I/O Board

ICD/OSS
As this Antic issue went to press, it was announced that ICD is taking over the complete OSS product line, including MAC/65, ACTION!, BASIC XE and ST Personal Pascal. For ordering and support, contact ICD/OSS at 1220 Rock Street, Rockford, IL 61101. (815) 968-2228.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT
Is there a program for the ST that lets you create questions with multiple selection of answers and give you a score at the end of the test, along with a printout of questions and answers? Also, where can I obtain a new ST mouse?

Larry Doss
Chicago, IL

Pursuit of the Graf STrivial (Antic, September 1987), written in GFA BASIC, does exactly that. If you don't have GFA or don't want to type in the listing you can order the disk from Antic's Disk Desk. Also, you should be able to purchase a new mouse for your ST from Atari Corp. at 1196 Borregas Avenue, Sunnyvale. CA 94086 (408) 745-2000. - ANTIC ED

I/O OR 1/0?
I'm a retired data processing manager and I never have let my programmers use the letters I, O, S or Z as variable names. I'm sure you can see the similarities between those letters and 1, 0, 5 and 2. I even steer clear of Q, U and V-Q looks like 0, and U and V look alike. Avoiding those variable names would make type-in listings much more likely to work the first time.

Jerome Fraenkel
Franklin Square, NY

LIGHTSPEED RELOCATES
Here's the new address for the makers of Lightspeed C (New Products, December 1987). Clearstar Softechnologies Division of Omegasoft), P.O. Box 140, Harrells, NC 28444. (919) 552-2359.

XMM8O1 SOFTWARE
Regarding William Tilley's XMM801 Woes letter (February 1988), Starfleet Software has three XMM801 utility disks available for $10 each. These utilities enable the Atari XMM801 to print screen dumps in five different sizes, print near letter quality, mix NLQ text with graphics on the same page, plus much more. Starfleet is at 1037 W Oakland Avenue, Decatur IL, 62522. (217) 42.5-6820.

Terry Ortman
Starfleet Software

REAL SIERPINSKI AUTHOR
The Sierpinski Curves program reprinted from Page 6 Magazine in your February 1988 issue was originally written by me for the July 1984 Creative Computing. The programs are identical, right down to the variables and line numbers. I would appreciate a note in Antic that I am the author.

David Ahl
publisher,
Atari Explorer

Antic sincerely regrets this Transatlantic foulup. Page 6 credits for this short fractals program in their May/June 1987 issue simply stated that the "nice little demo. . .was sent in some time ago by Alan Sharpe on behalf of tbe Brighton Users Group."-ANTIC ED

SCHEDULE SAVER
I work for a leading child mental health center and one of our biggest problems is room-scheduling for appointments. We decided to use an Atari 130XE to make this easier. Because the scheduling office is a high-turnover, low-computer-literacy place one of the significant features of our system, written in Advan BASIC, is that it's user-friendly. No training time is required. I should point out that we selected Advan BASIC because of a good review in Antic (June 1987). It's an excellent product, and customer support has been excellent, too.

Katherine Wilson
Brookline, MA

INDUS AID
Please tell Victor Decarlo Jr. (Indus Compatibility, February 1987) to disconnect and reconnect the I/0 cables between his disk drive and computer several times to improve the contacts and make sure they're firmly in place. This often-neglected precaution fixed my own problem with Flight Simulator II on my Indus drive after a couple of infuriating months of troubleshooting.

Richard Barkley
Eugene, OR

ALL I NEED
My little Atari 800 has run a large real estate company in Daly City, California, for over two years, fulfilling all data processing needs--reports, word processing, mailing labels, etc. The original investment, excluding the printer, cost about $600. it's a sad situation for anyone to spend more than $400 (plus the printer cost) to get into computing. Atari is the one computer that more than fulfills this need.

John Mohr
Daly City, CA

CAN'T HOOK UP
Your article Laptop-to-Atari Connection influenced me to buy a Tandy 200 laptop to use at work. My intention was to transfer files to my Atari for storage. However, I haven't been able to get them to communicate. I've tried every combination of modems, cables, hookups and software I could think of. Can you help?

Michael Lettini

Mercer Island, WA

Go into the built-in communications program on your Tandy and make sure it's set up (parity baud rate, stop bit, etc) the same way as the terminal program you're using on the Atari. And make sure your Atari program can transfer ASCII files--if it can transfer only ATASCII files, you're using the wrong program.-ANTIC ED

PRACTICAL PATCH
Bibliography Master (Antic, November 1987) is a terrific program--a victory over those pedantic little rules that drive most of us crazy.

However, the program prints a line space between each printed line, and that presents a problem. Most form books and pedagogues require that each entry in a bibliography be single-spaced and that a blank line be used only (if at all) to separate the individual references.

The program can be changed easily to double-space only between reference sources (which looks nice) by inserting or revising the following lines:

681 DBSP = F0
691 IF DBSP = F1 THEN ? #F3:LIN=LlN+ F1
1040 ? #F3:LIN=LIN+ F1:DBSP= F1

If you just want single-spaced printouts, forget about lines 681 and 691 and revise line 1040 as follows:

1040 ? #F3:LIN = LIN+ F1

Now, if someone would convert Bibliography Master into a program to format end notes, we'd have most of the maddening technicalities of writing academic papers just about licked.

Dwight Collin

Pittsford, NY

FAMILY ANTIC
Thanks for the programs in the January 1988 issue of Antic. My kids enjoyed Rassilon's Triple-Header and have been printing BASIC Biorhythms charts for their schoolmates. Mighty Mailer and Antic SuperCopy are both good programs, but I'd like to send special thanks to Rich Moore for the SSI Joystick Commander. (You can add Kampfgruppe to the list of games the "daring method" works with.)

Robert Smith

Reedsport, OR

WANTS ISSUE #1
The only issue of Antic that I don't have is issue #1. How can I get a copy?

Evan Engelkes

Council Bluffs, IA

Sounds like a job for Antic Classified Ads.-ANTIC ED

DOUBLE DEUTSCH
My brother bought a 1040STM in Germany and was told that he couldn't read the single-sided disks from my 520ST because of the new double-sided drives. This isn't right, is it? Also, is there a program for the ST that would help me learn French?

Gerd Knaak
Spring, TX

Double-sided drives can read single- or double-sided disks. If your brother wants to send a disk to you, he should format it as single-sided.

The Linkword Languages from Artworx Software (reviewed in Antic, October 1987) include a French edition and are available for the ST.-ANTIC ED

DESIGNER MAILER
Thanks for the fine programs in your magazine. We especially like the Designer Label program (Antic, April 1987). We're using it without any mailer program: we compose our list on a word processor and save it to disk. Then we RUN Designer labels and LOAD our text file. The results are perfect. The only thing to keep in mind is to press [RETURN] after each line and another [RETURN] after each address--exactly as specified when using Mighty Mailer (Antic, September 1987).

Charles and
David Smith
Girard, OH

DISK DESK PRAISE
I am very pleased with the Antic Disk Desk. I called in an order late one Wednesday night and received my merchandise in Saturday's mail. I might also add that your new disk price and bonus programs have tempted me to renew my subscription, but with disks.

Gordon Toomey
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

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 94107