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Chairman's Review of the Year
A590 Hard Disk Reviewed
Amiga Graphics Programming
Virtual Floppies on the A590
Experiences of a Sysop
Chairman Geoffrey Reeves Treasurer Brian Ward Membership Secretary Shane Broadberry Chief Librarian Tom Kinsella Amiga Librarian Rocco Matassa PC Librarian Brain Ward C64 Librarian Steve Kemp C128 Librarian Geoffrey Reeves Communications Liam Murphy Newsletter Editor Eddy Carroll
CUGI Meetings are held every second Friday at 8:00 PM in the computer room at St. Andrew's College, Booterstown. All correspondance should be addressed to:
CUGI.
c/o St. Andrew's College.
Booterstown
Blackrock.
Co. Dublin.
Volume 2 Number 1
December 1989
Editorial Eddy Carroll 2 Review of 1988/89 Geoffrey Reeves 3 Commodore's A590 Hard Drive Declan NicArdle 6 Microcomputer Interfacing Part 3 John Pelan 8 DOS & That Brian Ward 12 Virtual Floppies on the A590 Eddy Carroll 18 Lost at 'C' Rocco Matassa 22 Experiences of a Sysop Marc Whisker 24 Writing for the CUGI Newsletter Eddy Carroll 27 Amiga Graphics Programming Shane Broadberry 28 Trials and Tribulations Stephen 34 Amiga Public Domain Releases Eddy Carroll 35 Utopia Stephen McGerty 37 Stephanie's problem Page Stephanie 38 Puzzle Page Rocco Matassa 40
Welcome once more to yet another issue of the Newsletter. Once again, I can report that this issue is bigger than ever before! Who would have thought that in just over a year, it would have grown from an 8 page pamphlet into the 40 page booklet you are currently reading? Certainly not me.
This is the second issue to be produced using Amiga TEX and it is coping with the task admirably. It seems that each issue will get a little easier; as time goes by, I am building up a file of useful macros which make it easier to obtain special effects. This issue, you get a real inch symbol for 3.5″ disks! (Previously, you had to be content with 3.5" disks.) You also get to see signal names as they appear on circuit diagrams (like RESET for example). Typography seems to bring out a pedantic streak in people (in me anyway) but hopefully the results are worth it.
This issue sees very little on the C64, I'm afraid. In fact, John Pelan's article on interfacing is the only one which has any relevance to the C64 at all. I know there are C64 owners out there, so how about a few articles!
On the other hand, there are a good number of Amiga articles, which seems to indicate that more and more members are having a go at programming it. It is not an easy route for those previously used to the C64; you have to learn C, and come to terms with the Amiga's hundreds of ROM functions (compared with the C64's 20 odd kernel calls). The reward is the ability to make your machine do anything your imagination can dream up - and in the meantime, you'll have a lot of fun getting there. As Geoff's report of the year mentions, CUGI is doing rather well financially at the moment with the result that a few books on C are being purchased. Those interested in dabbling could do worse than borrowing one for a fortnight and finding out what it's all about.
Since the A.G.M., Rocco has taken over the post of Amiga Librarian, which I have had to give up due to pressure of studies. Rocco tells me he has great plans afoot, so you should be seeing some changes soon.
Final note: This issue contains a brief writing guide for would-be authors who are thinking of submitting material to the Newsletter. It's not intended
to scare people off; if you haven't got the time to pay heed to all the details mentioned, that's okay (after all, I suppose that's the job of the editor) but it would be nice if you could keep them in mind. The deadline for articles for the next Newsletter is 16th February 1990.
That's it for now. Have a good Christmas, and a happy new decade!
E.C.
by Geoffrey J. Reeves
Having had such a successful year, I thought that it might be an idea to remind the membership of some of the events and highlights of the last year.
Having been involved with CUGI since it began back in the long distant past, I can say with assurance that this year was definitely the best. It is
not simply a case of pointing the finger or directing the credit to any one aspect of the group but rather to an overall growth.
Financially, our group is very healthy - each member who didn't make it to the A.G.M should have nevertheless got a copy of the accounts. If you
didn't, then remind us. In summary, we began the year with just under £250 in our current account (and a similar amount in a deposit account). By the end of year, this had risen to just under £500. During the year, about £2000 passed through our hands, the major payments being the purchase of disks (over £750), rent of the room and photcopying (£165) and the cost of obtaining about TO disks for our C128 library (£130 - ouch!). The future looks good because we should be getting in more funds (we raised this year's subscription) and we will not have to pay our fee to Compunet. This will allow us to expand the library - books are expensive - and to purchase some items of hardware to lend to the membership. By popular acclaim, we hope to get a (stereo) sound sampler in the near future, the idea of buying a Genlock having been put 'on hold' for the moment.
CUGI is currently worth about £2000 and has no liabilities. Our assets include over 500 P.D. disks, a couple of modems, a software library, a book
library, an Amiga disk drive, an EPROM programmer and 2 C64s (for spare parts only). You can borrow hardware items if you ask in advance sometimes another member may have what you require on loan already.
As you will have gathered, the library has grown dramatically in size and range over the last year. Strictly speaking, there is more than one
librarian these days to cover the different computers. We hope to produce a catalogue soon to make it easy for all of us to see what is actually in the
library but please, bear with us - there's a lot of it and it must be done properly. In the meantime, talk to Tom the librarian or write and we will
look after you.
No review of the year could omit the very item you are reading - the Newsletter! I recall vividly, the committee meeting which suggested its rebirth. "Just a Newsletter, i.e. 4 sides of A4 including the cover", we agreed. Well, just look at it now it has become an excellent production supported by many of the members - this is not a committee newsletter for the members, by the members and all that. Do keep supporting it; send articles, reviews, puzzles, jokes, anything at all. Make them short, long, whatever ... but do contribute. For goodness sake, why not even write a letter to the Newsletter and we can start a Letters Page?
The Newsletter is, of course, one of the ways that we keep in touch with our Associate Members and we hope that despite the fact they they cannot
attend meetings, they avail of all our services. There has been some 'hitches' in the past but I think that this year, we have got a fast and efficient service in operation. If we haven't, YELL! In case you are wondering what happens when you write and don't always get a speedy reply, I better tell you how it works in practice. All enquiries end up in my cubby hole in St. Andrew's and are passed on at the next meeting (committee or general). If you are
very unlucky, this might not be for the best part of a week. However, this is hopefully not too common. Then, replying can involve contacting other
members etc. - more delay. If there is a problem, we want to hear about it. We know how useful CUGI is to each of us and we would like you to get
the same value from it.
Those of you who did make it to meetings (and didn't fall asleep ...ahem) will have enjoyed (we hope) topics from areas such as graphics, games and
hardware. We showed you Digipaint, Sculpt 3D, PhotoLab, DeLuxe Paint I and an excellent public domain Mandelbrot generator. Incidentally, if you can get DeLuxe Paint II (free with new 'Batman' Amigas, and apparently available with the 'Batman' ' extras for £20 in town) and send away to get it upgraded to DeLuxe Paint III, you will be very happy - DP III is fabulous (if you have at least 1 Meg).
We also demonstrated Sim City, Kennedy Approach (ugh! the C64 version was better - seriously), Zany Golf and Star Trek (public domain, brilliant but it takes up three disks). Battle Chess was simply incredible - chess will never be the same again! On the hardware side, someone else's 1541 disk drive was given some switches to allow easy device number changing live in front of an audience - the amazing thing was that it actually worked! We also reviewed (re-reviewed?) the Sound Sampler and Sound Expander for the C6+. excellent items and great fun. Incidentally. one of our members has successfully attached the Sound Expander kerboard to his Amiga; next, we need some software! On the C6t, we replaved Paradroid, a classic. We also brought in a guest speaker (Kieran Caulfield) who with his Genlock VCR and a stooge entertained us for an evening - you had to be there!
So apart from buying 10,000 disk labels (these are nearly all gone!), staging a couple of table quizzes, and some of us visiting the Commodore Show in June, it was a fairly quiet year, really. I know the committee enjoyed it and we all hope you did too. For our troubles, the A.G.M. ended up with the same crew being re-elected for another year. We'll take it as a vote of confidence! If you have forgotten who we are or what we do, check the list on the inside front cover.
So, what's ahead? Well, on the Amiga side, the new A590 hard drive is catching on and the long awaited Kickstart / Workbench 1.4 looks interesting, to say the least. The new boards inside the current A500 allows for 1 Meg (without the A501 expansion memory), though I'm told some track cutting may be required. That would allow owners to upgrade to 1.5 Meg quite easily (and up to 3.5 Meg if you have an A590). There isn't much happening with the C64 these days but we still support it - we've tons of stuff for it. Anyway, 1990 looks good at this point in time for all of us, so on behalf of the Committee, I'll wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Here's a useful tip for Amiga 'power users' which was posted to Usenet recently. Most of the time, the keyboard repeat speed (settable in Preferences) is perfectly adequate. However, there are times when it would be nice to be able to speed it up temporarily while scrolling around with the cursor keys for example.
One neat way of doing this is to use one of the public domain keymap editors. Edit your favourite keymap, and look at the definitions for the standard cursor keys. These are of the form ESC[A (or B or C or D). Now, change the definitions associated with the ALT cursor key combinations. Just set them to be the same as the standard cursor key definitions, but enter each sequence several times. So, for cursor up, you might use ESC[A ESC[A ESC[A. Now when you press ALT ↑, it will move three times as fast as normal - instant turbo control!
You could also do this using SHIFT instead of ALT but quite a few programs use the shifted cursor keys for other functions so it's best to leave them alone.