READERS' QUERIES AND QUESTIONS  Ed: Thanks go as usual to the numerous people who help out with info on these and other questions, including Nic Wilson, Barry Caudle, Rick Jewson, Andrew Wong and others.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  SLOWING DOWN GAMES ON THE A3000 Chris Mills asks how he can get the game Populous to slow down, now that he has an A3000 - it goes so fast that he can't even get moving before he's blasted away. Ed: Turn caches off (> cpu nocache) , and doubleclick nofastmem in the System drawer - this will slow it down to 3 times the speed of an A500. Also available is the program Degrader by Chris Hames on MD25, which "degrades" your Amiga in various ways to make it operate like a lesser machine. Nic Wilson described how to load Kickstart 1.3 using SetCPU v. 1.6 which will then allow you to reboot into KS 1.3 which automatically removes all Chip memory. Find this in MD18 in his article on how to get the most out of games on the A3000.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  ACTION REPLAY III MEMORY PROBLEM? Dear Ed: Doug Groat's articles in MD27 were very helpful. You should publish as many more as you can. The Amiga we have is a 500 with 2.5 megs. Do you know if Action Replay 3 will work with this? The advertisements say it will work with up to 2 megs of RAM. We wrote to the distributors but got no reply. Imogene G Cribbes Como West, NSW. Ed: This question arose once before - Andrew Hill says he had 3 meg of Ram running (1 meg chip, 2 meg fast) with the pass-through adaptor for the A590 and never had a problem. See the classifieds if you want to buy one of these.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  MAXIMISING MEMORY Dear Ed: With disk #GAS20 which contains the animation "At the movies", it appears that it requires 1.2mb to run. Is there a way to run it on my 1mb A500 with dual disk drives. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Perhaps a note could be put on the catalogue disk advising others of the requirements to run this. If I am unable to run this on my Amiga would it be possible to exchange it for another PD disk? We were at the World of Commodore Show and had a chat with some of your people and bought MegaDisc 28. I would just like to commend you on your continuing standard of speed and competency in dealing with your readers. Keith Hodges Warilla, NSW. Ed: I'd say that you'd be unable to run the program, but if you ever want to maximise memory, follow these rules: * remove or turn off any external drives (hard or floppy) * boot straight in to a program without opening Workbench - even stop the startup-sequence with CTRL-D and run the program manually if possible. Just don't have extra little programs running unnecessarily. * if you need Workbench, make sure you have a minimum of windows open, and none overlapping.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  FINANCIAL PROGRAMS Dear Ed: I have an urgent requirement for an investments monitoring and charting program for stockmarket and other investments similar to the programs "Portfolio Reporter" and "Dowchart" for the IBM. Both these programs are Australian efforts but unfortunately do not come in an Amiga version. Before I rush out and buy a 486.... do you know of any programs, commercial, PD or shareware of this type for the Amiga? I have asked a number of people without success but perhaps you may know of something suitable. Keep up the good work with MegaDisc, I look forward to every issue! Colin Haywood Kingsley, WA. Ed: I faxed Colin details of what programs were available - several from Lionheart Press deal with financial matters and others can be found by checking up the relevant section of Amazing Computing's "Guide to the Amiga".  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  DRIVER FOR CANON LASER Dear Ed: We are running 3 Amigas and 3 PCs. Each of the PCs are outputted to Canon LBP8III Laser Printers, we wish to connect these printers to the Amigas, however Canon has informed us they have not written a driver. Are you aware of a PD Driver which may assist us? Ron Bell Gosford, NSW. Ed: It seems that Canon has its own Postscript language, which is proporietary and only works with Canon drivers, which don't exist for the Amiga. So I warn readers not to get one of these machines, because like Ron, you'll have problems.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  SATELLITE TRACKING PROGRAMS Dear Ed: I am trying to locate a satellite tracking program, "AMIGA SAT" or "PIANO", for the AMIGA 500. Do you carry these programs and if so, what is their price? W. Hanson Beenleigh, QLD. Ed: Can anyone shed any light on this query, or anything related?  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  DIRECTORY OPUS Dear Ed: I've been experimenting with Directory Opus (which I bought from old, or should that read young, "Jonathan Potter", at the W.O.C. show). It's easily the best program that I've come across. I've tried a few of the others available, and used SID for a couple of years, and found it to be very good. Then along came Dir Opus. It's just heaps ahead of the rest. Good one Jonno. (Looking forward to the free update!) Once I've got the extra memory and the hard drive, I want my system to boot up to Dir Opus, with/without Work Bench, (I'm not sure if I'll be saving much by not loading WB), or maybe it's a good idea to keep it hanging around, I'm not sure, (can anyone put forward any ideas on this?), bearing in mind that I want to do everything from Dir Opus. What would the ideal SUS look like with what I have in mind? I've got a few things in there already: ATSC; PPloadseg; Setfont Clean 8, and AutoCLI. I'm running a few programs from Dir Opus at the moment, but only having one meg of memory and two floppies, I'm really pushing it, Dir Opus is just so huge. I read the review in MD 29, (PD_Since_MS28), about my Microwave disk. Whoever did the review has misunderstood what I said. He/she said that it is a DEMO COPY of a $50 SHAREWARE cookbook. It is not a DEMO COPY, but the full version, and it is not SHAREWARE, it's all there, the whole book for free, or next to free. It took me a long time to type it in though. George Anderson Berowra, NSW. Ed: You can certainly run DirOpus and pretty much forget about both the Workbench and the CLI, George, provided you've configured DOpus to access all the programs you want. I'd have Workbench hanging round myself, simply because for some operations it is the most efficient interface - or perhaps I'm just accustomed to it. You save very little memory by not running it in any case. As for the startup-sequence - presumably you'd just be running your favourite PD utilities and DOpus, which would just require entries to the effect of "run DOpus" or whatever.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  HANG ON TO YOUR DEMOS Dear Ed: With the demo disks, should they be sent back once looked at? Also, if I then decide to buy a full copy of A-Gene, do I send the money to you or Mike Simpson? Cheryl Szpak Bundeena, NSW. Ed: With our demos or any other PD disks, once you've bought them, they're yours. However, you are welcome, as a subscriber to send in any disk which gets updated, to get the latest version free (send a SASE, though). As most people know, you can get your catalogue updated at any time too of course. As for A-Gene - yes, send the money to Mike Simpson ($30) whose address appears in his review of BlitzBasic_2 this issue.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  FINAL COPY AND OUTLINE FONTS Alwyn Francis asks: Does anyone know anything about how Final Copy deals with outline fonts? Alwyn finds that some of those on the disk don't work, and nor do those that are in our CGFonts pack of 6 disks of outline fonts. The program says it can't open the file as an outline font when you try to load one. Ed: Final Copy uses a different arrangement for using outline fonts, said to be better than the way other programs do it. In fact Commodore was involved in the development somwhat, and was a little miffed that the way of handling them was changed. But you do have to handle fonts from within the program. Our CGFonts pack will not work because of this difference in the way of handling outline fonts. [Thanks to Barry Caudle for this info.]  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  INSTALLING COMPUGRAPHIC FONTS Dear Ed: My first problem relates to the installation of the compugraphic fonts. The advice contained in your short note has not resulted in my being able to install any of the fonts. Your mention of an obscure bug in the Fountain program raises further questions. I would be pleased to know the exact steps which should be taken if I am to be successful. Given the nature of the problem, it may be timely to include a step by step account of a tested procedure on MegaDisc 30. For example, what is the path to Arctic on AmigOz32? As I recall, you were working on a new Megados disk, System 2. Is it available? Ron Upton Yarrambat, VIC. Ed: Check the "Bugs&Upgrades" section in the Articles drawer this issue for an explanation of what to do with this problem. Re Megados 2 - the manuals that come with WB2 are now pretty good, and so it's not so urgent to have a more usable manual. When V 1.2 came out, the manual was woeful and that's why I wrote Megados. So it's unlikely but not totally out of the realm of possibility, that Megados 2 will see the light.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  LOCAL DTP BUREAUS Anyone know of any local DTP bureaus for scanning etc (Sydney area)? Michael Chapman Ed: In Canberra there is Desktop Utilities (Tel: 06 2396658) which does a fine service and many other things besides. Here in Sydney I know of no commercial bureaus for scanning. Can anyone suggest any, here or elsewhere?  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  CREATING LETTERHEADS Dear Ed: What I am looking for is a disk/s with a wide selection of easily-useable graphics so I can create my own letterheads. These would ideally be music oriented, such as instruments or notations. Any suggestions? Phil Langdon Ashmore, QLD. Ed: You've come to the right place, Phil - check out our "Theme_Packs" in the PUBLIC_DOMAIN drawer for listings of various Clip-Art packs. The material is of all types however, and I can't promise special disks of musical themes.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  THE FACTS ON GPFAX Dear Ed: I have a few questions which may be appropriate for the next issue of MD. In using GPFAX with A2000HD, parallel printer, and Maestro 9600XR Fax/Modem why is it that I can only print out the faxes when the modem is disconnected from the serial port? Why would GPFAX disable the MyMenu program which runs on startup? Is there a program which will give information on the number of bitplanes in a selected IFF file? Using PageStream to prepare faxes of more than one page for transmission by GPFAX, why is it that these are converted to a separate fax for each page? Nina O'Flynn Bateau Bay, NSW. Ed: Nina wrote later with an answer to her first question: "I consulted Maestro modems in Canberra and they suggested my cable was probably at fault. The modem requires a 25 way cable. Mine looked like that but on obtaining another (RS232 M/F) the difficulty was removed. I don't know how the ordinary user is to know the difference in cables as they certainly look the same in every respect but one: the RS232 is fatter!" Anything which sets Preferences disables MyMenu, and so many programs do disable it. Greg Perry (author of GPFax) suggests that you shouldn't be using it any more. Re Pagestream - it sends a form-feed at the end of each page which causes GPFax to close the file and open another. This is just the way that it works - each page has a different filename. Note that the current version of GPfax is V. 2.04 - anyone who bought it direct from GPSoftware will be getting information/upgrades in the near future. Those who bought it as part of a modem deal don't get automatic upgrades but upgrades will be available at a fee. AmigaNet BBS in Australia and world-wide will have the upgrade patches available soon, as will InterNet. About finding the number of bitplanes in an IFF - many programs will do this: eg, DPaint will let you know all about it when you try to load a file, as will numerous graphic displayers such as Mostra.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  PRINTMASTER PLUS AND INSANITY Dear Ed: I am drafting this plea attached in response to our telephone conversation on Saturday evening and hope that somebody out there can help with my problem. I am hoping that you will be able to insert it in the next issue of MD and maybe that somebody out there may have experienced the same problem. I have greatly enjoyed MegaDisc since it was first issued and although I am only a fiddler I get great enjoyment from the many articles in each issue. Hoping that MD only goes on from strength to strength in the future. Here I plead for my own SANITY, can any good hearted sould out there help me? I have at present in my possession a recently purchased Print Master Plus and am having great difficulty in getting it to print. The program does everything that I want it to do until I get to the print mode, all I am getting is a very black and ominous line about 5mm. wide. To all intentions I am doing everything that the program asks for with the equipment that I have. The setup I have is AMIGA 500 + 1 Meg. expansion, external disk drive and Star NX-1000 (Mono) Printer. I have tried to use the printer drivers off the WorkBench Version 1.3 but only come up against the same problem each time. I have tried all the Epson drivers available as I believe they are compatable and still find the same problem. If any kind soul can help me I would be forever grateful, I can be contacted on 02-6702403 (home) or 047-320414 (work). Geoff Johnston Erskine Park, NSW. Ed: Are there any users out there who've solved this problem?  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  QUARTERBACK TOOLS AND HARD DISK CRASHES Dear Ed: As a user of the Amiga 500 for only 12 months with no computer experience beforehand, I and my two sons have Amiga 500 + 1 meg chip +590 + 2 meg 2 externals and printer. I used QuarterBack V.4.2 for backing up and QB tools V1.6 for checking H.D. When using QB tools to defragment the HD I find the system crashes half way when it is defragmenting. Has anyone else had the same problem? If so, what is the cure? or what other program could be used? That's the bad news. The good news is "Hooray" for the Amiga and the support there is from other users. Have recently upgraded to W/B 2.04, marvelous, what! Thanks to MegaDisc for all the help and info put out on the disks. Gordon Woods Bendigo, VIC. Ed: Use ReOrg on Fish 716 to de-fragment - it's PD and very good. See also the tutorial this issue on disk fragmentation. According to a subscriber, his Pagestream program now loads in 30 seconds rather than 90 from his old hard disk. Someone also mentioned a program called SpeedDisk which has a very nice interface as well. Andrew Wong also adds the following: Some suggestions for the defragmentation problem: a. Use the "Find and Repair bad files and drawers" option in QB Tools to ensure there are no errors in the file system. b. Remove everything in the startup-sequence that is not standard, especially disk caching programs such as BlitzDisk or FaccII. Also, rename the WBStartup drawer on your boot disk if you are using Workbench 2. c. If QB Tools still doesn't work reliably try one of the programs mentioned in the Disk_Fragmentation article in the Tutes_&_CLI drawer of this Megadisc.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  GAMES DISK-MAG LOOKS FOR CHEATS Gary Dellar puts out a free disk-magazine devoted to the world of gaming on the Amiga - it has hints, cheats, maps, you name it, and he is always on the lookout for more information, so if you know anything get in touch with him: 12 Austin Court Sunbury 3429. He particularly wanted solutions and maps for : Legend, Mortville Manor, and Maupin Island.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  FUJITSU PRINTER DRIVER Does anyone have, or know of a Fujitsu DL-900 printer driver - to handle 360 x 360 resolution? Please let Craig know through Megadisc. Craig Lawrie Adelaide SA  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  PRINTERS Having updated to DPaint IV, I am enjoying myself producing family invitations, cards, etc. I have a Citizen GSX 140, which is a 24-pin dot matrix printer with a colour ribbon option. It will only print standard Lo-Res images, not HAM, interlace, etc: all other modes bring up a "Printer.device not found" message. Is this common with printers, and can it be fixed? What colour printers will handle other resolutions? Ed: You probably don't have the correct printer drivers installed on the disk you're bootin on PROBLEMS 1. I have enjoyed the Showanim animation disks I ordered from you recently. Is there any way I can load them from the HD, by icon? I have experimented with this and always get a noisy animation as a result. Ed: You have to duplicate the way the animation is set up on the floppy disk - so from icon, it could well be that if you check the DEFAULT TOOL fo the icon by clicking on the icon once, then selecting INFO from the Workbench menu, you'll find SHOWANIM. So put ShowAnim in the same drawer as the animation is on the hard disk. 2. I have used GIFMachine (to convert my GIF files to Sham - at least I think that's what happened - they can be loaded in an incomplete way into DPIV) but I cannot get ShamCon to convert them into IFF form. ShamCon just takes all the disk space available, without ever actually completing the transfer. What is the secret? Ed: David Jacobs suggests HamLab, a demo of which is on Fish 726, and which can do all the final version can do but with a limit on size of 512x512. He says it is very easy to use and will do all you need. He also recommends Convert by Black Belt Systems, also on one of the Fish disks, as well as FBM which does much more besides. So forget about ShamCon because you're doing a double conversion where you could do just one. Art Dept Pro amd ImageMaster are recommended too, but are commercial programs. 3. How do you get GOMF loaded from your startup-sequence automatically? All I get is a screen that needs to be clicked on, and I would prefer not to have to action anything. Ed: You could try entering something to the effect of: RUN >NIL: eq "PRINT" ;//checks whether PRINT entered ;type >prt: Ram:Notes ; if so, prints ;endif ;if eq "SHOW" ;//checks whether SHOW entered ;type Ram:Notes ; if so, displays on screen ;endif ;if not eq "" ;//checks whether SAVE and a name entered ;copy ram:Notes ; if so saves to filename entered after ;endif ; the word SAVE ;if EQ "DELETE" ;//checks whether DELETE entered ;delete ram:Notes ;if so deletes file ;skip NoNote ;//if DELETE, skip the entry routine ;endif ;if not eq "" ;//if SAVE and a filename skip NoNote ; entered, skip the entry routine ;else ;if eq "PRINT" ;//or if PRINT, skip the entry routine ;Skip NoNote ;else ;if eq "SHOW" ;//or if SHOW, skip the entry routine ;skip NoNote ;endif ;endif ;//only gets to here if not PRINT,SHOW ; SAVE or DELETE so we want to add note echo " Use Ctrl+\ to finish" ;// say how to get out echo "*E[32m" ;//pen colour to black, outputs blank line if not exists ram:Notes ;//check whether file already exists date >ram:Notes ; if not, create file with date & time else date >>ram:Notes ; if so adds current date and time endif type >>ram:Notes * ;//accepts keyboard input and directs it ; to end of file until Ctrl-/ is entered echo >>ram:Notes " " ;//adds blank line to file echo "*E[31m" ;//restores pen colour to white lab NoNote ;where to skip to if DELETE,PRINT or SAVE Andrew Wong writes: The problem with the script is that the behaviour of the IF command has changed under AmigaDOS 2.0 so that statements of the form IF EQ "" don't work when the keyword is a null string. The solution is to surround the keyword variable with quotes thus: IF "" EQ "" The Notebook script has to be changed in the two lines that read if not eq ""  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###  OVER PROTECTIVE ED Here is another problem I have come across with WB2.xx. I use scripts as much as possible in making life easier at the Keyboard so Ed is the text editor I've become accustomed to using, when making scripts or altering my user-startup. Ed saves the scripts then alters the protection bits by removing the "e" and "d" flags which can be a pain if you are trying out new scripts and I have to alter the "d" flag so it can be overwritten/saved to. Also after writing a script it won't execute because the "e" flag does not exist these problem did not exist on WB1.3.2. I did try the WB1.3.2 Ed on WB2.xx but it crashes - any idea out there in Amiga land? Alf Zappala Rydalmere Andrew Wong writes: You should be able to execute scripts even with the Execute bit clear as long as the Script bit is set. I don't know of any way to change Ed's behaviour in this regard. Perhaps you could use a script like this: .key FROM/A,ARGS/F .bra { .ket } ed {from} {args} protect {from} +ed Script files seem to need some tidying up under 2.0. Although the /A, /K, /S, and /F keyword switches work OK, /N doesn't do anything and /M always produces rubbish results.  ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ### 30 ###