=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amy Today A text-file magazine for all Amiga lovers Volume #4, Issue #2, October 20th =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Editor : John Rydell Writer : Bob Bliss Address all correspondence to: "Amy Today" C/O John Rydell GEnie address: J.Rydell1 640 Willowglen Rd. (#54790) Santa Barbara, CA 93105 Plink address: J*Rydell GEnie discussion in category #2, topic #29 Plink discussion in Section #2 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: 1. A Message From the Editor John Rydell 2. Distributing "Amy Today" John Rydell 3. Amiga Happenings John Rydell 4. CD-ROM & The Amiga Bob Bliss 5. Fred Fish 155-158 John Rydell 6. Trading Galore!! John Rydell 7. Newsletter Trading John Rydell 8. Advertising John Rydell 9. In the Future John Rydell =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= A Message From The Editor: First I'd like to apologize for the fact that this issue is so late. I have just been so busy that there was no way that I could write an issue any sooner. I will work very hard to get back on schedule so that everyone will once again know when to expect Amy Today. I've asked many times if someone would like to help me produce Amy Today. This invitation is still open. I'm hoping that a friend of mine might be able to help some more in the future but all help is gladly accepted! This issue contains what I feel is a very interesting article on the Amiga and CD-ROM players. I realize that it is long, but I found it VERY enjoyable to read. I have also included information about the first half of Fred Fish's new disks. I am looking for reader-support in the way of articles or short programs you would like to share with the Amiga community. If you would like to contribute please contact me at one of the locations printed in the magazine's cover/title section. All good PD/shareware software will also be mentioned or reviewed if it is sent to Amy Today. John Rydell (Editor) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Distributing "Amy Today": Amy Today is what I call a public domain file-based magazine. This means that I would like to be given credit to anything taken from the magazine and I request that the magazine remains "AS IS". Please do not modify it in any way if you are going to distribute it. About Distributing: Please upload Amy Today EVERYWHERE! This magazine simply will not flourish if it is not uploaded whenever possible. Every issue is kept under 15,000 bytes ARCed so that upload/download time should never be a problem. So, please, if you have the chance spread the magazine around the country! Give a copy to your friend! Keep Amy Today alive and going strong! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amiga Happenings: (John Rydell) Commodore- The prices of Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000's are up because of the price rises in the RAM/ROM chips. Also, the 1084 has been discontinued to make room for the 1084s (the same monitor with stereo sound). The 1084s costs more than the 1084. Because of this, new users will find themselves spending up to $200 more for their computer. I hope this doesn't hurt the Christmas season too much! I'm still hoping to get my hands on a WB1.3 for system. My local distributer still has no way to get any copies. World of Commodore Show- The World of Commodore Show will be taking place in Philadelphia from Thursday, November 3rd until Sunday, November 6. The show will be held at: The Philadelphia Civic Center Pennsylvania Hall 34th Street and Civic Center Blvd. Philadelphia, PA 19104 For tickets contact The Hunter Group or ticketron. The price will be $10 a day. For more information contact Karen Jewell or Lynn Densmore at: The Hunter Group, Inc. 204 Richmond St. West, Suite 410 Toronto, Ontario Canada M5V 1V6 (416)595-5906 Amiga Happenings is a column dedicated to giving you information on what is happening in the Amiga community. Some of the information could possibly be wrong due to the fact that I am trying to get early information. I do not in any way guarantee that the information will be accurate although I will try my hardest to protect the innocent. >>If you have some new information you would like to share please submit it to Amy Today. ############################################################### # Amy Today Trading Galore! Trade public domain or shareware # # software with Amy Today. Look for more information later # # in this issue. --The trade is going strong...participate # # today! # ############################################################### CD-Rom and the Amiga: Why Not Now? (Bob Bliss) Up front, I gotta tell you: I am almost as crazy about CD-ROM as I am about my Amiga. So it shouldn't surprise you that I am disgusted that nobody as exploited the capabilities of the two together. This column is a plea for somebody, ANYBODY, to hitch up this perfect couple. Let's start with the basics. Compact disc technology was originally developed several years ago to bring digital precision to the music world. A single CD delivers over an hour of nearly "perfect" sound. Analog music information is sampled 44,000 times each second and converted to digital data, which in turn is encoded onto the surface of a metal disk as a series of surface areas and pits. A transparent coating covers the disk surface to protect it against scratches and such. Then in the CD player, a laser beam is used to reflect light off the pits and surface areas to read the digital data. This digital data is converted to analog form by a (surprise!) digital to analog converter. The analog signal is then amplified like any other music signal to drive the loudspeakers. If analog music can be stored as digital data in the form of pits on a disc surface, then it should not be surprising that digital computer information can also be stored this way. When computer data is stored in this way, it is called CD-ROM, Compact Disc Read Only Memory. The user can read the data on the disc, but cannot change it. (We will talk about read/write optical disc technology in a future article.) But what a tremendous amount of data there can be on a CD; over half a GIGAbyte! Despite the fact that CDs are a proven technology, CD-ROM has been slow to catch on in the personal computing world. There are several reasons for this. A claim could be made that the industry was waiting for standards of data format and a way to access such large files from MS-DOS. But these objections were overcome some time ago with the High Sierra format standard (named after a conference at Lake Tahoe) and the Microsoft MS-DOS extensions which allow an MS-DOS computer to access specific data on such a large disk partition (over 500 MB compared with the normal 32 MB MS-DOS disk partition.) The most obvious reason there are so few CD-ROM players in use is their cost. A CD-ROM player is actually a simpler device to make than a musical CD player, because there is no need for a digital to analog converter; the raw data on the CD is simply transferred "as is" to the computer. And if musical CD players have been in the under $200 range for the past three or four years, you would expect a CD-ROM player to be in the same price range, right? Wrong. They started out about three years ago in the $2000 region, broke the $1000 barrier about a year ago, and have been dropping in price very slowly since. There is really no technical justification for this; the term "gouging" comes to mind. The high cost of the players has severely limited the number in use, and the low number of CD-ROM players tells potential disk producers they won't sell many disks, so they begin few new projects, which in turn means there are few discs for sale to attract computer users to buy players, and so forth. Many of the discs that have been produced are for very limited audiences, such as a car manufacturers complete spare parts data for dealers or the CD-ROM version of Books in Print that is used by many bookstores. A couple of notable non-specialized discs have been the text of an encyclopedia (all of the text and an extensive indexing system take up a fraction of the disc) and a large collection of public domain and shareware software for the MS-DOS machines that normally requires about 1000 standard 360K floppies. More recently complete dictionaries (not just spell-checkers) and various other types of reference material have bene produced. Microsoft is making a big pitch for the CD-ROM market, and we may soon see a real flood of data available on disc. But at the moment, I am unaware of any Amiga CD-ROM discs. Yet they certainly are feasible. From a hardware point of view, you could connect a CD-ROM player to an Amiga today; SCSI-compatible CD-ROM players are available, and there are several SCSI adapters you could use. And it should not be a difficult task to decide on a format for the discs (such as High Sierra), or put together the software necessary to read the discs. If you have the data in machine readable format, it only costs a few thousand dollars to produce the CD-ROM master; then producing the actual discs is in the $10 each range. The production of the discs is identical to the production of musical CDs, and these retail in the $10 to $20 range including royalty payments for the artists and such. So assuming Commodore-Amiga, Electronic Arts, or somebody puts the various pieces of the puzzle together, what could be put on the discs? The possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. For starters, how about putting all of the Fred Fish, Amicus, New AGe, and Amiga Round Table (of course!) public domain and shareware disks on a single CD-ROM disc. You could put the data from about 600 full Amiga floppies on a single disc. What about the encyclopedia? Of course. And you could use the extra space for oodles of IFF pictures, animations, and musical pieces to make a more complete encyclopedia than the MS-DOS version. But let's be more creative than that. Why not put together a history course on a CD-ROM disc? Pick a certain period in history, and include maps, pictures of important people and events and works of art, DMCS or Sonix scores of all the major music of the period, and throw in a few simulation games of the important events. Use three of Amy's voices to play Wagner's music while the fourth is Amy reading the history of late 19th century Germany, while different screens are showing maps of the changing shape of Germany, and pictures of the key people are also constantly changing. The music fades as sound effects of a primitive automobile are played, and a video of the first Mercedes appears on the screen. You don't care about cars, so you pull down a menu and click on 'Fashion', and Amy stops talking about wars and starts discussing clothing, with pictures continually changing to show how fashions evolved over the period. You get the idea. And if 19th century Germany does not excite you, perhaps a similar treatment of the history of baseball or Hollywood movies would. The Amiga gives you all of the tools you need to display and use all sorts of information, from simple text to pictures to music to speeches to animations to game-based simulations to interactive quizzes with the user. It also gives you the multitasking ability you need to mix and match the various ways of displaying and using the information. All of this information must be stored in digital form at some point. The CD-ROM gives you the capability to distribute an enormous amount of any type of data on a single disc, and who says you must limit yourself to just one disc? The Amiga and CD-ROM seem to make a perfect pair. Will somebody PLEASE get working and bring them together?? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Fred Fish: Fish recently released disks #155-162 in his public domain library. In this issue I only have room for the first four to be looked at. Because of this disks numbered 155-158 will be reviewed this week and #159-162 will come in the next issue. I'm not sure who originally created the text for this file. It might have been Fred Fish himself. It might have been someone on Usenet. To whomever credit is due, it is given. ---Disk #155--- AsmExmpls:A couple of assembly code examples. Executables are not extremely useful but the code might be of considerable benefit to beginning assembly language programmers. Author: Henrik Clausen Bison: A replacement for unix "yacc" command. This is from the GNU (GNU is Not Unix) effort. Contains updates to the version on disk number 136, submitted by two separate sources. Includes source. Author: Bob Corbett and Richard Stallman, updates by William Loftus and Scott Henry NoSmoking:Sample program showing the use of a recoverable alert while displaying a personal health message. Includes source. Author: Theo Kermanidis Scenery: A very nice assembly language random scenery generator. Generates very realistic looking landscapes. Includes intuition interface and lots of menu options. Version 1.0, binary only. Author: Brett Casebolt ---Disk #156--- Blocks2: Amusing and colorful display of a moving trail of "blocks". Update to version on disk number 71, however this version also includes source. Author: Gary Walker Flex: Flex is a replacement for the UNIX "lex" (lexical analyzer generator) program that is faster than lex, and freely redistributable. Includes source. Authors: Jef Poskanzer, Vern Paxson, et. al. Submissions by William Loftus and Scott Henry Go64: Another screen hack aimed at an earlier Commodore product.(Not to be confused with the commercial product Go-64! from Software Insight Systems). Includes source. Author: Joerg Anslik Grammars: A group of lexical grammar files for Ada, C and Pascal for use in conjunction with the flex program on this disk and the bison program on disk #155 Authors: Various, submitted by William Loftus OOPS!: Tired of the monochrome background color of your Workbench or CLI? Then try this colorful screen hack to brighten things up! Includes source. Author: Joerg Anslik ---Disk #157--- 60or80: A small utility to toggle the 60/80 column text modes without having to go through preferences. Works from either the CLI or the Workbench. Includes source. Author: Mark Schretlen AmicForm: Creates a phonebook containing only those areacodes and exchanges reachable through PC-Pursuit. Input any of Chet Solace's Finalist BBS lists and it creates the phonebook in a form usable by AmicTerm and a number of other popular terminal programs. Version 1.3, Binary only. Author: John Motsinger AnimBalls:A nifty little animation program that allows you to create a collection of balls in three-space and then interactively rotate them in real time using the mouse. Includes source. Author: Jim Guilford BootBack: A handy little utility to copy and save the boot block from a disk, then later restore it should the disk get stomped on by some ugly virus. Includes source. Author: David Joiner ECPM: A CP/M emulator for the Amiga. Emulates an 8080 along with H19 terminal emulation. Update from version on disk number 109. Includes source. Author: Jim Cathey; Amiga port by Charlie Gibbs; Significant improvements by Willi Kusche KeyFiler: A BBS message file sorter that allows sorting by keyword. Includes a textreader, Soundex matching, and limited wildcard capabilities. Version 1.0, Binary only. Author: John Motsinger ScreenZap:A little utility to clean away screens that are left by ill-behaving programs. It will kill every screen behind the WorkBench, noting how many it gets. The screens in front of WB are not affected. Includes source. Author: Lars Clausen SetPrefs: Allows you to build a whole library of preference settings and instantly switch back and forth between them. Affects all preference settings not just the colors. Very useful for machines with multiple users or multiple external devices. Includes Amiga's default and various sample preference settings. Binary only. Author: Martin Hippele Xicon: Xicon lets you use icons to call up scripts containing CLI commands. This is version 2.01, an update to the version on disk 102. Includes source. Author: Pete Goodeve ---Disk #158--- DiskX: Nicely done Sector-based disk editor. Binary only Author: Steve Tibbett MemTest: Originally designed for production testing of A1000 memory boards. Very nice intuition interface. Version 2,4. Includes source in Modula. Author: George Vokalek MSDOS: A program to list files written in standard MS-Dos or Atari ST format. The files can then be copied to Ram and rewritten to disk in Amiga-Dos format. Binary only, Shareware, Version 0.1. Author: Frank Wubbeling PCBTool: An early version of a shareware PC Board layout program Lots of options including variable size pads and traces, grids, grid snap, layers, zoom, selectable centering text and more. This version does not support printer/plotter dumps or libraries. Version 2.6, binary only. Author: George Vokalek ScreenX: A handy little background utility that provides a small clock/memory counter in its inactive mode and a versatile screen manipulator when called upon. Binary only with source available from author, Version 2.1. Author: Steve Tibbett TaskX: A "real-time" task editor. Lets you list and set the priorities of all the currently running tasks. Binary only, Version 2.0. Author: Steve Tibbett VirusX: Update to the version on disk number 154, checks for a couple of additional new strains. Includes source, Version 1.6. Author: Steve Tibbett YachtC3: Update to the Yachtc program on disk #10, contains some fixes and incorporates a simple sound process. Version 3, includes source. Author: Sheldon Leemon, with enhancements by Mark Schretlen =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Trading Galore: First we had a picture trade. Users were urged to send in a disk full of pictures and, in return, were given a disk full of the best pictures that had been collected so far. The picture trade was, and will hopefully continue to be, a GREAT success! Because of this, I have decided to open up a new trade which allows everyone to participate--not just those of us with pictures. Send me a disk full of anything you want. (Music, Art, Animations, Sound files, and Public Domain/Shareware software...anything!) Include a SASE (please remember the stamps!), and I will send your disk back to you filled with whatever you want. Just tell me whether you want music, art, software (you can even specify a specific pd/shareware program but I can't guarantee that I have it), and I'll send it back. On request, I'll even send disk copies of all issues of Amy Today. Send your disk and a SASE to: Amy Today's Trading Galore 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 <> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Newsletter Trading: (From Issue 1-1) I am looking for Amiga user groups who would like to trade newsletters with me. Every month I will send you three issues of Amy Today and, in return, I would like a copy of your newsletter. I know a lot of this trading takes place and would love to get involved. The more articles and information that I have about the Amiga, the better I can make Amy Today. If you are interested please drop me a line on GEnie, Plink, or by mail. I would really appreciate a sample newsletter and will mail you Amy Today in return. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Advertising: Amy Today is open to advertising at VERY affordable prices. Large and small companies both have a great opportunity for quality advertising while supporting a public domain Amiga magazine. If you are interested please write to: Amy Today ATTN Advertising 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= In the Future: A review of Bard's Tale II A review of Professional Page 1.1 A review of Modula-2 A review of a CLtd 33 meg hard drive A review of a Supra 2400 baud modem Yes, another review of F/A-18 Interceptor An interview with a shareware programmer (Guess who?) Maybe even more interviews, also And hopefully numerous articles from you--the readers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Amy Today" is copyright 1988 by John Rydell. Portions of the magazine may be reprinted but the content of this magazine may NOT be changed without the expressed consent of John Rydell. Yet everyone is encouraged to distribute it AS IS. Please give credit to "Amy Today" as well as to the individual author when reprinting material. "Amy Today" as well as any of its authors are not responsible for any damages that occur because of errors or omissions. Articles reprinted from other newsletters, as noted, are not property of Amy Today but are under the control of their original authors. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=