I/O Board
MDA ATARITHON
This summer I worked on my hometown Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. The dealer that had previously supplied computers went out of business, so donors' names, addresses and donations had to be listed by hand. But a friend and I brought our Ataris (800XL and 6OOXL) and I wrote a quick program to track all this information. We had a good time and I got to show off my computer to the whole community.
Oscar Fowler
CompuServe ID
72347,1655
SHARED HARD DRIVE
Is it possible for an 8-bit Atari and an ST to share the same hard disk drive?
Lenny Tamburello
East Hanover, NJ
Theoretically it's possible to connect one hard disk to both computers if you have interfaces for each. But using data on the same hard disk in both 8-bit and ST file formats would be quite a programming challenge. In an upcoming issue, we will review the Lurie & Associates Hard Disk system (up to 128Mb) forAtari 8-bits. The company plans to offer an ST interface soon. Lurie & Associates, P.O. Box 7546, Van Nuys, CA 91409. (818) 780-1783.-- ANTIC ED
HELP FOR DISABLED
On behalf of the severely physically handicapped who now (or wish to) enjoy the Atari, I appeal to programmers to try to include all starting controls, options and other controls in simple menus accessed by the joystick. It's very frusuating to require someone else to press keys when you're not in a position to do so. We have taken a great step forward in the past few years in recognizing that the handicapped can enjoy the things we take for granted if we just include them in our thinking and designing of things.
W.E. Barton
Chatsworth, CA
BUDGET DB UPGRADE
I have an enhancement to the excellent program, Budget dB (Antic, November 1986). When listing transactions to the screen, the prompt "C to cont" gets printed at the top of the screen after the second page is listed, overwriting part of a transaction. Typing "C" at that point ends the listing. To correct this, delete POSITION N0,22 in line 445.
Jim Barnett
Gaithersburg, MD
NEEDS DEVELOPERS KIT
I am unable to locate a Resource Construction Set anywhere. Can private individuals get the Atari Developers Package? If so, how? It appears the RCS and the Atari/DRI documentation are worth the price. If not, what now?
Joel Hart
Yes, anyone may purchase the Atari Developers Kit directly from Atari by sending $300 to Atari, Inc., 1196 Borregas Ave, Sunnyvale, CA. 94088. Write on the outside of the package you want the Developers Kit. In addition to 1500 pages of ST/GEM documentation, you'II receive six disks packed with Alcyon C, a linker, a debugger, a text processor many tools, and example source code. Oh, you get Atari's RCS, too.
You'll also be admitted to CompuServe's Atari Developers SlG, where many people who make the ST tick! (like SYSOP*Tom Hudson 76703,4224) visit every day to answer questions. There are other RCS's available, however. The RCS which comes with MegaMax C ($200) is a good one and KUMA has just released an RCS of their own. RCS 2.1 was available for downloading from CompuServe for a while, but has disappeared as of this writing.
MICROLINE 1025
The Atari 1025 does have adjustable tractor feed capability. It's basically the same printer as Okidata's Microline 80. Cascade Electronics sells a tractor drive for this printer for $35 and it fits the 1025 perfectly. Cascade Electronics Inc., Route 1, Box 8, Randolph, MN 55065. (507) 645-7997.
Gary Martin
Dothan, AL
ULTIMA RUNES
Most of the characters in the archaic alphabet of Lord British's Ultima IV (Origins Software) can be found under "rune" in the American College Dictionary (Random House). Translating the ancient language on the cloth map of Ultima TV into English is a great help when moving players between cities.
As a further clue, remember that mandrake root and nightshade can be found only when both moons are dark.
Marjorie Martin
San Francisco, CA
CHROMA BOOST
The "busy" appearance of the video display background described in Jon Krahmer's XL Color Boost (Antic, November 1986) is actually a video problem originating in the composite video signal output. The problem varies according to whether the unit was manufactured in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and it's less noticeable on high-quality monitors because their wide range of contrast control permits greater suppression of the background than can be achieved on a television set.
Benjamin Poehland
Frazer, PA
1020 PENS: FOUND
A number of readers replied to Russ Novotny 's cry for Atari 1020 Plotter pens (December, 1986) Radio Shack carries a set of three black pens (26-1480) and another trio with red, green and blue (26-1481). Each of these 3020-compatible sets costs about $2.95. If you're out of paper for your 1020, Radio Shack's rollpaper for the CGP-115 plotter (26-1428) will do fine--but you 'II have to transfer some paper to an empty spool, because the full CGP roll is too big to fit into the 1020.
Thanks to Pete Harker, Cory Laidlaw, David Brown, Raymond Aston, Gary Vimr and Paul Marquette for their help.
TURN C INTO PASCAL?
As a new C programmer wishing to learn the already hard subject of interfacing C into GEM, I do not appreciate your published C source code filled with #defines that turn it into "Pascal." Will you ensure that any future C source code is straight C and not #defined to the hilt into some "other" language?
Ralph E. Freshour
Different programmers write programs in different ways. The person who programs for us in C feels the operator set in C can be (and is often) abused until the program becomes unreadable. Also, it seems the majority of people reading The ST Resource know some BASIC or PASCAL, and are encountering C for the first time. Since C allows its operators to be re-defined, they get changed from the curly brackets to "begin...end" or "for..next", or whatever is applicable. However, we have a simple solution for you. Type in the code as it appears in the magazine then run your source code through CP68.PRG, and the file it puts out(yourfile.i) will contain pure, clean C source code without any #defined Pascal in it anywhere.--ANTIC ED
Help!
MENU MAESTRO
If Menu Maestro (January 1987) is "freezing" your XL or XE keyboard, just add the following line for a quick thaw:
150 IF PEEK(65521)=2 OR PEEK(65521)=1 THEN A$(100,100)="Q":A$(101,101)= CHR$ (251)
The TYPO II Code for this line is SY.
Antic welcomes your feedback but we regret that the large volume of mail makes it impossible for the Editors to reply to everyone. Although we do respond to as much reader correspondence as time permits, our highest priority must be to publish I/O answers to questions that are meaningful to a substantial number of readers.
Send letters to Antic I/O Board, 544 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 34107.