______ _____ / __/___ ______ ____ ______ ______ ______ ______ /\ \_ \/ / __ \/ _\/ /___/ \/ \/ \/\ / \/ \ / / / ____/ /__\ ____/ /___/ / / / / \/ / / _/ / _/ / _/ / _/ / _/ / _/ / _/ / _/ _/ x /_ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ \ / / \___ / \___ / \___ / \___ / \_/.sNs.\___ / \_/\ / \_/ \_/\__ / \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ VECTRONIX NEWSLETTER #9 (6 October, 1997) All text by Phoenix/Vectronix (unless stated otherwise!) Contact: vexnews@mindless.com, vectronix@hotmail.com [1] Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 - Contents 2 - Forewords 3 - Atari-Fair in Neuss, Germany 4 - Inter Jam '97 Mini-Report 5 - New Releases 6 - Das ATOS Magazine 7 - Free XXX Password Sites 8 - Apple to Slash Notebook Prices 9 - Sun to Unveil 600-MHz Chip [2] Forewords -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I just wanna mention that Monoliths At-Home project which is redirecting our homepage is having some huge problems at the moment, this means http://xxxxxxxxx.xxxx.xx.xxx has not been accessable for a few days. Please use http://xxxxxxxxx.xx.xxx:xxxx/xxxxxxxxx/ if the other url doesn't work, you just have to remember entering the port number and vectronix folder! Also, VEXNEWS now got it's own email address! Use this for un/subscribing, old issues requests, sending articles or whatever concerning VEXNEWS. The address is xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx, we're waiting to hear from you! We'd love to get article contributions for future issues, if you could consider helping us writing this little newsletter, please get in touch! [3] Atari-Fair Neuss, Germany. A Short Overview. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This year the ATARI fair took place in NEUSS, Germany, again. After last years disaster with this show, as you probably remember, time and place of the fair changed in short-time, this yearīs show was organized very well. As Ali Goukassian, the master of the FALKE-Verlag was somehow involved in the showīs organization this must really be called a wonder! Unbelievable! A lot more exhibitors than in 1996 found their way to Neuss, this was good news. There have been a lot of exhibitors showing stuff for Jaguar and Lynx which both were buyable for a very cheap price. Even 16/32 Bit Systems from the UK have been at the show. And they showed a joystick for the Jaguar from GRAVIS which had the incredible price of 145 DM which was cheap compared to the original UK-price of about 129 pounds... For us itīs more interesting to see which companies did some new stuff for the ATARI-computer series. There have been e.g. R.O.M, ASH and MW-electronic and many more producers showing their product-palette: EBACKUP 2 ECOPY 1.72 JINNEE 1.0 MAGIC 5.13 NVDI 4.11 R10 PAPYRUS 5.5 PHOENIX 5 SIGNUM!4.2 TEXEL 1.6 THING 1.2 TOS2WIN 2.0 and lots of other stuff.. Well, I must admit, some of the packages are already released by VECTRONIX or are at least on itīs way to be released by VECTRONIX... but if you have the possibility to get hold of one or more of the packages which are not released by VECTRONIX, please get in tough with us! We are always willing to produce new releases for our friends in scene, but we need YOUR support! There have been available some newer games for ATARI FALCON, which have not been cracked by anyone. E.g. there was a new updated version for Conquest (?) of C... well, shit, I forgot that whole name... but Iīm pretty sure you know which game Iīm talking about. I must admit: I didnīt see any new games for ST/STE, unfortunately. But available have been a lot of older games which were bad to receive over here for years, e.g. No Second Price. Maybe you remember those old days: No Second Price was first cracked by Cynix, but only because this game was sold in the UK _before_ it was sold over here... Well, I really was angry about this, because this was a great title and I wanted to be the first putting his fingers on this game... so I never cracked it then! There was the French magazine ST MAGAZINE available at this show. This really is a nice magazine which is very cheap to subscribe! Compared to that very expensive and mostly not very well written German ATARI INSIDE the French ST MAGAZINE is a good alternative! The only problem is: Itīs in French! (now you know how it feels to have an atari and not be born in Germany perhaps! ;-) /Phx) OK, but the most impressive thingy on the fair have been the HADES with the ethernet-connections and the plugged in PC-card which did enable the computer to run PC and Atari-software simultanously, and of coz: The MILAN. The MILAN is a new ATARI-compatible computer which looks like a PC and even the motherboard looks like a PCīs one! It looks definitively VERY clean and stable this little system! Michael Schwingen and another guy are responsible for it. The motherboard looks more than a PC-motherboard than an ATARI one: thereīs 4 PCI-slots, 3 ISA slots, an Intel (!) PCI-to-ISA bridge chip, two EIDE controllers, a floppy-controller and PS/2 SIMM banks which will hold 60 ns EDO RAMs only, because the 68040 in this system accesses them in full steam power with 33 Mhz while internally itīs running with 66 Mhz. Optionally the system will work with an 68060, but not at this time of development!! The system displays video through a standard PCI TRIO V64 gfx-card and the sound will be done using a Soundblaster 16, the standard-card on PC. Itīs planned to build DSP-cards for full Falcon-compatibility, PC-card and more. In December, the developers want to show a fully working MILAN on the PARIS-ATARI show. Actually, the MILAN uses a patched TOS 2.06, but the machine in PRIS will then contain a modified TOS 4.04 which is on FLASH-ROM which makes it easy to be updated to a newer TOS or other system. The built-in GLUE chips on the MILANīs motherboard are programmable using some kind of cable-connector(?), also. So itīs even possible to make the MILAN more compatible to ATARI-computers by updating the "hardware" in the GLUEs! I need clarifying possible misunderstandings: The MILAN will not be a fully compatible ATARI-system. You will not be able playing your old games from the ST or STE, but you will be able to run all Atari-software which is 68040 compatible and which is made for GEM or Magic. I think that all software which works with the MagicPC or MagicMAC or TOS2WIN emulators will for sure work on the MILAN, too! Games which only work with PacifiST Emulator will most pro-bably have no chance to work on the Milan. Main reason is that the original ATARI-video-hardware is not rebuilt in the MILAN, but exchanged with a faster one. In my eyes, the MILAN is a promising system which really is worth to be considered as an alternative to your existing and slow-being ATARI TT. The price of the MILAN should be lower than the HADES costs. This was a short overview over the ATARI-Fair in NEUSS. Read longer articles in printed medias for more information, please! But this must be, I bet, one of the first reports from that show which will be readable for more than a fistful of people. BTW, lots of scene-people have also been at the fair, e.g. Jacky, Bandit, Stratagem, Daryl, Marc Rosocha, SuperGAU, Matt, Teddy and so on.. [ Written by Metallinos ] [4] Inter Jam '97 Results -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a _very_ quick and tiny little report from Inter Jam '97 party held in Karlsruhe, Germany this weekend. Hopefully we'll be able to present a little bit more extensive report in a few days, we'll see! In short words there was 87 people attending, 4 of them was girls and one "whatever", the rest was boys for some weird reason. 60 litres of Cola, 10 bags of trash! ;-) No Atari entries except for graphix and musix, the results of those are below, there was 4 PC intro and 2 PC demo entries, only one Atari intro which was not released. This was mainly a party for having fun and meet people, not to be productive as the compo entries tells... GFX results Inter Jam '97 1. Gizmo/Icebird 2. MrCoke/Icebird 3. MOD/tSCc MSX results Inter Jam '97 1. 505/Checkpoint 2. SCY/.tSCc. 3. McLazer/.tSCc. For more information, results and releases check out the official Inter Jam homepage which will be updated shortly! http://home.pages.de/~interjam [5] New Releases -------------------------------------------------------------------------- VEXT2W20.ZIP 550453 TOS2WIN v2.00 (c) Uwe Schneider GmbH [1/1] ECOPY172.LZH 136117 VECTRONIX presents: ECOPY 1.72d [1/1] The second commercial atari emulator coming from Germany besides MagiC-PC is a real killer in it's new and latest version. TOS2WIN v2.00 definately outperforms all competition when it's about business applications and more serious stuff. For games and/or demos PacifiST is still the unbeatable choice, but if you want to to anything else, like word processing, desktop publishing or whatever, you need TOS2WIN! It's lightning fast, compatible and powerfull, and it's biggest advantage might be that it's very ease to use. If you need to emulate an atari on your PC, this is what you should use! ECOPY is sold since many years and it is indeed THE standard copyprogram for the ATARI-computer-system. After the development of FCOPY/FCOPYPRO had stopped, ECOPY took FCOPY's pole-position in every case. The comprehensive variety of functions, all very simple to use and the possibility to configure everything that way you want to see it, show the programs brilliance. Antivirusoptions and disk-analysing instruments are also included. Main difference between this version 1.72 and version 1.70 is that ED-floppy drives are supported on Falcon now, without installing any ED-module!!! ECOPY runs with all ATARIs and compatible machines, also with MagicMac... /// Note About NVDI-ET4000 NVDI-ET4000 v4.11 r10 released some week ago must be installed from floppy disk in order to work properly! This was not mentioned in the release anywhere, but that's how it should be! If you've had problems installing it from harddisk, copy the files to two floppy disks and try again! This is a procedure which usually works if the installation fails, not all install programs works from harddisks as you usually get your original copies on a floppy disk. We do however always test our releases, so they SHOULD work, but if you're having problems installing something it might be worth trying to install from floppy! [6] Das ATOS Magazine -------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's a German ST-Guide/HTML magazine named ATOS available on the World Wide Web. It's been around for quite some time, but I still think it deserves to be mentioned as lots of people don't seem to know about it! This is not a scene magazine or anything like that, but a real serious magazine with professional reviews of software and high quality articles. There's only one thing which is wrong with it, it's all in german! Please send them emails and complain and tell them to translate future issues to english so everyone can read it! In the current issue (which always is available for online browsning) the following topics are to be read about.... Atari-Messe Neuss, GIGAFUN-Convention 97, Twilight 2.07, Schon_me, qed 4.00, TOS2WIN 2.00, Freedom 2, Thing, Fenix, Milan, TAE-Anschlußtechnik Check out the ATOS magazine on their official homepage: http://wwwrzstud.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uk48/ATOS/ [7] Free XXX Password Sites -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Want to check out some commercial sex sites? Of course you do! Instead of listing alot of passwords which will work for a few days at maximum we give you a few sites whose only purpose is to bring you tons of links with passwords, updated regulary every day with new sites and passwords. What more is there to wish? There's many of these sites available on the net, those mentioned below are some of the best at the moment, they usually have some mirrors all around the world as they sometimes have to closedown, and due to the heavy use. By following links from these sites you can keep finding new sites for all eternity.... Psychosis http://www.servtech.com/public/psychosis/ Slutman City http://151.196.195.56/SlutmanCity/mirror.html Password.Org http://www.password.org/ Corporate Businesses Suck http://www.digicities.com/digital/64/hack.htm [8] Apple To Slash Notebook Prices -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apple Computer is set to drastically slash prices on some PowerBook notebook computers by as much as $1,000 as it makes way for updated notebooks with the recently announced PowerPC 750 processor. How low can they go? http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C14898%2C00.html?nd [ CNET NEWS.COM Dispatch ] [9] Sun to Unveil 600-MHz Chip -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sun Microsystems (SUNW) today unveiled a new generation of processors that could reach upward of 600 MHz by next year, topping Intel in the chip performance game. The new UltraSparc-III is the third generation of the Sparc family of processors, which serve as the brain for Sun's workstation computers and servers, and will allow Sun to build even more powerful systems. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C14913%2C00.html?nd [ CNET NEWS.COM Dispatch ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Vectronix News Mailing List (c) 1997 Vectronix, All Rights Reserved.