~December 1986 Newsletter` NZ Amiga Users Group (Wgtn), c/- Tony Wills, 156C Queens Drive, Lyall Bay, Wellington 3. ~Editorial :` Well we have finally produced a Newsdisk for you to look at. It is not meant to be a vehicle for distributing our library of Public domain software, but a way to distribute up-to-the-minute (up-to-the month?) information, and information that is inconvenient to distribute in printed form. For example, lists of products and public domain software available for the Amiga. Other things that you can expect to find on the newsdisk are contributions and correspondence from members. Having said that, we will still put public domain stuff on our disks in the form of programs and projects that interest a lot of members. If you find little or nothing of interest on our first disk then don't hesitiate to let us know, and tell us what you would like (or preferably submitt some example of what you would like to see , or hear!). We had hoped to include some digitised music but alas no room this time (those samples are BIG). ~News :` Reminder to Commodore - We really are still waiting for an NTSC to PAL upgrade. The Ausies have them, why not us! The SideCar is now available for about $2000 - a bit too steep I thought, probably better off buying a Taiwanese PC clone for about the same price if you really want a IBM PC type machine. If it was priced around $1000 (perhaps $1200) it would be a much better proposition. The next version of the Amiga may include the SideCar as standard (builtin) which sounds like a good idea, why they are at it how about stuffing 1Meg of memory, a second disk drive, 68020, maths coprocessor and bigger power supply into the machine as well! ~Hardware :` A few members have had problems with disks that fail and are apparently unusable. Often the disks have been corrupted by AmigaDOS and will work fine if reformatted (initialised), but sometimes AmigaDOS will refuse to reformat them. Occasionally AmigaDOS also refuses to format a brand new disk, complaining of a hard error on cylinder 0. In both these cases you can usually work around the problem by using a copy program that ignores errors (like Marauder, Mirror and perhaps Quickcopy) to copy a good disk over the bad disk, then an ordinary reformat usually works. The disk may still be suspect, but I have only found a hard error on one disk, and that one has the excuse that it was actually sold as a single sided disk! (NB the rest of the box is OK, so far!) If you don't believe that AmigaDOS (Version 1.1) can corrupt disks when you are using apparently innoxious commands then try this - make a copy of your workbench disk (V 1.1), hop into its 'c' directory and execute the following commands : rename dir to f rename list to f/s now hop into its root directory (cd /) and look for the 's' subdirectory - you will find it is now listed as a file! yet you can still look at its contents with the dir command. You will also find a number of files and directories appear to be missing, although you can still access them. In short AmigaDOS certainly can corrupt disks! (still happens in version 1.2) ~Letters to the Editor :` Dear Tony, The Amiga users club has gone well so far, but I notice that the same two or three people bring their machines to the meetings every month. At the meetings these machines are continually in use (blame Fred - ed), maybe people who bring their machines should be given a small fee for every meeting they bring their machine along. This is to make up for wear and tear to the keyboards, mice and especially drives. Thanks, Pete McPherson (Wellington). I don't think we have enough money in the group to pay anyone, say $5 per machine per meeting, without increasing the meeting levy. It may be more reasonable to get members to bring their own machines if they want to copy PD software during the meeting. What do other members think, and what do members do at other meetings about the country ? - ed Dear Sir, I would like to send out a plea to software publishers to ask them to stop publishing so much software. When the Amiga was launched I understood that it was so overpriced that no one would buy one and therefore no one would bother publishing software for it (and that the company was going to sink soon anyway). As an amateur pirate (buccaneer third class) I thought this was just the opportunity I had been looking for - I could get rapid promotion by achieving the rare distinction of pirating every program published for a particular machine. After many months of hard work (selling pirated software) I saved up and bought an Amiga - I now find, to my horror, that there are over 700 titles available and it will cost me another $5000 just for the blank disks that I need to store all that booty on. I'm discusted at the publishers dirty underhand tactics. Yours walking the plank, Blue Bottle. Aaah, so thats how publishers can scuttle pirates! -ed ~NewsDisk :` The first NZAmigaUG newsdisk contains the following : AmigaLibDisk.List - Fred's summaries of the contents of his AmigaLibDisk series of public domain programs etc. To date we have disks 1 to 46 inclusive. The disks are listed in reverse order in the file so that you will come across the latest version, of any particular program, first. Software.Prices - A list of software for the Amiga, including publisher, price and supplier, NZ price if available locally. Generally the 'price and supplier' category is the sort of price you can expect to get it for if ordering it direct from overseas, and the name of a company advertising it. Remember to multiply all US prices by something like 2.5 to estimate what it will actually cost you in NZ dollars. Hardware.Prices - As above, but for hardware, NB the freight costs are liable to be a significant factor for hardware. Book.Prices - As above, but for publications that have some relevance to the Amiga. MemExpansion - Details of construction of a wire-wrapped memory expansion board (1Meg) with battery backed up clock. There has been a bit of interest in this project, and if there is enough interest someone may design a printed circuit board. It is a relatively simple RAM board and doesn't 'auto-configure' on powerup. KickBench - Details of how to make a disk with both kickstart and workbench on it, so that one disk can be used to bring the system up. There are understandably a few problems with this slightly forced marriage, but it does work, and is useful for applications like Bulletin Boards to enable the system to automatically reboot after a power failure without human intervention. This directory includes a copy of DiskEd, but before someone complains that this isn't public domain I should point out that you already own a copy of it - it is on the kickstart disk! but you may have just a little trouble accessing it there! Utilities - A few useful tools : ViewIlbm : Update of the program that displays IFF files (from AmigaLibDisk #44) -it will now display H.A.M. files like those produced by digiview (Hurray!). Open the icons 'Wood', 'Glass', or 'Spidiwi' to see it do its stuff. ('Spidiwi' was digitised by me using digiview and camera kindly lent by 'Malcrons Computer Village' and is of a spendid specimen of 'Spiderus Plasticus', a species that only breeds in some Japanese factories). These pictures are seen in their full splendour only when viewed from TV viewing distances, not the couple of feet (aprox 0.6 metres!) away that you may be viewing this from. Ty : Program to display textfiles from the workbench.(I didn't use the NotePad as it objects to displaying foreign files) This is a very much hacked version of the 'less' program from AmigaLibDisk #34 - It needs a lot more work, and has only taken me three weeks of fighting with the C language to get it this far (I might just know something about C when I've finished!) DirUtil : Workbench utility to allow you to move files about, perhaps most useful when you've only got one disk drive. Fileprint : Workbench utility that dumps text files to your printer. NB the only printer drivers on the disk are 'epson' and 'generic', preferences is set to 'epson'. ScreenDump : Workbench utility to dump screen images to your printer. (Probably can't dump H.A.M. pictures) Old Newsletters - Copies of all our previous newsletters to inform new (and perhaps not so new) members of what has gone before There are thousands of other things that we could have put on the disk, but contrary to whatever I may have said previously 880k isn't really enough for a newsdisk! ~Hints :` Workbench Disks - If you are setting up a disk that you want to be able to boot as a Workbench disks you can strip off a lot of stuff and have about 80% of the disk available for your own programs. You must run the install command on your disk to make it bootable. The system files on our newsdisk are as follows : c (dir) CD,Dir,EndCLI,Info,List,LoadWB,Run,Type l (dir) Disk-Validator,Port-Handler,Ram-Handler devs (dir) printers (dir) epson,generic parrallel.device,printer.device,system-configuration s (dir) startup-sequence CLI Even this isn't a bare minimum, some of these files aren't needed by the the newsdisk (we can probably get rid of parallel.device, and perhaps Disk-Validator). You only need device drivers in the 'devs' directory for those devices that you actually use. The files don't even need to be in subdirectories, in general AmigaDOS will look for files in the current directory first, so you can for instance put startup-sequence and system-configuration in the root directory and dispense with unused subdirectories. If you are not using the CLI you don't need the files in the 'c' directory (nor of course the CLI program) except for LoadWB. NB If you want to be able to startup the CLI from the workbench you seem to need the 'Run' command in the 'c' directory - it uses it just after creating the newcli window, but I don't know what for. The workbench 'initialise' command appears to be the only utility to create wastebasket directories, I don't think you can move wastebaskets so if you want one on your disk use 'initialise' rather than the CLI format command. ~Disk-recovery :` While creating the newsdisk I had occasion to recover a few 'trashed' disks - no less than six times! I was assembling the stuff onto one disk and every so often I would hear those ominous sounds as the drive drags the heads back to cylinder zero, tries again, and gives up with rude messages about your corrupt disk. Every time it turned out that cylinder 40 had been corrupted. (under AmigaDOS 1.1 disk space is allocated from cylinder 40 out to cylinder 0, then from cylinder 80 back down to cylinder 40, hence the root directory usually starts on cylinder 40) After the fourth time I was becoming a little annoyed and actually started to keep a note of what I was doing. The corruptions only occured when writing to the disk in drive zero (internal drive), I had no problems with the external drive. Well, needless to say, I religiously avoided writing to any disk in drive-0 from then on, and so far so good (I suppose I will have to go and find out what the service for these machines is like on Monday). Well anyway to recover the disks I used both DiskDoctor and DiskSalv. DiskDoctor is on one of the workbench 1.2 beta test disks and only works under AmigaDOS V1.2, it also has the disadvantage that it writes back to your 'bad' disk to fix it, which could be nasty (but an advantage if you've only got one drive). Disksalv (from AmigaLibDisk #20) requires 2 drives, writing its corrections to a new, formatted, disk. Both seemed to work about as well as each other but I found that DiskDoctor didn't recreate lost directories, but put files from lost directories into the root directory - hence requiring a bit of renaming on your part when finished. Disksalv recreated directories and copied each file back in - incidently repacking the files as it went. With both programs you have to check carefully what was actually recovered - if there were corrupt blocks then files and directories may have disappeared without trace. (NB when Disksalv asks you to press return to start, ensure that you don't press it until the disk light goes out, otherwise it gets into a nasty loop) ~User Group :` We have boxes of 10 disks at $70 (including postage within NZ). If the demand goes down the price will go up! - If you can get proven good disks cheaper then let us know. We should get a price drop in the newyear. ~Public Domain Software :` Currently we've got assorted Commodore-Amiga demos , AMICUS disks 1..6,8,9, and disks 1..46 of the AmigaLibDisk series assembled by Fred Fish in the States. If you've got any contributions or requests then send us a disk. (or money to purchase a box of disks, and specifications as to their contents) ~Group Meetings :` Wellington : The next local Wellington group meeting is on Monday the 29th December at 7:30pm in the Royal Society Building, Turnbull Street, Thorndon, Wellington. Contact : Tony Wills, 156-C Queens Drive, Lyall Bay, Wellington 3. ph. 877-258. Auckland: The next Auckland group meeting is on the 4th Feburary (1987!) at 7:30pm in the Glenfield Salvation Army Hall, 430 Glenfield Road, Glenfield Auckland. Contact : Roger Manson, 22 Ellice Road, Glenfield, Auckland. ph. 444-4044. ~ MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION` Membership fee is $12 with a surcharge for local (Wellington) members of $8 to cover room rental for local meetings. Would 'out of town' members indicate whether they would like to be local contacts for other Amiga owners in their area. Name : _________________________________________ Address : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ Home Phone : _________________ Work Phone : ___________________ Any areas of expertise that you can share (eg C language programmer, experienced VIP-planner {Lotus 123} user, hardware hacker etc) : :________________________________________________ :________________________________________________ Any specific areas of interest (eg Graphics/Animation, Music/Sound, Accounting/Business, Publishing/Wordprocessing etc) : :_______________________________________________ :_______________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Annual subscription fee (for following 12 months) : $12.00 ______ Local Meeting Levy : $8.00 ______ TOTAL : ====== -------------------------------------------------------------------- _ _ Interested in a Newsdisk |_| Local user group contact |_|. _ BIX subscriber |_| usercode : ________________ Comments : ______________________________________________________ Date ______________ Signature _________________________