Well did everyone enjoy the extra day that leap year gave us? Ha!
I ended up working that day, so I hardly even noticed it
Actually I don't have very much to say this month. So far everything is still "IN THE WORKS". Michael Fitzpatrick and Sherm Erickson are in contact with our possible speakers and Earline Fitzpatrick is rolling right along with the software library. I think what I will do is rehash a few things that have already been said that may have passed over your heads: SOFTWARE LIBRARIAN: Earline Fitzpatrick is now in charge of all club software for rental. One of her distinguished accomplishments is the availability of the hundreds of pieces of educational software that the club purchased from me. You can now borrow various titles from the club with all necessary equipment to run them on any ATARI. SPACE FAIR: The possibility of a distinguished member of the ATARI 8-BIT community speaking with the SPACE club has put carnival wheels in my head. SPACE could really shoot off some fireworks around an event such as this. Think of ideas that SPACE could utilize in a fair with a special speaker. All ATARI enthusiasts all over the country would be contacted for this one. SPACE PROGRAMMING TEAM: What? Yes, a programming team headed by Larry Serflaten is still hacking away at an ambitious project. If you would like to volunteer your programming skills and learn much in the process, contact Larry or Sherm or myself at the next meeting and we'll point you in the right direction. Also thanks to Lance Ringquist for continuing to provide SPACE with the newest and the finest ATARI software products! See you all at the next meeting! AND DO THE SURVEY IN THIS NEWSLETTER! Nathan
The meeting was called to order by President Nathan Block at 7:40pm.
There was a special guest at this Valentines day meeting, it was the famous movie star Steven Segal who stared in Hard to Kill and Out for Justice, it was the Presidents understanding that Mr. Segal wanted to buy an Atari 8-bit, some of us could tell that it was only cardboard others were not so sure. The $50 worth of tapes offered to the club arrived, "Shrink rapped and ready to be sold." They were sold at $3 a piece as voted on by the club the meeting before. The meeting was relatively short so that means the minutes are going to be short. Most everybody left at around 9:00pm to go out for Pizza. There was still a little talk about Robert Puff, a really well known author of Atari software. Nathan requests that you please be thinking of what you would like done to the Fan Fair Nathan mentioned last meeting. One person requested that Mr. Puff show the different techniques he uses for writing those most excellent programs. The meeting was closed by Nathan around 8:30 or so.
Happy Valentines Day!!
Well looking back at the midwinter madness show that was held on feb. 8,1992, it was a good experience for me and all the people that manned the space booth. I would like to thank Mike Schmidt who does a lot of work to make it possible for the apace club to have a booth at this event to represent the club. Mike has to wake up very early, load the truck with all the computer equipment and other things, come to show, and lugg everything to the booth. This time sherm erickson and son, showed up to give mike a hand. Suggestions were made to upgrade our booth banner, maybe this can be discussed at the next meeting.
Manning the space booth were a variety of people, there were the young, middle age, and older folks. while the younger folks were not answering the questions of the people that did stop by, they had the opportunity to fool around with a variety of disk programs that mike brought in. I think they had a fun time, and found mike's disk programs educational too! We took turns, manning the booth, a few people would mann the booth while the others would look over the show. The young folks did great.
Visitors to the show from our club were Ray Wafer, Bill Cotter, Mitch Mclaughlin, Joe Danko & Family, Mike Fitzpatrick & Family, and others. It was nice to have a chance to talk with them. there were bargains to be had, rachel thompson picked up some bargains, I picked up 80 floppy disks for $2, Mike Cable picked up a 1200 baud modem, Mike Schmidt bought (3) 386sx motherboards, along with the rest of the people who manned the booth.
Well the big moment came at 2pm. When they announced the winner of the grand prize (I thought I was going to win it) a brand new computer. I didn't win it! oh well! there is always next year. Anyway there is the amateur show at aldrich arena, this summer.
Another thing I would like to talk to you about is using your cable tv to help the space club grow. Here is what I mean. there are a lot of cable companies that serve the twin cities and the other areas. Each of these cable companies have a cable channel called a community event channel. Since this can only be used by cable subscribers, each member of the space club could use their community event channel to post our club meeting as a community event. Just think of the people that this could reach. People who want to know about an ATARI user group (especially a good club like SPACE). How you would list this event is ...... the event, time , place, more information, and a phone no. for people to call for further information (I assume the president's phone no.). I have talked to nathan about this idea in the past, and he thought it was a good idea. Just think of all the new people we could draw into the club. boy, we would have one hell of a big club. Just think of it, it is a little effort for the member to help with this, but think of the rewards for the club as a whole.
Another thing I would like to talk about is the kindness of a SPACE member, just one of many. back a while ago my computer started giving me trouble, this was a crisis to me because I love working on the computer and also bbs'ing. My keyboard was giving me trouble. I said to myself, oh! no! my 800xl is on its last legs. I love this computer over others I have had the opportunity to use. I bought it at the amateur show last summer for $15. I talked to Mike Schmidt about it and I found myself out to mike's house with it. he tore it apart found it needed a little cleaning and put it back together and it worked. It was interesting to see what a computer looked like inside. I realty never knew. What a experience! I would like to thank Mike Schmidt from the bottom of my heart for his help.
Last of all I would like to give you one of my favorite cookie
recipes, so when you get time you can make some for your
kids, hubby, or wife.
Here it is ------------------------
Computer cookies with a lot of chips (chocolate chips)
1 cup margarine
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon water
3 large eggs
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chocolate chips
Mix ingredients, chill batter, preheat oven 350 degrees, grease pans, bake till light, light, brown (don't over bake), cool, eat, and enjoy. you can add some coconut to batter if you want.
Well that is about all see you at the march meeting.
Mike Weist
(Part one of two)
After you succeed at getting AtantWriter Plus fully configured to the specific needs of your own hardware system, using this fine word processor becomes a real joy. Everything works exactly as it should, characters are never dropped, and search-and-replace is so vastly improved over the original AtariWriter that it alone is almost reason enough to purchase the new software. Maximum file size is limited if you're not using the 130XE computer, but the chaining feature works very well and pretty much makes up for this. Here are the most important things I needed to learn about AtariWriter Plus through my own personal experimentation. (Please note that Antic doesn't have the hardware in-house to test all these specialized tips prior to publication. Let us know if you find any fixes necessary. -ANTIC ED)
DOUBLE DENSITY
I wasn't so excited about AtariWriter Plus when I first tried it. I was disappointed to find it was on a copy-protected disk with Atari DOS 2.5. Since I have double-sided/double density drives, I naturally like to use them to their fullest advantage. What a drag to have all my text files in single-density only. (My drives don't work in enhanced density.) Worse yet, none of my old files in double or quadruple density could be accessed from the new program. Then I loaded TOPDOS (configured to be density-wise), put AtariWriter Plus back into drive 1, and binary-loaded (option L) the AUTORUN.SYS file. Voila - the program came up as usual and could now read all my disks. I liked it a lot better already. But this method became a nuisance and took a long time to get running. Eventually I was brave enough to write a new DOS file to my program disk. (This, of course, voids your Atari warranty, so be warned.) I'm a little suspicious about the DUP.SYS file on the disk, so I didn't replace it but instead wrote DOS.SYS only. In TOPDOS you must also rename AUTORUN.SYS to AUTORUN.AUT. Now everything works as intended, with one exception - I must make certain that my 850 interface is turned off before booting AtariWriter Plus. Apparently the built-in code included in the AUTORUN.SYS file to boot the RS-232 handler is incompatible with other disk operating systems - no big deal after you realize it.
MARK OF ZERO
I have heard complaints about a bug that makes AtariWriter Plus print a zero in the upper left corner of each page. This isn't really a bug. If you have an Epson-compatible printer that does not have a proportional print option (or uses a different escape code for it) and you use the FX-80 printer driver from the program disk, your printer will receive the code to cancel proportional print for each font except Font 3. The FX-80 code is [ESC]-[p] [0]. Your printer may discard the first two characters as a meaningless escape code and then print the 0 as instructed. If you choose Font 3, you might get a 1 at the top of each page. The solution is to create and use a custom printer driver tailored especially for your printer. My driver for the Epson FX-85 defines all nine fonts and lets me write superscripts and subscripts with [SELECT][UP-ARROW] or [SELECT][DOWN-ARROW] as well as with Fonts 4 and 5. In addition, two-column printing is now accomplished by printing one column and then backrolling the paper for the second one. This does away with certain limitations imposed when both columns are printed together - as is necessary with many printers.
MARGIN MIXUP
The left and right margin numbers on the Global Format screen assume that the first printer column is 0 and the last one (in picas) is 79. For reasons known only to Atari, the Print Preview feature numbers these columns beginning with 1. If you choose 80 as your right margin, your printout won't be what you expect. The rule is: Your right margin setting must not exceed one less than the maximum number of columns available with a particular font. If your printer offers elite spacing (12 characters per inch), choose that font and set margins L6, R45, M50, and N89 for an ideal two-column printout.
STRING TOO LONG
The AtariWriter Plus manual doesn't mention an error that pops up every so often: STRING TOO LONG. This aborts your printing or Print Preview with no other explanation. What's happening is that a string of characters somewhere in your file is too long to fit on the line you have defined with your margin settings. The program considers this string to be a very long "word" and is reluctant to break it up. The string often turns out to be a series of dashes or underlines used in a form of some kind. The solution is to break the string at the end of the lines with a space or a [RETURN]. You can use the Print Preview to check that you did it right. Incidentally, if you need a continuous blank underline in a form, press the inverse key [] before and after typing the underline. Then your printer will not produce individual underline characters. And don't forget that you can extend the default of 38 screen columns in the edit mode up to 249 columns with [OPTION][C]. This lets you set real TAB stops for a chart, for instance, and scroll across the screen while you enter or edit text and make sure that your columns are lined up properly. This sort of editing is almost impossible with a fixed 38-column screen, such as the original AtariWriter had. However, the scrolling makes for a rather jerky screen, so I use extended columns only when needed. Otherwise I use 40 columns - and always when proofreading.
Here is the answer to the February Word Search:
Title: Cartoon
- - - C A S P E R - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - E L M E R F U D D - W - -
D S Y L V E S T E R - - O - - E - -
A - A R C H I E P - - - N - - N - -
E - - - Y - - O - - - - A - - D - -
H - - - - R O - - - - - L - B Y - -
G - - - - B R - - - - - D - U - - -
U - - - Y - - E - - - - D - G - - -
J - - T - - - - J - - - U - S - - -
- - T Y - - - - - D - - C - B - - D
- E - T - - - - - - N - K - U - - A
B - - E - - - - - - - A - - N - - G
Y - - E - - - - - - - - M - N - - W
F - - W - Y E U H Y B A B O Y - - O
O - - T - - - - - - - - - - T - - O
O - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - D
G H C I R E I H C I R - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TOM AND JERRY DONALD DUCK RICHIE RICH
BETTY BOOP BUGS BUNNY SYLVESTER
ELMER FUDD BABY HUEY DAGWOOD
JUGHEAD CASPER ARCHIE
TWEETY WENDY GOOFY
Here is this months installment of Word Search.
This month it is Catfood. Good Luck!
Title: Catfood
K L F Y N M I A Q S Y W O H C B F Y
P C O G R U B T O E S I B N I R O T
Y U J B O O J I F L U W S F M O S V
M J Q H L I A D Y B S N B Z E R O G
L J E Y F V D B S I T M U C A J M X
K V D T U S B M B D E O R Y L H F B
S I I A T A K W D E N U Q B S J G J
H E T A T L Z G Q S A S V V F A R E
H E L T N I A U J F N E Q S V M S D
D N U B E D D X Q U C R E E X S L V
L I C L I N S S B J E Z F H Y N N L
R L I Y X T P N O Z R T Q D N L J X
L E W M G R S C Q U Z H A T E E H C
C F V O D I Q E L G N A S I M V V E
D J T O M C A T M W Y N P E T P Z N
M F Z W S G Q W G O Y S X Q L S O V
K Z K G B V B U I I C A M T C I V U
O U A F X L S N O I T A R V L L W C
COMESTIBLES SUSTENANCE RATIONS CHEETAH
EDIBLES FELINE TOMCAT MOUSER
KITTEN VIANDS TABBY MEALS
LION GRUB CHOW
Published by the Saint Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts (SPACE), an independent organization with no business affiliation with ATARI Corporation. Permission is granted to any similar organization with which SPACE exchanges newsletters to reprint material from this newsletter. We do however ask that credit be given to the authors and to SPACE. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of SPACE, the club officers, club members or ATARI Corporation.