting a wooden dining chair), perhaps thinking that I wanted my money back for something that had been sold the week before.

My Atari, though, was incredible after those BBC's. Just switch on and go - almost literally. I was given a pirated copy of First Word, then First Word Plus, and then I started to buy some (legal) programs. All those games we got with those early Atari's! I've still got them, but I never play them now. In fact I never played them much when I bought the Atari - the kids did and were soon proficient. I was too old for games, except for bridge, which I still use regularly.

I also bought a colour TV. Cheaper, I thought, than a colour monitor. But it hurt my eyes when I typed. Then I bought a colour monitor. Not much better. Then I bought a mono monitor. I still use the mono one. My son uses the colour one.

It was the STFM I had at first. I fiddled with loads of programs, bought the manuals for the ones that were given away on the fronts of magazines and now hardly use more than three or four old favourites. I now also have a 2 meg STE, bought for £60, and a 40 meg hard drive, a 24-pin dot matrix and loads of disks full of PD software that I hardly ever use.

The favourite programs? Redacteur for word processing. I would have liked it to be more like Calligrapher, which I seldom use, with its easy-to-use fonts and boxes, but Redacteur is a much nicer thing. I have an old copy of PageStream. I would like it to be able to use colour, and I keep thinking of buying the new version, but would I really find it useful? I use the ST mainly for writing work sheets or reports for school. (My wife gets a lot of use out of it - out of me actually as I have to do all the typing, etc. I do as I am told. She is a teacher as well.) I also use Personal Finance Manager (a great deal) and K-Spread (a little).

I wouldn't be without the dear old Atari ST and although I sometimes look longingly at the ads for PCs with CD ROMS, I know that I'll never have the time (or the money) to get the most out of them. And besides, I know that I'll never be intelligent enough to work a PC properly. I've seen them working at school, or seen other people working trying to get them to function effectively. I would like to use a modem and link up to the world wide web, whatever that is, and I do keep getting ST Applications, although 80% of it nowadays goes completely over my head. I really do not know what most of the articles are about and the reviews are of items that I could never imagine having any relevance to me. Still, it is nice to know that I'm not the only one who still has an Atari. As I said, I wouldn't be without it. It's a part of the family now.

Anon (sorry, name went astray)

Getting Connected

Please! Is there anyone out there who can help me get connected to the Internet? The following is only the briefest summary of over three months of banging my head against every wall in the house.

The documentation for STik, CAB and the associated programs in the Internet package all give contact details for support but most of the contacts are via e-mail addresses. I have yet to register the programs or subscribe to any of the support services but, in view of the fact that I have already spent one hundred pounds and wasted over one hundred hours of my time without getting anywhere, who can blame me? (I usually register promptly for any PD/shareware programs that I use regularly but I do, at least, like to know that they will work for me before I reach into my pocket.)

Please, can anyone help?!

Chris J Fuller
01449-722887

CiX costs £6.25 per month, worth it even if you only stick around for one month while you get your internet connection sorted out, and you can avoid the £25 signing-on fee by entering 'friend' when the system displays the new user startup screen. The Atari connection and OLR software for CiX are on FaST Club disk NW.75.

Calamus and JCA

Howard Carson of MGI also made the following comments which I believe should be drawn to the attention of STA readers:
"JCA and John Craig are operating without any sort of agreement with MGI Software Corp. Since MGI Software Corp owns every last right to every single version of Calamus (including the Atari versions!), JCA and Mr. Craig et al. are being very naughty boys indeed."

I have had some more email correspondence with Howard Carson at MGI, and he said that anyone buying Calamus '95 is entitled to a full manual (for which JCA wanted to charge me £25). Subsequent to my emailing them a scan of my invoice they have promised to post me one. I am very impressed by the level and tone of the support!

Sasha Clarkson

Timeworks

If it is available, who from, and how much? Any information will be welcome.

Chris White
chris@white3.demon.co.uk

Timeworks was the best selling DTP package in the UK Atari market and you shouldn't have any problems tracking down a second-hand copy.

Tower Cases

Martin Collins
martin.collins@zetnet.co.uk

Since the instructions in Tower were put together, a number of companies have manufactured tower cases suitable for housing an ST or Falcon motherboard. TUS, Titan Designs, and Systems Solutions all supply these.