i/o board

PRINTER DRIVERS

"I recently purchased AtariWriter to go along with my GE TXP-8100/Letter Quality printer. Is there a printer driver available that will access the special features of my printer?" one reader wrote. We're constantly getting requests like this. The following printer driver programs should work:

Gary Furr Drivers-An old APX disk now available for $10 from the author. Supports the Atari 1020, 1027, IDS-480; Epson MX, RX, FX-80/100 series; C. Itoh 8510; Okidata 80, 82, 83, 84,92 and 93; Mannesman Tally Spirit, 160L, and 180L; Diablo 620; Panasonic KX-P series; NEC 8023A; Gemini 10 and l0X; BMCpb 401; and Silver Reed 770. Write Gary Furr; P0. Box 1073, Mountain View, CA 94042.
Printer Driver Construction Set.- $19.95 through the Antic Catalog. If your printer isn't among the several preconfigured ones, you can create your own with this disk.
At A Glance Drivers-$14.95 for dot-matrix printers and $24.95 for daisy wheel printers. Supports most popular printers such as Epson, Star; C. Itoh and Diablo. At-A-Glance, 86 Ridgedale Avenue, Cedar Knolls, NJ 0792 7. Also available through Antic mail-order advertisers such as CompuClub. -ANTIC ED

DOWN TO BUSINESS

I have been buying Antic at newsstands now since 1983. Your March, 1986 issue not only had a decent cover (as opposed to the usually kiddie-style coloring book type covers), but content to match: A business-oriented, no-nonsense issue. This reinforces my belief in the capabilities of the Atari computer and removes it from the game machine only image.
H. Gerald Wittenberg
Toronto, Ontario
Canada

I hope your new found professionialism continues and I hope covers like March '86 keep on coming!
Eugene Rhough
San Jose, CA

ATARI AT LAW

We read with interest the article Atari at Work (March, 1986) about the commercial use of Atari 8-bit machines. Our law office is run exclusively with our Atari 800. We have in excess of 200 forms saved on disk, including wills, deeds, trusts and corporate/business agreements. Our pleadings, interrogatories and orders are all processed on AtariWriter and printed in letter quality on a Radio Shack DWP 410. With SynFile +, we maintain a database of all recent cases decided by the Courts of Ohio in our area of specialty. Our accounting is malntained on VisiCalc, and since each partner has an Atari at home, writing briefs after hours is no longer a chore. We would be anxious to hear from other Atari lawyers.
John Lynett
Olds, Lynett & Bradshaw
49 South Main Street
Akron, OH 44308
S. Karl Mohel, the Assistant Ocean County Prosecutor in Toms River; NJ sent us a message via Compuserve to say that he uses his 520ST to write Appellate Briefs and is waiting for more business software. -ANTIC ED

VIVE LE ATARI

I'm writing to tell you about my club of Atari users in France. The address is: Soft-busters, c/o Oliver Meyer, 1 vie de la Liberation, 77436 Champagne/Siene, FRANCE.

HABAWRITER IS OK

The ST Resource Habawriter review (March, 1986) was substantially negative. My experience using the program since December, 1985 has been very positive, except for a small bug in the setting of tabs. The system has never crashed, and I would recommend it as a first word processing program.
Jeffrey Falkenhan
CompuServe ID.
73147,2330

CREATIVE LIE DETECTION

It seems that your Atari Lie Detector program (March, 1986) could easily be adapted to the RCA jacks that exist on the AtariLab Control Module. With low prices for AtariLab, some people will be looking for new uses of this device.
Michael Martin
CompuServe ID.
7177,3022
Rhett Bryson of the GrACE users group says he did a fascinating experiment by hooking the two clips of his do-it-yourself lie detector to one of the leaves on his house plant. He pressed a leaf on the opposite side of the plant with his finger and thumb and was surprised to see a spike show up on the graph to correspond to the pressure!-ANTIC ED

SINKING SUBS

Silent Service won't work on my Trak disk drive. The program appears to boot, but my submarine kept sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I called Microprose and they said they do their development work on Atari drives and don't guarantee that their programs will run on Atari-compatibles, such as Percom, Rana, Indus and Astra. Microprose says their new copy-protection method may be causing this problem, but nowhere on the packaging is this disk drive detail mentioned. Luckily, the mail-order house I purchased the program from sent me a refund, but the sad part is that I really wanted the game!
Karl Wiegers, PhD
Rochester, NY
"We desperately want to find an answer that will keep everybody happy," says Frank Schmidt, Microprose Director of Marketing. He says that Microprose is trying to determine which brands of third-party disk drives do not work with Silent Service. Microprose is planning to print a disclaimer on all ads and packages to warn potential customers that the program is intended for use on Atari disk drives. They suggest calling their customer service number first before purchasing the program for a non-Atari drive.-ANTIC ED

OKIMATE PAPER

I was unhappy about the poor printout quality on my Okimate 10 printer until I found a smooth paper for both color dumps as well as text-Brother brand plain paper. I bought 500 sheets from Consumer's Distribution catalog for only $6.97. The results are even better than Okimate paper, which costs $9.95 for 250 sheets.
Vincent Tan

LUNAR FUEL

Thanks for Daniel Deighan's excellent program, Lunar Lander Construction Set. If you're like me, you were wondering when line 230 would come into play It has a print statement that prints "lost fuel dump". In order to find this lost fuel, guide your lander down the extreme left side of the fuel gauge and you'll receive a new supply of fuel. But remember, you can only do this once each game without destroying your lander.
Tom Ambrosio
Saxe, VA

PARTNERS IN DOS

I am a loyal fan of DOS 2.5, and my friend is a loyal fan of DOS 3. But when we trade programs, I can't put his program on my DOS 2 formatted disk.
Garrett Denzer
Kansas City, MO
Atari DOS 2.5 has a conversion utility on the disk -ANTIC ED

MODEMS, PLEASE

I bought practically all of my Atari stuff after reading Antic product reviews. The disk drive, printer and other product surveys really helped. But where is the modem survey and comparison? I'm definitely buying a modem in the next six months.

You 'll find help in our 1986 Telecommunications issue, coming soon. -ANTIC ED

128K DOWNGRADE?

This is an open letter to all commercial and non-commercial software writers. I have an Atari 800 with an Axlon 128K RAMpower card installed. With all the hoopla surrounding the 130XE, it seems those of us who have been using RAM-disks for years are being pushed aside. Because the new 130XE RAMdisk uses a different address for access, the older RAMdisks are not compatible with 130XE software.

My plea is this: Please try to incorporate these older, and in most cases superior, systems when you write programs for the 130XE RAMdisk. Synapse did something like this with SynCalc by making provisions for Axion 128K boards. The main reason I haven't purchased the 130XE is because I don't want to downgrade from 160K to 128K.
Donel Wyman
Oskosh, WI
We'll pass your request to those submitting articles to Antic. We also refer you to the article "DOS 2.5 for Axlon RAM-disk," February 1986 Antic.-ANTIC ED

AMDEK OWNERS UNITE

I would be interested in contact with other Amdek disk drive owners. As you know, almost no software was published in this 3-inch disk format. Maybe someone will even have disks to sell. My local source has dried up.
John Hawkins
64 Park Drive #C
Dayton, OH 45410

COUNTRY ATARI

Thanks for publishing such a fine magazine. I run a bulletin board on my 130XE here in Texas with 360K of online storage dedicated to country music information. Call "The Gate" at (817) 869-5259, from 6 pm to 6 am, seven days a week.
Bennett Hamilton
Music director, KPEP
Gatesville, Texas

PERCOM REPAIRS

In response to a number of queries from readers seeking repairs for their Percom disk drives, Antic has learned that a nationwide Percom repair contract has been awarded to STS Computers, 1073 W Broad Street Falls Church, VA 22046. (703)237-0558. Contact STS first for information about repair rates and shipping. -ANTIC ED