Apple 2000 Vol 5 No. 4 1990 08 BASUG GB

ax S S 2 : i—) = = 2 S 5 Zz E 5(4) VOLUME AUGUST 1990 APPLE IIGS - New 1MB Version Apple IGS 1MB £650.00 Apple Drive 3.5" 260.00 Apple Drive 5.25 175.00 Apple Hard Disk 20SC 395.00 Apple Hard Disk 40SC 525.00 Apple RGB Colour Monitor 110.00 Apple SCSI Interface Card 65.00 Apple SCSI Peripheral Cable 35.00 Apple Peripheral Adaptor Cable 20.00 Apple Exp Card 256K 95.00 Apple Fan Kit 50.00 Prices Subject Apple and the Apple Logo are trademarks of Apple Computer Inc. _ AppleCenitra is a service mark of Apple Computer U.K Lid USED APPLE Il HARDWARE Apple Drive 5.25 Apple Disk It Apple Duodisk _ Apple lle Computer Apple liGS Computer Apple Monitor it ee: Apple Monitor lic with stand Apple Monitor tit Apple Profile Hard Disk Half Height Disk Drives 5.25” _ HOLDENS COMPUTER SERVICES The Mansions, Chapel Lane, Longton, Preston PR4 5EB “~~ ~=6FAX 0772615919 TELO772615512 Apple2000 The All Apple User Group Committed to All Apple Users == Apple2000_= August 1990 CONTENTS Chairman's Corner Ewen Wannop 2 Letter Box 3 Hardcore Pips ... Richard Teed 8 ... and Apple Ha ee Keith Chamberlain 10 Disk Zaps and All t (Part 1) Ewen Wannop 12 AppleXtras ProDOS 8 and ligs 14 Disk Drive Servicing — a review Roger Larcombe 15 Stickybear Alphabet — a review Dave Ferris 17 Game Plan — three reviews Robert Hornby 18 AppleFiesta — a report Joe Walters 20 StoryWorks — a review Peter Stark 24 Doctor, Doctor! Martin Twelftree 25 Our Shrinking Globe The Greatorex family 26 AppleLink TidBits Apple Tech. Support 27 SoftCat Corner Jon Gurr 28 Copy){+ Version 9 — a review Terry Cymbalisty 30 TimeOut Primer Harvey Nyman 32 HotLine News Dave Ward 33 OCR for the Apple II 33 Apple UK stop all support for Apple II 34 Two new Apple II magazines Andreas Wennborg 37 The Nibbler 38 MacChat Norah Arnold 42 Z88 - Mac Mike Dawson 45 FoxBase+ / Mac Mick O'Neil 50 Support Program for SuperCard Developers 52 Powerful Languages for the Macintosh 53 CommGATE 55 The PostScript Font Handbook —a review _ Irene Flaxman 56 JAM Software Upgrades 57 New Editions from Addison-Wesley 57 Shareware Author Survey Kevin Garrett 58 Network News 60 Mac Viruses John Norstad 64 How to $ave buck$ to buy Toys Jack Ziegler 68 Software Circus 70 Koala Source Book — a review Irene Flaxman 73 aie —areview Irene Flaxman 74 Bulldog Font — a review Irene Flaxman 75 AppleXtras Macintosh disk 4 76 Mac Library 77 Local Groups 78 Members’ Small Ads. 80 Advertisers’ index 80 There are a number of ways to contact Apple2000 Force users who have a query about the service can contact the adminis- trator, John Lee, directly for help and advice. Call him on the number opposite or send a message to his box on the Force. If you wish to order goods or services from Apple2000 or just leave us a message, call Irene on OS0-Ste-4 eh (Ansafone during the day). Alternatively you can Fax. your order to Gl) -GHsS}000F or write to the PO Box. If you use comms you can leave orders on TABBS addressed to the SYSOP or contact us on AppleLink (BASUG. 1). If you are expericncing problems with Apple hardware or software Dave Ward and Tony Dart run the Hotlines and will try and help you. We are very interested in the activities of local user groups, and if you have any information which you would like publicised John Lee would like to hear from you. We reserve the right to publish, without prejudice, any advice or comments given to members in the journals of Apple2000. A little praise for a few of our authors wouldn't go amiss. Send all comments, and contributions, via the PO box, especially suggestions about what you would like to see in your magazine. August 1990 Apple2000 Apple2000 P.O.Box 3 Liverpool 121 8PY Fax: G88 $29 G/F Raacsecd I a pa haar supports users = the Apple computers. The ITT 2020, I, 1, H+, //e, //c, /{e+, Tgs, Ugs+, ///, Lisa, XL, Mac 128, 512 MacPlus, SE, SE/30, Mac II, ex, Ici, Ix, Ife and Portable Contributions and articles for the magazine are alway welcome. We can handle any disk size or format. Please send to PO Box 3, Liverpool, L21 8PY. NOTE: In general the front half of the ete eee the Apple ql, Apple llgs z le The back half for The Macin- tosh and Lisa. Look out for the descriptive page icons. Key: Apple II, //e and //c pesk Apple /// je) Apple Iigs 8 Macintosh, Lisa & —— Contact Points The Force and Local Groups John Lee Voice (iii meiaisill Administration Irene Flaxman Whee OF Shem aed ieaae OF Soe HRN Apple Il Reviews Elizabeth Littlewood Voice iit? Feit Apple Il Hotline Dave Ward Voice Gee Seine Mon-Fri 1900-2100 Macintosh Hotline Tony Dart Voice Hse Haiti Mon-Fri 1900-2100 TABBS Ewen Wannop - SYSOP Modem (itis Punratr AppleLink: BASUG.1 Chairman's Corner Summer is probably only just a memory for most of us now. The heatwave we allexperienced inJuly has long gone, it is probably getting colder now as the nights draw in again. That is what it should be like by the time you are reading this if English weather is anything like normal. However, we have all grown to expect the abnormal once in a while. It may well be sweltering in the 90's yet again and the keyboard lies idle as you alltry to keep cool in the shade. Apple are as predictable as the weather. Products expected a long time ago appear suddenly without warning. Prices drop regularly on the least expected products. What sense is there in dropping the price of the Mac Plus and the SE/30 while leaving the SE where it is. The basic SE even though it now has 2mb of RAM, a 40mb drive and a SuperDrive™ is not much of a bargain next to an SE/30 2/40. The Mac Portable has dropped in price, apparently because no one 1980-1990 was buying it. 1am not surprised at that, as it needed to be half the price with twice the memory to bea realistic proposition. Meanwhile the IIgs stays the same price ... With no date set yet forthe release of System 7.0 for the Mac it has been difficult for Apple to know what to release next. The personal LaserWriters have at last appeared, but the low cost colour Mac has yet to appear. The new LaserWriter SC willat least give the Hewlett Packard DeskWriter a run for itsmoney, but will not really come into its own till System 7.0 appears. It is interesting to note that Apple are going to exhibit at an Apple II show this Christmas in the States for the first time in many years. Whatever can they be showing? Not the Super IIgs at last? I await with baited breath. Talking about the summer and idle keyboards makes me wonder yet again what happened to the paper white LCD screen we were promised some years ago on To- morrows World. This would have allowed us to take our computers out into the sun and work quite happily in the garden. The Mac portable screen will of course work outside in daylight but the normal Mac and Il screens will not. Many of you may not know that all Apple computerssold in the last fewyears in the UK have universal switch mode power supplies. These are quite happy to run off any voltage from 120 to 240 and from 50-60 hz. This means you can carry your Mac with you to the Costa Brava and calculate the exchange rate as long as you can find a power point next to the bar. Of course if you take a pocket modem with you it would be possible to keep in touch with TABBS and AppleLink from your hotel bedroom! This is not as far fetched as it may sound. There are many who do take their computers with them, not on holiday perhaps, but when away on business. The Mac SE series is small and light enough to be carried over the shoulder all round the world. The flurry of Macintosh maga- zines that appeared towards the end of last year is at last beginning to thin out. It was good to have more competition on the newsa- gents shelves, but it did affect the advertising here at Apple2000. There is only somuch togo around. Please remember to tell the dealers that you are an Apple2000 maga- zine and that you saw their adver- tisement in our magazine first! Ewen Wannop S ve Annual subscription rates are £25.00 for UK residents, £30.00 for E.E.C. residents and £35.00 for other overseas members. Apple2000™ is a trading name of BASUG Ltd, a non-profit making independent company limited by guarantee. ‘The contents of this journal are copyright of BASUG Lid and/or the respective authors. Permission is granted for non- commercial reproduction providing the author and source are properly credited and a copy of the relevant journal is sent. The opinions and views expressed are those of the various con- tributors, and are not necessarily endorsed by BASUG Ltd. This journal is published bi-monthly by BASUG Ltd as a benefit of membership in February, April, June, August, October and December. The copy date is the Ist day of the month preceding publication. Advertising rates are available on request. Apple™ and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Computer Inc. Macintosh™ is a trademark of Macintosh Laboratory Inc and used with the express permission of the owner. Telecom Gold™ is a trademark of British Telecom ple. The FORCE™ and Apple2000™ are trademarks of BASUG Ltd. ‘This issue was prepared using Aldus PageMaker™ 3.0 and Neg MicroSoft Word™ and Claris MacWrite™, s The Editorial team is: Apple Ii Ewen Wannop Elizabeth Littlewood Macintosh Norah Arnold Irene Flaxman Many thanks to all those who work behind the scenes and who receive no personal credit. These people are the stalwarts of Apple2000. Additional thanks to Walter Lewis of Old Roan Press (051-227-4818) for our printing service, and to Ian Sharp of Sharp Studios (051-227-2788) for our cover design. Apple2000 are Founder Members and Wholehearted Supporters of the Apple User Group Council = Y 2 Apple2000 August 1990 llgs Help Wanted London SUS SMe irae Gi 8 Sa Dear Ewen, I have an Apple IIgs that has caused me nothing but difficulty, Although the machine is quite remarkable, | seem to have had a run of bad luck with interfacing the printer and a number of other problems. What! would be particularly grateful for and seems to be quite unavailable is willing expert help. I am quite ready to pay for this but there seems to be considerable difficulty in locatin, somebody willing to do some gene! troubleshooting and helping out. Will such people be contactable through Apple2000? Ihave worked with Bidmuthin Tech- nologies in Harrow. They are indeed very helpful but from South London to Harrow is avery major trip and in spite of their efforts I continue to have prob- lems. Tom Treasure OAs you will appreciate, we are not able to help you on the spot with your llgs problems. If the help is of a level that a phone call could solve, please ring Dave Ward on the Hotline. Mean- while, I hope that one of our many members in the London area might be able to help. If one of you can help, please get in touch with Tom either through a Fax or by sending us your name and phone number which we will pass on tohim. Ed. « Case History Haslemere Surrey Dear Irene I have been a member of Apple 2000 for over a year now and felt that a contribution of some of the trials and tribulations of working with Apple Ile's might be of interest to other readers. Please feel free to edit as you feel appropriate or indeed simply ignore if you think that my experiences would not be appropriate for the magazine. August 1990 pe Ihavea lleenhanced with aPlusRam 1 meg. RamCard in slot 5; Grappler+ with 65k in the usual slot 1; Apple SS card in slot 2 (feeding a Pace Nightin- gale modem: mainly for TABBS - I have t to get heavily into comms) a icrosoft Soft: which includes a Z80 (for CP/M) in slot 3 for 80 col mode; a Dark Star Snapshot card in slot 4; the usual disk controller card in slot 6 and an ICE 12 meg.Microcube Hard Disk driver in slot 7. Most of the above cards were pur- chased second-hand through Micro Mart, MGA or Eric Sausse of Esco (an excellent contact who has helped me many times to get things to work!) Iam the Treasurer of three societies; my wife is the membership secretary of two and my son is Treasurer of the local Rotaract so we use the computer primarily to try to keep accounts and membership records up to date. We use AppleWorks 2 and we also have version 3 with the spelling checker both on hard disk. We also use AppleWriter II on hard disk (A trusty favourite! ) My main trials came when I bought the disk. It came with ProSel (a marvellous l recommend to all harddisk users), had been formatted and partitioned into 2 meg.for DOS 3.3, and 10 meg. for ProDOS. My first task was to copy various DOS 3.3 programs across using the special version of FID (called ICEFID2). Volume or whole disk copiers won't work and you have to copy file by file. This was fine but I then discovered that many Binary programs will not work. For example the Snapshot card software although it will copy across simply will not work properly. It tells me thatit has allocated 8 x 64k memory blocks out of my SS card in slot 2! No matter how many times | re-configure it the re- st is et NR : ic Of le seiec- tor cand Cateleaie ‘will copy across but won't run. Similarly with various other Binary files although all Basic files/ programs I have tried have run. ! have tried quoting different addresses when “brun’-ing the program as| think this is the problem but I don't have sufficient knowledge ofthese addresses to understand where I should load them. I understand that ICE has gone bust and I cannot trace anybody who can help. If any reader can suggest what I should try please get in contact! I have partitioned the ProDOS sec- tion into 4, mainly so that I can prac- tice with various programming tasks without risking clobbering my main partition if! do something dumb. My biggest mistake occ when! tried to get AppleWorks to work prop- erly. It works fine until you want to print anything. It will not print at all. I spoke to a couple of contacts and one suggested that as the ICE disk only operates on ProDOS version 1.0.1 I should rename the ProDOS file Old.ProDOS and copy across version 1.7 which Ihave. He reckoned that this version of ProDOS should be fully compatible with AppleWorks and cure my printing problem. DON'T DO IT! I did and then when I tried to run anything at all I couldn't get back into the two main partitions of the hard disk! It hung at the ProDOS intro screen. There I was with about 3 meg of software sitting on my disk and I could only get into the small test partitions 3 & 4. Partitions 1 and 2 where all my software was loaded was totally unrecognised and all I got was “path not found”! The Dos 3.3 partition was OK but nothing I did could get me into the ProDOS partitions 1 and2. Ihadbacked up the hard disk a few weeks before but the backup program presumed that you get into’ the disk’and ticularly find /prol/ the name of m first partition Nothing I did would en- able any p: torecognise the hard disk. Even Copy II Plus reported ‘De- vice not Connected’ and the Restore program | needed to use would not recognise the card in slot 7 even though itwas the same program that prepared the backup in the first place (Glen Bredon's ProSel) Visions of reformatting began to loom. Finally, after about 5 hours of an- guish only those who have faced this type of situation can appreciate T telephoned Eric Sausse who had sold me a number of cards etc and poured out my hard luck story. He suggested one last avenue | had not thought of: Boot the ICE. cent be (the software that is supplied with the disk unit) get into the ‘mount user's volumes’ menu and unmount one of the partitions I could still access (3 and 4) and remount one of them into partition 1. Partitions are mounted in pairs so if1 sculdact into partition 1 it would automatically oe get me into 2 as well. Please submit all letters and articles to the magazine on disk wherever possible. The disks will be returned to you when the magazine is published. If you have a modem, send us letters, articles and Public Domain programs either to BSG005 or to TABBS (i PHF, ~ Apple2000 Fortunately I had copied a version of ProDOS 1.0.1. in partition 3 ( other- wise | doubt whether I could have accessed that partition ) and as I had bynowrun outofevery idea (I had tried every option but this one) lunmounted Partition 4 and mounted partition 1 in the available space. Ithen rebooted the hard disk, entered partition 3 and with literally sweat on my brow typed PREFIX/PRO1. Bingo! I had got back into the first two parti tions. Needless to say the first thing I did was to delete ProDOS version 1.7 from the disk and rename the old version 1.0.1. I pass on the above to all who have the ICE disk as a salutary tale. Don't mess with later versions of ProDOS, it will lock you out! Finally can anybody help me with my printing problem?I have two copies of AppleWorks 2 one patched with Pinpoint and one clean. The patched version will not print at all BUT if 1 invoke Pinpoint notepad option and then press O-A ‘P’ the note prints! Pinpoint works but the program itself won't. I have changed my Grappler+ card for an old Aristocard in case this is the cause but it makes no difference. The ‘clean’ version with no Pinpoint won't print at all. O-A ‘H' makes no difference, it doesn’t work cither. I havea StarLC 10 whichis similartoan Epson FX model. Also AppleWorks version 3 won't print. Everything else works in the program but the printing. If lrun AppleWorks (either version) from the floppies they work. If I then copy them to a new directory on the hard disk they won't print but if then copy these files back to clean floppies these copies DO work! | am baffled. Can anybody help? When the printing menu is accessed on AppleWorks 3 and the number of copies is entered the’slider’ bar rapidly moves across as though it is printing and the page break line appears but nothing gets through to my printer! My ProDOS version of AppleWriter II also does not print but a patched ver- sion with Pinpoint does! All very strange. If am has problems with the ICE hard disk 1 have learned more about it than I ever wanted to know and will be very pleased to assist if I can. In turn if anybody has a patch that will make my printer work I will appreciate hearing from them. Graham Doubtfire ‘ Articles Please Sr et Scunthorpe Dear Ewen Ina telephone conversation with my son he mentioned he had decided not torenewhis membership of Apple2000. He, like myself, isa comparative novice using a model //e, while I use a Europlus. He has been delighted with the excellent advice he has had from Dave Ward over the past year. but finds the magazine has little to interest him for his par- ticular model. The phrase he used was very few usable articles, and to a cer- tain extent, I have to agree with him. | know that we members with older models may be in a minority, but. is it sovery small?. Perhaps , through your records, you may find out exactly how the balance lies, for I find it hard to believe that all our members have fat wallets, and a desire for a Mac. All Plus with a modest memory can be just as much fun to program as a high powered job, and we are all in different stages of learning. | know in “Hardcore Pips”, you do, recognise this. The choice of articles must be difficult, take for example, this months article on assembly language. No doubt its fine, but before I can understand it 1 have to mug up Apple machine lan- guage, which is fine in the long term; but for someone who has finally mas- tered Dos. and is now tackling ProDOS, machine code is a long way off. Which brings me back to usable articles. Is it possible for example. to offer a short, interesting program, say no more than twenty five lines in DOS one issue, say containing a problem to be solved (the answer in the next Apple Slices)?. Or a “How to” article again (short) do a certain thing in ProDOS with program example?. How about exploring AppleWorks, hands on wordprocessing for the novice?. Low Res graphics using read/data state- ments (as in ‘Graphics Cookbook’. Whatever the article, or program, let it be of the type where the reader can go to his computer and try it out, hands on. Afterall, the joy ofhavinga computer is in the learning (or have I got it all wrong? Harry Markham QO Thank you for your comments. No you do not have it all wrong. Your comments are all very fair and to the point. It is very difficult however to get a perfect balance in the magazine. Members have all got different inter- ests and levels of experience. We can- not please you all, all of the time. Half the magazine is for the Apple II. though some of this half is of course devoted to the IIgs as many of our members have this machine. The Apple2000 editorial team are all Speeds: V21(300) to V22bis(2400) 8N1 24 hours (7 MITTIN WIT ANNA) NNN IH Tne me LLL LL A Wit wii tiny 1111 Ht Apple2000 naa ALA 4 Ge DLE MUM IT Bulletin //11/ The Apple Bulletin Board System Board System ~ ye >>>>> TABBS TOP MENU <<<c< <#>Endcall <.>Utilities <;>Time <G>oodbye <I> Apple ][ folder <2> Apple IIgs folder <3> Macintosh folder <4> Apple2000 folder <S> Developers folder The TABBS message system is more than just a Bulletin Board. With a shopping mall where youcan browse the Apple2000 catalogues and order the goods yourequire; alibrary with over 70mb of compressed files for the Apple II, IIgs and Macintosh; the NewsBytes™ news files updated weekly bring you the latestin world computer news; a private and public E-mail service; file transfers that can be enclosed in private or public mail; message areas covering many topics including the Apple II, the IIgs and Macintosh; Xmodem, 1k Xmodem and Ymodem file transfers; multi-speed access at all common speeds; 24 hour operation; and much, much more make TABBS the premier Apple Bulletin Board serving Europe. Give TABBS a call today! <6> Public areas <D>ownload Libraries <M>ailbox <N>ews Columns <A>dvertisment Hoarding <s>hopping Mall <Wrhat’s new on TABBS <H>elp files for TABBS = ne Ring TABBS on (IRS) F4R797 at any speed through V21, V22, V23 to V22bis 8N1 TABBS is available 24 hours a day XK == Be J August 1990 Apple2000 >| volunteers and they simply do not have the time to write all of the kind of articles they would like to put in the magazine. We have to rely on our members to write suitable material. ‘The choice of Hardcore Pips is a difficult one as many of these ar- ticles are no longer relevant today, reviews of unavailable programs and outofprint books for instance. We include things that will still be of interest today. You throw downachallenge with some projected titles of articles. Come on all of you, there must be someone out there who can oblige with an article on Basic or AppleWorks. Ewen Wannop « Drive Problems Corbridge Northumberland Dear Boffin, 1am trying to use a 800K Apple Drive with my Ile using a UDC Weaker, ee Controller card). e problems lam riencin; are that the drive oatya READS information from the disk - it cannot format or WRITE infor- mation to the disk. The informa- tion was originally written onto the disk using an Apple IIGS. 1 also have Apple II Pascal v1.3 ona3.5" floppy which fails to write information to the disk or to for- mat a disk. I have CopyllIplus version 8.4 which also fails to format a disk and write any information to it. I have tried formatting it from there andalso copying disk with format, none of which work. Using this method I get an error message “error on sector 0007". When I tried formatting I got error mes- aay “error writing to track 0001, 0002, 0003" ete. and I gave up after that. I have tried ProDOS Utilities disk which fails to recog- nise the disk. Can you throw any light on this? Are Apple 800k drives usable ona Ile using the UDC card? Would my best option be to try and sell the 800k drive? Do I need to upgrade my computer to an enhanced Ile? David Beale Gln your letter about the problems in getting an 800k drive to work, you donot mention precisely which 800k drive you have. In fact there are three drives that Apple made that have 800k capacity. 1. The original 800k external drive for the older Macintosh 128k and Lisa X/L machines. 2. The Apple 800k drive for the //c, the 3.5 disk controller card and the UDC card. 3. The Apple 3.5 drive which is the current standard on Macin- toshes and the Ilgs. The first of these drives is not directly usable on the Apple Il. The second will plug into the //c, the Apple 3.5 controller or the UDC card. The third will only work on the Macintosh or the ligs. The main difference between the second and third of these drives is that the 800k drive has an intelligent interface built in- side which controls most of its functions. The Apple 3.5 drive (named on the bottom as ‘3.5 Drive’) can only be connected to a SmartPort device. This only exists on the Macintosh or the IIgs. If your drive is of the first type, it is best priepated to an enthusiast who could use it. If it is of the second type. then you have severe problems as it should be working with that drive card. If itis of the third, you should sell it toa Macintosh or IIgs owner. The new price of these drives is over £250 at the moment so you should get a fair price for it. You do not need to update your //e for the 3.5 drive to work. All versions of ProDOS will run on standard //e's. However it would be advisable to update your //e so that you can run the most recent software. Refer to the notes in the June issue of Apple2000 which mention this problem. The Boffin é Super Serial Card Tiyndyy abet Becta! Sheffield, Dear Ewen. Thave a little problem with my Apple lle super serial card and wonder ifyou could offer any advice. I have a wind speed transducer which lam trying to read into the computer via an analogue-to-digital converter. The converter sends an ASCII string of INEW SOFTWARE DOS STARTER DISK 7/90 Edition 00] FASE WPM W325 TimeOut Performance Pak (Beagle Bros) F109.95 {Combo package containing these Appt We enhancements:- | Toots, DeskTools i, and PowerPak. £129.96} SuperFonts, [special characters, and 40 ready made| salty wath banners. Gives you ultra ‘tntewmernauy’ BLANK |MORE NEW SOFTWARE| need an AE [Cit vey up (or order it from MGA). ProDOS 8 v1.8 Update are: I-ProDOS O30%70 - (320 ONCE AGhist OVA O7P Pe HAS Fae ov os = Nowt Ad Tins Pee dum om vk Ho ita Qubasi-wr! Ler Ok MistARES BE A UBSSor To yn Jon Gut [7] Astarisked prices also Include UK p&p Any iam ordoted fogother wath posttrea fase evewer Ragured MGA SoftCat Print Shop GS Fonts/Borders 41 Cinque Ports St., Rye Siete Fen tao y Tet: (0797) 226601 Foe Ser [packages are supsiied as 3.5", M you want 6.25" for LLL or NPS, please ask for price. £4.50) pe workload. Packed with short Jeuts for producing long or complicated] 8. Creates files for boilerplate ce| Jdocument | JQuickTabs, MarkMerge, MultiPrint, In Jéexor, Table of contents generator, & move. Exorciser (Vitesse) *£39.95) This. NGS program ends your virus wor August 1990 _ Apple2000 numbers when prompted by sending through the SSC a text string like I] to initialise and then | to get it to trans- mit the reading from channel 1. Allworks well usinga comms package (Access II) but when! try to obtain data with a BASIC program, nothing will come back. 1 seem to have tried all sorts of permutations, but still no ef- fect. Is there something simple | am missing In sending text and receiving it? The SSC handbook is not very clear on this matter. David Durling Q Your attempts to use the Super Serial Card for input/output have unfortunately fallen into the various traps that are never made clear in the normal literature on this card. Put simply you cannot expect to get input into Basic from this card at any sensible speed, and even more to the point, you cannot expect input and output at the same time. The firmware on the card allows you to access it for input, but Basic is just not fast enough to cope with inc ales any tiing above the slowest baud rate of aroun 110 or so. However the execution of a practical and reliable solution is actually more complex than this. Comms programs like Access II do not use the entry points that Basic uses, they in fact access the chips directly and usually have an interrupt routine to handle the incoming data as well to ensure that none is lost. All of this may sound confusing to ou, so rather than explain the prob- lems further I will describe in outline how to use the card for your particular problem. 1. Initialise the card issuing a standard PR# call from Basic. If the card is in slot 2; 10 PRINT CHRS (4) "PR#2” 2. Output to the card can then be made normal PRINT statements. This so far should follow the route you have taken and will initialise the card to the settings of the switches on the card itself. 3. Input from the card must be done outside of Basic by means of an in- terrupt routine at machine code level. This is the only way you can reliably read and keep the incoming data. The interrupt routine must be written in assembly language or machine code and placed in a safe part of memory. The interrupt vector at $3FE is then changed to point to this routine. The routine should have four parts to it which will all be CALLed from Basic: a. An INIT which sets up the $3FE vector and writes to the serial chip to initialise it for interrupts. b. The interrupt code itself which reads the serial chip and places the data into a 256 byte circular buffer maintaining a pointer to that data. c. AREAD routine CALLed from Basic that picks up a byte of data from this circular buffer and increments a sec- ond pointer to show where you have got to. If there is no data ready, you could return a NULL from the CALL routine to flag the fact. d. A SHUTDOWN routine that switches off the interrupt source on the chip and restores the $3FE vector to its initial state. ‘As you will see this is all fairly drastic and requires a knowledge of assembly language and of the 6551 serial chip. It is the core of any comms program and is a fairly lengthy piece of code. I can- not really go into any greater detail in this letter, but it gives you a pointer to the route you should take. If you cannot change the speed of data from the transducer toa very slow rate, or are not able to program to this level, 1 am afraid I have no easy solu- tion for you. You would need to find someone with experience of the SSC card and interrupt routines to do the actual programming for you. Ewen Wannop & Multiple Drives (Baswessehegy Biogen] East Ham Dear Ewen, My 3.5" disk drive (only bought a few ago) has broken down, andl am awaiting advice from the dealer. It was all working well to begin with but for some unknown reason when | last booted-up, the 5.25* drive would not work and the IIgs searched the 3.5” drive first. Ordinarily, with the use, as Ihave, of one 5.25" and one 3.5" drive, (the latter being connected to the IIgs first in the daisy-chain) the 5.25" shot startup first and if it cannot find a program it then moves to the 3.5" drive. But this has ceased to work. I have checked the cables, swapped the disk drives (with both seemingly working alone), and checked the Ilgs system which shows “Godd System” and therefore am currently at a loss to know what the problem is other than perhaps a fault in one of the drives refusing to daisy-chain. Any ideas please? Whilst on this subject I do have an old Apple 5.25” drive and dual card in Slot 6 of the IIgs and would like to reinstate the past practice of two 5.25" drives working together. Unfortunately I cannot connect the old Il drive to the new type because of the different cables. However if I were to currently put a program in one drive that nuns from a port in the Iigs (operating from the motherboard), and data in another, they will not work together for obvious reasons that one runs ‘off the port and the other from a drive card. Can you advise how I can configure the IIgs to recognise the two 5.25” drives as well as the 3.5". Gordon Owen Q The problem with your disk drives 6 2 ® may be explained pe hardware ‘bug’ that exists inside the 3.5 drive. This bug only shows when a 5.25 drive is daisy chained from the back of a 3.5 drive. It is intermittent and causes no long term harm. The symptoms are that all of a sudden while accessing one of the drives, both the 3.5and 5.25 lights will come on and both drives will access, Hitting Reset causes the lights to go off, but the 3.5 will apparently disappear from view. The only cure is to power down and back on again to clear the ‘lockup’. Itisa known bug by Apple Inc. in the States, and there they will replace the offending bit of hardware. As it on shows up with 5.25 drives connected, of course it never occurs on a Macin- tosh. For this reason Apple UK do not know of the bug and apparently will do nothing about it. I understand that recently manufactured 3.5 drives have the fault cured. All I could suggest is to see if your dealer can kick Apple! I live with the problem on my machine by only activating the 5.25 drives in Slot6. when needed. To see more than one 5.25 drive you will need either to daisy chain the two from the 3.5 or have both running off the old disk card in Slot 6. When you daisy chain a 5.25 from the 3.5 it is apparently seen in Slot 6 anyway, so you could not have a card in Slot 6 well. Ifyou refer to page 28 of the article in the December 88 issue of Apple 2000, you will see how to rewire your existing 5.25 drives to work on the daisy chain. This is the method I use and it works fine. I took the opportu- nity to make the ribbon cable even longer than normal! Ewen Wannop « Manuals Needed Saltcoats Ayrshire Dear Sir, Irecently acquired an Apple //e with twin drives and running Cirtech’s CP/ M. I have found it very difficult to find information and any publications about the machine. Has Apple ceased to support this machine? In favour of the Macintosh. I would be teful of any help or direction on who to contact. James Gilmour OQ Apple UK have indeed ceased to support this machine in favour of the Macintosh, despite the fact that it and the //c are still manufactured in the States. However there are many deal- ers in the UK that provide a level of support with both hardware and soft- ware. Try MGA, Bidmuthin, etc. You will see their advertisements in the first half of this issue. Manuals are of course not available new, but some of these dealers may be able to help with old copies. Another possible source of manuals and hardware is Eric Sausse 0724-855795. Apple2000 August 1990 CP/M ts of course another problem as it is a third product issued originally by Mi . Thereare many books on CP/M to be found in any technical computer bookshop. The Cirtech brand of CP/M follows the normal conventions. We stock the full Addison Wesley range of Apple books in our mail order shop. You may find that one of the // e or other manuals fits your needs. Please refer to page 17/18 of the green price list you received with your membership pack. Ed. ¢ Edgeware Middlesex Dear Apple2000, Re: Apple //e, the next step? As an avid //e user for the last couple of years, I find myself in a suandary: e //e has been great and with the latest addition of AppleWorks 3.0, Iam able to duplicate most of my workplace computer activity at home. The set-up now comprises a Hard- Card and, at last, a usable ICE/Sym- biotic Hard Drive. My thanks must go to Ron of Sheflield for the many hours of despair in terms of this latest ac- quisition. Great, now what next? My budget is limited, so really the Mac is out, what about the IIgs? Will my canting software be compatible, will the Hard-Card and Drivealsowork? Will my Data Disks be usable? Whilst the //e. I am sure will finda See baie pn help anothee mer ane) ¢ path of the APPLE STORY, can someone please help me! The recent article by Alan Remu on “A POKE OF APPLES", gave me some insight, but a step by step comparison would en- lighten meandIam sure, others looking onward, Colin Stodel Q Well, another challenge for the bud- dingauthors out there, Come on, please supply something that will help Colin! Put simply, the Ilgs would be your next logical step. However, even with the recent price drop, it is still an expensive option. The IIgs will run 99.9% of your existing software and hardware. The only exceptions are protected programs that may rely on precise code timing to unlock their protection, and slot hardware that re- que precise bus timing to operate. ¢ IIgs clock is subtly different to the //eand problems have arisen in trying touseZ80 cards in the llgs forinstance, The Hard Card should also work in the IIgs, but you will probably find that uu will wish to change this for a SCSI rd drive in due course as this would be more versatile in working under GS/OS. The ICE does not see GS/OS. without extreme difficulty not being a proper block device recognised ProDOS. Ewen Wannop «¢ Printer Smudgin Hunstanton Norfolk Dear Apple2000, Can you help me? I have trouble printing clean addresses on envelopes with my brary skeet Tl even adjusting for the thickness of the paper. By removing the front cover you can locate the lever on the right-hand side, which is supposed to cure the problem. In fact all it does is slightly improve the situation. This: Scat eat ar such an expensive piece of equipment. Per- haps some other members have had similar problems. W Barrie Smith Q1 know of no simple answer to this problem. The printing head tends to ie up spare ink and this gets trans- ferred to the envelope as it is much thicker than a normal sheet of paper. Remove the head and clean excess ink with a soft cloth. This will lessen the problem till it clogs again. Can anyone make any other sug- gestions please? Ed. e Up te Douchapt France Dear Boffin, Thank you for the advice given in the March issue of Apple Slices, 1. Lack of memory? I am pleased to report that using GS/OS version 5 there appear tobe no problems with Chessmaster 2100 and VS/Draw. 2. 3.5 inch drives Ido not think that the failure of the two 3.5 drives could have been due to static as neither drive has been dis- connected, nor any other drive daisy- chained, for well over six months be- fore the failures occurred. However, | live in a country area and the power supply by overhead cables which are prone to lightning strikes. Care is normally taken to disconnect sensitive equipment If there is a thunderstorm in the vicinity. 3. Missing Top Margins Some time ago I contacted the local dealer and he was quite positive that the fault was not in the printer, but said he would look into the matter. Meanwhile | purchased AppleWorks GS V1.1 and with this I have no top margin problems. This leads me to believe that as V1.1 has an improved printer driver the problem must be in the original driver. Soon after Easter I visited the dealer who said that he had been in touch with Apple and they stated that the problem could occur with some pro- and operating systems. It was fairly obvious that not being a Macin- tosh they were not interested in doing anything about it. Since I shall be using AppleWorks GS for most of my writing, there is little point in pursuing the matter further - can always use fan fold paper if 1 have occasion to use other word processors. Again thanks for your interest and comments. Ron Perkins Q Well at least some solutions to a few of your problems. Thad assumed of course that as all Apple computers use a switch mode power supply which is normally not very fussy about the plage that is fed to it, that all would be with your fluctuating power supply. However tning strikes are another matteras a mutee or peak througha strike wou not be stopped by the power su alone. You Setnced to get hold ofa surge filter that could filter out any such peaks or spikes. These are often available for fitting to HiFi amplifiers at a more reasonable cost than the computer industry would charge. The Boffin Q We asked you to send us your Compuserve/Forum ID's. We nowhave a small collection of these printed be- low. There are still some of you that have not responded. We cannot con- tact you online unless we know who you are. Please send us your!D's either to the Apple2000 ID 76004,3333 or to the PO Box in Liverpool or of course to the Sysop of TABBS. Apple2000 76004,3333 Mateen Greenaway 100016,602 Bryn Jones 71307, 1457 Peter Kemp 100016,1172 Elizabeth Littlewood 100016,401 Jeremy Quinn 100016,560 John Richey 10006, 1037 Andreas Wennborg 100012,342 Ewen Wannop 76224,211 QO Many ofyou will alrea of AppleLink™ and others may be thinking of joining. For simple E-Mail it cannot be beaten. It will also keep ee up to the minute with what is cast} at Apple headquarters. be members We would like you to send us your contact ID's to add to this list. Apple2000 BASUG.1 Herts User Group NA.HERTSUG Liverpool Group LIVERPOOL.UG August 1990 Appie2000 @ecs 7 Hardcore Pips The BASUG archive brings you two articles by Richard Teed from October 1983 onworking with Basic and Dos 3.3 Permanent and Temporary Strings in Basic or How To Avoid Garbage Collection Garbage collection is something that seldom bothers a user of BASIC: this is because memory generally takes a lot oftime tobecome exhausted, but when it does and a ge collection Is invoked then the computer may hang- up for about five minutes and I believe the theoretical limit is somewhere in the region of four hours! Ifone thinks about it, it is possible to extract enough information from a program to tell BASIC when and where to garbage collect so that a full scale garbage collection is not necessary. The problem is that no facilities exist at a high level to make this possible. Programs that use strings fall into two groups when creating strings: the first is constantly creating temporary pide ae in copying one file toanother, and the second has a number of per- manent strings from which temporary strings or further permanent strings are created. Let us examine how to avoid garbage collection on the two classes of strings, but first here is a memory map of BASIC’s variable space to make the explanation easier: (HIMEM) —-start of string storage strings build down from (HIMEM) bottom of string storage ! ! ! v -- —+top of array storage ! larrays! t t +---—--+bottom of array storage ! ! !simple! !varia-! 'bles ! ! ! too +start of simple variables (LOMEM) What causes a garbage collection is when there are so many strings that they, have come down from HIMEM and are about to over-write the array sectionofmemory, the interpreter then sees which strings can no longer be accessed and removes them moving valid strings up to take their place. Consider the following program and suppose that “A$” and “B$" are to be permanent (by permanent I mean available to the pi throughout its execution), while the value assigned to “C$” is temporary; that is it is cay valid within the subroutine after whic! its value may be lost:- 100 AS="ONE” : BS~"TWO” : CS=ASIBS: GOSUB 1000 : CO=BS+AS: GOSUB 1000: CS=AS+AS : GOSUB 1000 : END 1000 PRINT C$ : RETURN ‘The first two statements produce the following strings in memory:- +--+ HIMEM !E! After the third statement the memory looks like this:- HIMEM ! STRING 1 STRING 2 1 STRING 3 After the fifth statement however things look like this:- STRING 1 STRING 2 STRING 3 ° w T E N ° STRING 4 Hzoozm] 1 a i i: STRING 3 will nolongerbe accessable and would be cleared by a garbage collection. Inorder tomake string “A$” and“B$" permanent and string “C$" temporary a little code must be added to the subroutineand just afterall permanent strings have been created. What needs to be known is the memory location at which the perma- nent strings stop and this is given in locations $6F and $70 (111 and 112). Now each time before exiting from the subroutine (any temporary strings having being finished with) we must put the bottom of string storage back to the bottom of the permanent strings so that the next temporary string overwrites the last. Here then is the complete program:- 100 AS="ONE”: BS="TWO": PI-PEEK (111) : PH=PEEK (112) 110 CS-AS+BS : GOSUB 1000 : CS=BSHAS : GOSUB 1000 : CS=AS+A$ : GOSUB 1000 : rD 1000 PRINT C$ : POKE 111,PL : POKE112,PH : RETURN The constant re-setting of the bot- tom of string storage means that it will never reach the top of array storage which would causea garbage collection. You can ofcourse update the number of permanent strings simply be PEEKing location 111 and 112 just after the new permanent strings have Moding ike ing BASIC’s pointers this can be sane if yall are not care- ful, but basic: the only thing that you should not do is to produce a new stag om temporary strings that have just been released by re-setting loca- tion 111 and 112, because the new string will be created over the topofthe strings that are to comprise it resulting in corruption. Richard Teed October 1983 « s @& Apple2000 August 1990 Format - 80 Word processing so advanced anyone can use it! For your Apple Il and //e, //c, //gs Format-80 costs just £99 + VAT. Existing users can upgrade to the latest version (2.26) for £35 + VAT. If you would like more information please contact your local Apple Dealer or Elite Software Company Ltd.. Elite Software Company, 4 Hawthylands Drive Hailsham, E Sussex, BN27 1HE Telephone : 0323 - 845898 Alternative DOS End Of File One of the problems with reading data files in BASIC is that it is very difficult to deal with an end of file, either data has to be put in the file to show the end of file or an “ONERR” command has to be used. Although the “ONERR™ command is usable it has a number of piers the worst of which is that file reading cannot be done in a subroutine because the stack is upset. The following is the DOS readbyte routine which is used for reading text files from disk:- aRG $A626 MB OWN Ist GF ISEASRUN EQU SA6SE CLAARM = BR $A679 CSWSTATE BQU SAAS2 ROIEXT BQU SAGEC CLOSFRFE QU SA2FC RIssS BOU SAGOD DCERROR BU SA6D2 ASAVE BQO SAASC XSAVE, BQUOSAASA In By $0200 DOSsxIT BU S9FR3 READBYTE JSR ISHASRUN ;Is BASIC munning ? BCS~sCLSWARM 7If not then shut shop IDA #6 #Set DOS to state 6 August 1990 3 (po output STA CSWSTATE of prompt) JSR -RUIEXE ~—s;Read a byte from the file zinto the acamulator BE TSTUR If not an end of file terminator 7*** DEAL WITH END CF FILE BE JSR CIOSEREE ;Close the file TDA #503 7Ts DOS in state 3 (EXEC) Qe = COWSTART HQ sORISS If so then exit to caller RD.2 #505 ;Get. theerror number for: IDA ae DOERROR 7An “END OF DATA ERROR” 7*** CHECK AND DEAL WITH LOWER CASE TSTLAR ae #520 7Is the character lower case? Bo L153 7I£ not then skip AND #S7F 7Else remove the MSB 1153 STA ASAVE Save A IDX = XSAVE Get our position in the jinput buffer HQ 1163 7T£ at the start then skip ox IDA IN,X 7Set the MSB on the 7character CA #80 ; (last characted planted my shave been STA IN,X ;£ixed for lower case) 1163 we DOSXIT EXT Ascan be seen each byte read is placed in the input buffer until a null byte is returned; then an end of file condition exists and all text files are closed and an “END OF DATA ERROR’ is output. The exception to this is if the text file is being EXECed, in which case the file is simply closed. it is needed Is fora special character to be returned on the end of file being reached and for this I have chosen CHR$(127). Ideally a check would be made on the number of charac- ters read into the input buffer. If the present one was the first then a CHR$(127) ($7F) would be returned. This would satisfy the GET command. Ifthe present character were the second then the routine would assume that the command was an INPUT and would return a <RETURN> character: thus a CHR$(127) would be returned for both GET and INPUT. Unfortunately things aren't that simple and. instead of the “X” offset being zero for a GET, it’s a one, so the <RETURN> character must be returned on the third char- acter (ie when “X” is 2). This will result in the single character returned to GET being the desired CHR$(127) but the string returned to INPUT will be a double CHR$(127). Still, this should not cause any real problems. Here, then, is the modified DOS for our improved end of file condition (n.b. on end of file you have to do the closing yourself). ERGERAHEREREE 558 BEEREERESHS® °°5 $9B3 IMPROVED DOS 3.3 READ BYTE ROUTINE }*** READ A BYTE 7Is BASIC running ? REABYTE JSR ISEASWN BS CLSWARM 7I£ not then shut shop IDA 46 7Set DOS to state 6 7 (no output ROB.1 STA COWSIATE =; of pronpt) JSR ROIEXT Read a byte from the ifile into the accumlator BE TSTINR 7I£ not an end of file jtemminator 7*** DEAL WITH END OF FILE + This routine retums a CHRS$(127) for a @T 7 And a two character string both CHR$(127) for an INPUT zas the original § » yee CHECK AND DEAL WITH LOWER CASE ‘TSTIAR ap 4SE0 7Is the character lower case? Boo OLLS3 7I£ not then skip AD #S7F sElse remove the MSB 1153 STA ASAVE 7Save A IDX SAVE Get our position in the ;input buffer FQ 1163 3If at the start then skip cEx IDA IN,X 7Set the MSB on the character GRA #580 ; Qast character planted my ve been STA IN,X ;fixed for lower case) W163 OP DOGXIT ;EXIT There are two things to be remembered with the above routine: The first is REXEC a file with it because ifyou do the result will be an unstoppable infinite loop, and the second is that it will not work for INPUTting to numeric variables. Abig advani ofthis method for dealing with the end of files is that it will work with compiled programs as well as normal interpreted programs. In order to use the routines easily, here is the data in poke oom You can put this into your programs at strategic places. NORMAL DOS 100 FOR N-42534 TO 42589:READ A:POKE N,A:NEXT N 1000 DATA 32, 94,166,176, 78, 169, 6,141, 82,170, 32, 140, 166, 208, 15, 32, 252, 162, 169, 3, 205, 82,170, 240, 206, 169, 5, 76,210,166, 201,224, 144,2, 41,127,141, 92,170, 174, 90,170, 240, 9, 202, 189, 0,2, 9, 128,157, 0,2, 76,179,159 IMPROVED DOS 100 FOR N=42534 TO 42569:READ A:POKE N,A:NEXT N 1000 DATA 32, 94,166,176, 78, 169, 6, 141, 82,170, 32, 140, 166, 208, 15,174, 90,170, 224, 2,208, 3, 169, 141, 44,169, 255, 234, 234, 234,201, 224,144, 2, 41,127,141, 92,170,174, 90,170, 240, 9,202,189, 0,2, 9,128,157, 0,2, 76,179,159 Richard Teed October 1983 « Apple Magazines Several magazines on the market are dedicated to the Apple the best of which is NIBBLE, which is only available from the states. Next comes CALL A.P.P.L.E. which has been obtainable in the UK. and finally WINDFALL. Other magazines such as PRACTICAL COMPUTING, PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD, QUESTIONS AND AN- SWERS, COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES and a host of others sometimes carry interesting articles and programs for the Apple, but should be viewed at your local newsagents before purchase as they may notbe of much benefit at times. At the top of my list is NIBBLE which has an amazing number ofarticles, reviews and good programs that actually work. The main problem is getting ‘your copy from the states ne IX = XSAVE 7Get our current position in and the price. Also available are NIBBLE EXPRESS Vols 1, the input buffer 2 and 3 which are splendid value and contain selected x #902 7Is this the second articles from all NIBBLES of 1980-81-82 which include all ;character ? kinds of programs including utilities and games. BE GT 7I£ not then this is a Finally we have WINDFALL which, although it is apple ;GET not an INPUT dedicated, has its ups and downs as far as value is IDA = #RETURN ;Terminate string with concerned, but this apart it does have some quite ged ja <RETURN> hardware and software reviews, interesting articles and the oB SP #Skip the next sequential occasional piece of information that makes its purchase word worthwhile. This is another magazine that has started to er IDA 4#SF End of file character Speen newsagents and may be worth thumbing through Ne before purchase, Ne 7Pad out to the same length Keith Chamberlin October 1983 « 10 Apple2000 August 1990 ' Bidmathin Technologies « Apple Il/Mac Specialists/Lavel 1 Service Centre Summer Special - Sale of Ex-Demo Systems & Hardware Plus New Software Systems Macintosh SE 1mb Twin 800k drives Macintosh SE 1mb 20mb hard disk Macintosh SE30 4/40 Apple 2 Page Mono Monitor (with i/f card) Radius A3 2 page Colour Monitor (8 bit card) 895 1100 2295 1175 2795 All systems and hardware come with 12 months warranty, except printers 6 months Drives Printers Apple 5'/," disk drive 145 LaserWriter IISC 1325 Apple Unidisk (for IIc) 295 ImageWriter 115" 250 Apple 3'/," disk drive 195 ImageWriter I 10" 125 Apple Tape Drive 625 ImageWriter II Printer (White) 199 Data Frame Tape 40mb Drive & 40mb Disk Comb. 650 ImageWriter LQ 595 Apple CD Rom Player 495 Diablo 630 Daisywhecl (Serial) 95 Apple 40mb External Hard Disk 450 32K Buffer Option for ImageWriter LQ 65 Duo Disk 145 Appletalk Option for ImageWriter LQ 125 PC Drive 5'/," for Mac (with controller) 295 HP Paintjet (A4) colour 180 dpi 625 Mouse //e with card 99 Apple //GS Carry Case 55 //e Hand Controller (pair) 10 Kensington Mac Il Stand 20 Apple // SCSI card 49 Kensington Mac II Stand and Ext. Cables 51 GS-RAM card (unpopulated) 25 Kensington Macintosh Tilt/Swivel 21 Ramkeeper card 85 Stand SE/PLUS FastMath Coprocessor 84 Cool-It Fan //e or //GS 22 PlusDisk 512k 175 Printer Muffler 30 Apple // Software Program Writer «1... Apple // system disk & manual AppleWorks 2....... Upgrade to AppleWorks TimcOut Superfonts TimeOut Thesaurus .. TimeOut SideSpread TimeOut Graph TimeOut Spread Tools TimeOut ReportWriter TimeOut DeskTools TimeOut DeskTools II TimeOut Telecomm ..... Macintosh Software Adobe Type Manager and = Type Align Bundle .....ssssssssssseseessnesereresneees PlusWorks .... Typing Tutor IV Copy II Plus Access II Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego....... Science ToolKit Master Module Bank Strect WIitr ..ssssssssssseeeees Master Type & Writer Bundle Graphic Writer II 1.0.0... Soft PC Jazz. Omni The prices quoted are exclusive of VAT, Payment by cheque or credit card. Brent House, 214 Kenton Road, Harrow Middlesex, HA3 8BT. Tel: 081-907-8516, Fax: 081-097-4398 Disk Zaps and All That (Part 1) Reprinted from Hardcore February 1986, Ewen Wannop gives us a beginners guide to 'Disk Manager’ One ofthe latestadditions to theever growing software library is ‘Disk Manager’. This is a general ‘disc zap’ and disc utility program, and is avail- able on disc No. D105 at the usual price of £4 inclusive of VAT and P&P. The disc allows a comprehensive set ofdisc utilities. Twelve assorted options are available from the boot menu. I shall describe each of these in turn, and also explain some of the uses that they may be put to. First, let me say this disc is a DOS 3.3 utility, and although it will look at PRODOS, PASCAL or CPM discs, it is primarily intended for use with DOS 3.3. Arguments still rage over DOS versus PRODOS. APPLE themselves officially support only PRODOS now, but the vast host of DOS programs out there still need to be supported, and in fact virtually all the discs in our soft- ware library have been written under DOS 3,3. Properly handled, DOS is just as fast as PRODOS, and it has the advantage of using less memory under some circumstances. However PRODOS does have itsown advantages ... but that can be left for another discussion some other time, Upon booting the disc you should be presented with the ‘Disk Manager title page and the following menu: ** DISK MANAGER ** 0000 stor 6 DRIVE 1 TRXK Scr : CATALOG WITH T/S POINIER : FUE T/s List : FIND 1/S SCTORS 1 2 3 4 5 6 : DISK MAP 7 8 9 10 11 : DISK CLEAN The top line of the display shows the current status of the pi n. The four digit display at the top right shows the current tracksector being read orwritten to, and the letter preceding this number shows whether we are {R) or ‘writing (W) to that sector. The line below this ts used for setting up the working Slot, Drive and Track, Sector combina- ton as required. Perhaps, before I Fite further, 1 shouldexplain howa is constructed. There are, on an APPLE disc, 35 separate concentric tracks. Each of these tracks has 16 individual sectors each with 256 of data within it. On a DOS disc, tracks 0,1 and 2, are reserved for the use of the DOS itself, but there are useful there for us that we can lookat and change. Track $11, that is hexadecimal $11 or decimal 17, is the Catalog track, andis the key to getting at any of the files onthedisc. Itis usual rameters. Hexadecimal is easy to use. In decimal counting when you get to 9 you start again at 0 and carry one, in hexa- decimal you keep on counting with A,B,C etc. until you reach F, when you then go to O and carry one. In this way we count in lots of 16 instead of the usual 10. Nearly everything in a computer is based on numbers that are multiples of 2, and are usually then given in hexadecimal notation for convenience. A disc sector contains 256 bytes of data, atrackhas 16 sectors etc. We can now get down to the Menu options, first we have ... 1: CATALOG WITH T/S POINTER This luces what at first looks like a noi Catalog, but without the usual display showing the number of sectors taken up by the file. However, at the right is given a pair of numbers, first the TRor track number, and second the SC or sector number of that files Track/Sector list. More about these under the next option, but makea note of the pair forany file you may be interested in. To the left of the file name, will be given a “*' ifthe file is locked. If the * is displayed in inverse, then it means the file has been deleted and will not appear on a normal Catalog. It may be possible to revive this file, but again more of that later. If the Catalog is Ss a long one, then pressing the space bar will cycle through the entries, finally returning you to the Menu. 2: FILE T/S LIST On ent this , we must first put in the TR/SC number pair that we gleaned from the Catalog. These will display on the top display line as they are sry ogre gpmetopeaiieces peor pee value. Ifyou have entered a valid pair, you will be rewarded with a display of the ‘TRACK SECTORS taken up by that file. DOS keeps a list for each file, of all the sectors used. The list takes at least one sector itself, so the minimum file length is therefore two sectors, one for the list, and the minimum obviously of one for the file itself. The left hand digit is the track being referred to, and the digits ranging to the right are the sectors within that track used by that file. They are placed in sequence, so the first one shown is the first sector of the file and so on. Ent a return only, when asked for a trac! sector pair, will exit back to the menu. 3: FIND T/S SECTORS ‘This is where the fun can start .... We all occasionally get a corrupt disc, often because we have opened the drive dooror hit reset while the disc was being written to, All of these could cause corruption of the Catalog track, with the files all ap- parently lost. Help is at hand however, as ifthat track is |. we can re] reconstruct it. The DOS 3.3 manual has a great deal of information buried within its pages, and with care, it is possible to reconstruct a complete Catalog track. First we must find the track sector lists of allthe files by using the FIND option. then we look them up with option 2 to see if they really were proper track sector lists. We then repair the Catalog using these sectors as the T/S list for a known or dummy file. If there ee a lot of these displayed, you need to thompaceine Gheme thetest Taste 4: UNDELETE A FILE As I mentioned before, it be pos- sible to revive a deleted file. If any are y che, anal Sak yout AI N sempraoe ‘one, a! a asto priietiier yon yet like to see them or not. However, it is important to know that this will only revive the Catalog entry, itdoes not update the disc map, or ensure the validity of a deleted file. Hav- ing un-deleted a file, you must then load itin tomemory, checkitis OK. thendelete the file from disc and finally re-save back to disc. This will ensure all the correct disc maps etc. are kept up to date. I have ben saved many a time by this useful feature .... 5: DISK PATCH ‘Thisis potentiallyavery powerfulutility, and deserves whole article to itself, Twi only explain here how to use it. The possible uses that it can be put to will have to wait till some other time. A timely WARNING here, it is possible to damage irretrievably the information on a disc with this feature, and so it is 12 @ B Apple2000 August 1990 recommended thatyou first copy thedise in question, and work on the copy only, it oes non abet ou ae oman one ore sure your have worked. On first selection, you will be shown a ied menu of options. At any time aie tie tb is Patch facility, you may ‘turn to menu by using the ‘7’ key. Te tecabe Back to the cain Meni press <Escape> from wherever you are. Cc; Cs CHANCE 7/00: BUT DOUNOM Pesta fgren rae dane spay but ens eee ceeriatectie anew qoasseibe acces jon fue ia working on before itback to disc. You must enter in the top line display, using return as before, to go to the next entry. N: SPECIFY NEW TR/SC AND READ ‘The track sector s] will be read into the lernal buees ot ie ps bytes of the bi splayed. ee ee rraae nee, wide. An ASCII representation of the bytes is given to the it. To display the bottom Sees S : CHANGE SLOT/DRIVE Changes the working slot /drive, enter in the top display line and use return to go to the next setting, R: RE-READ CURRENT SECTOR This will re-read into the buffer the current working sector. Useful if have made a mess of things and want to start again. W : WRITE CURRENT SECTOR Writes back to disc the altered buffer. This could be: us, make sure you have not doneanything disastrous belore you issue this command. You should be working witha copy ofthe relevant disc so Mvehor read the sector if you make a mistake. P: PATCH SECTOR The main use of the Patch facility is by allow you to change bytes on ihe will. Youshould know precisely natu are doing before you start Fpoery Bet Always work with a copy of the disc in then re if a mistake is made you can ieee the stating point. This you to one or more enc eee type offile forinstance, or tochange characters to legal ones in file names in the Catalog, and many other useful as well. ‘Touse PATCH, you must firstenter the Sioa iia ar rene oe te ye te wish to work from. This is the t within the current buffer displayed on the screeff. Press return to go to the actual patching, and on entering each byte, press return to go tothe next. When you have entered all you wish to change, Tyrese Yotuen bir ksell loenicihe cane bytes into the buffer. You must then W write this backtodisctomake the change @ permanent addition to the sector you have been working on. T: DISPLAY FIRST #80 BYTES You can only display $80 (128) bytes of the sector at any one time. As a sector is $100 (256) bytes long, you must toggle the display between the first #80! ra orthe ym #80 bytes 'B’ of the current working sector. B: DISPLAY LAST #80 BYTES Displays the bottom or last #80 bytes of the current working sector. +: READ NEXT TR/SC ‘This will take you to the next sector in ascending numeric order. If you reach sector $F itwill goon to the next trackand display sector 0 of this track. Ifyou reach sector $F of track $22 then you will cycle round to track $0 sector $0. The display at the top right shows the current sector you have read. -: READ LAST TR/SC Descends one sector from the current position. Wraps round to $22/$F from track $0 sector $0. ESC : LEAVE DISC PATCH Returms to the Main Menu when you are done. ?; DISPLAY MENU When you get lost, will display all the Menu of possible commands. 6: DISK MAP As well as the Catalog and the track/ sector lists, DOS keeps a map of all the used and free sectors on the disc. This can show ina graphic form all the sectors that are currently in use. The display shows the tracks from 0 to the left, through to $22 (35) at the right. The sectors are shown vertically from 0 to $F (15). Ifyou draw adisc map ofa disc that hasonly been initialised and thus has no files on it, you will see that tracks 0-2 and track $11 are shown as in use. These are the DOS tracks and the Cat track, as mentioned earlier. You will be also al the foot of thescreen thenumberof free sectors left on the disc as well as the number odd sectors actually used. 7: CATALOG SORTER If like me, you end up with lots of odd files all over your discs, all ina haphazard order, then this is for you. On se! this option, you will be a secon menu, with 5 further options. There are two forms of the sort, alphabetical or manual, and each may be specified with the program called ‘HELLO’, ifpresent,as the first file. If you select manual sort, then each fl willbe presen resented to you in turn, simply answer Y¥' or ‘N’ as required They wilkeep cyeingroundatyou ul all Tol at hatebeercone eave arly dewied Mea to the end. All must eventually have been placed in order before it will write back to disc and take you back to the Menu. 8: INIT A TRACK Damaged tracks may be repaired by re-initialising them. This simply means writing rpectpiiretpenae plese zerocondition. Itisa prettydrasticremedy, and so you should try and save as much of the track by copying the good sectors. to another a as is possible, before this. It is important for DOS that the volume number of the track is con- sistent with the rest of the disc, so on entryit and tries to find it first. It will for the track you wish to renew. Xousressked boveriiy youre! 800. Just in case you a mistake .... 9: COPY A TRACK SEs Ee bosi to copy your favourite DOS a master disc e slave ashe A is given: are writing tothese toa hover You can copy a track from one drive to another, but the drives must both be in the same slot however. If you feel like it, you can copy from one track toanothercompletely different one, though I can't quite at the moment where this could be of much use. 10 : CHANGE SLOT/DRIVE This will the Slot and Drive. Enter the appropriate one, and press carriage return to get to the next setting. You cannot enter illegal slots or drives. The program mayeventually hang iyo Enver a soe aninoee Cia bea 1 drive in it! 11: DISK CLEAN You will need a suitable for this option. The head will psi or and forth from track 0 to $22 eae one minute. other for any ‘Read’ errors. It is assumed that ifthe disc reads correctly, then it can be written to correctly as well. If any errors are found on a normal disc, you will have to Initialise that trackagain. But first copy any sectors that are good to another disc, so that you can copy them back and repair afterwards as much of the track as can be saved. 13: EXIT ‘The way out from the . Ifyou have tried so far to get out Pressing Reset, you will simply have found your- self back at the Menu. This will let you go off and play that adventure game again. You didn't try to find the answeron the dise with the PATCH option did you? Ewen Wannop February1986 ¢ This was the first of a series of six articles by Ewen on Zapping disks and oaaee with the different Disk tems. Theyaroseoutof ‘Chameleon. ed Se chall eeaiitie wine caters the next few magazines. Ewen never completed the series as he intended, perhaps we can hope that he will some day. Ed. August 1990 Applie2000 &e 3 AppleXtras /XTRAS.P8.NO.4/ =P8PARTITION.SHK SEO 22 8-JUL-90 =CHANGEFILE.SHK $E0 49 8-JUL-90 “FRACTALIIE.SHK $E0 36 © 8-JUL-90 =DICTCONV.SHK SEO 17 9-JUL-90 =GRAMMAR . SHK $EO 36 © 8-JUL-90 “RESURRECT.SHK $E0 30 8-JUL-90 =VANILA.SHK SEO 66 8-JUL-90 =FLASHWORD.SHK SEO 16 8-JUL-90 /XTRAS.GS.NO.4/ =PRODOS sys 32 8-JUL-88 ~TITIE scl 65 8-JUL-90 “BOOT. SYSTEM sys 1 6-JAN-90 =PROGRAMS DIR 1 8-JUL-90 ~GS.SHK DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =GS.SHK.DOCS TXT 56 21-JUN-90 =GSHK $B3 203 24-JUN-90 =BUG. REPORTS TxT 8 16-JUN-90 =SHRINKIT. ICONS SCA 18 23-JUN-90 ~POWERLAUNCH DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =PWRWR DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =PWRINCH.PG1 TXT 1 23-FEB-90 =PWRLNCH .PG2 TXT 1 23-FEB-90 =PWRWR. ICONS SCA 8 20-FEB-90 =PWRLNCH-AWGS $50 27 23-FEB-90 -POWERLAUNCH $B3 72 23-FEB-90 “WAVE.EDIT DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =WAVE.EDITOR $B3 28 2-MAR-90 “PANGEASND.DOC TXT. 7 2-MAR-90 *C.C.C BIN 18 11-MAR-90 =DA.S DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =DFM. BXY $EO 223 24-JUN-90 =FIND.FIIE.V1.2 $B8 25 19-MAR-90 =WRITEI .BXY SEO 28 13-MAY-90 DIR 1 8-JUL-90 SBS 12 27-JAN-90 TXT 3 27-JAN-90 ~SSICON DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =SOUNDSMITH.ICON $CA 4 4-MAR-90 =ICON.NOTES ‘TXT 1 4-MAR-90 =PRODOS.TOOLS DIR 1 8-JUL-90 SFINDER.KILLER DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =FDK. ICONS $CA 4 18-MAY-89 =FDK.TXT TXT 12 18-MAY-89 =FDK.1.0 BAS 6 18-MAY-89 -NIFTY.LIST DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =NLIST.MANUAL = TXT 44 24-MAR-90 =NLIST.REV TXT 35 24-MAR-90 “NIFTYLIST.CDA $89 70 25-MAR-90 =NIFTYLIST.OMF2 $B9 70 25-MAR-90 =NLIST.DATA TXT 97 24-MAR-90 ~OMF2. NOTE xT 1 25-MAR-90 =GAMES DIR 1 8-JUL-90 PYRAMID DIR 1 8-JUL-90 =CARDS.DIAMONDS $B0 26 9-DEC-88 =CARDS . HEARTS $BO 26 9-DEC-88 =PYRAMID.PIC $cl 65 21-MAR-89 =CARDS . CLUBS $B0 26 9-DEC-88 =READ . ME TXT 3 22-MAR-89 “CARDS.SPADES § $B0 26 9-DEC-88 =PYRAMID $B3 39 22-MAR-89 =LUNAR. LANDER $B3 174 «11-Nov-89 /XTRAS.P8.NO.4/ All the files on this disk must be unpacked with ShrinkIt from Xtras.P8.No.1. P8PARTITION.SHK P8 Partition - Patches ProDOS 8 to see and map multiple partitions on SCSI drives to Slots. CHANGEFILE.SHK Change-A-File - Batch file utility to restore damaged AppleWorks Database and Word processor files. FRACTALIIE.SHK Fractal Ile - Displays the MandelBrot and Julia set on the Double HiRes screen. DICTCONV.SHK Convert - Converts Sensible Speller dictionaries for use with Beagle Bros QuickSpell. GRAMMAR.SHK Grammar Checker - UltraMacros 3.1 macro for AppleWorks 3.0. Checks your grammar! RESURRECT.SHK Resurrect - Complements Change-A-File by restoring disks with damaged directories. VANILA.SHK Plain Vanila - Formats and partitions SCSI drives using the Apple SCSI card Rev C. FLASHWORD.SHK Flashwords - Uses UltraMacros and SuperFonts with AppleWorks 3.0 to generate a classic flash card application. /XTRAS.GS.NO.4/ Programs Folder GSHK - At last we have the full GS desktop version of ShrinkIt. Many enhancements have been made and GSHK will now unpack ARC’ed and Stuffit files as well as the more usual ShrinkIt, BXY or BLU files. Powerlaunch - An alternative to the Finder to launch your ees Neatly done and with an excellent graphic interface. ways Editor - A simple sound and wave form jitor. C.C.C. - BRUN from Basic for the most amazing Graphics display you have seen on the Ilgs! DA's Folder DFM.BXY - Unshrink to make a powerful and comprehensive NDA file manager full documentation included. Find File - Handy File Finder NDA for those forgotten masterpieces you have mislaid. Based on the Macintosh original. WritelIt - An improved Version 2 of this handy word processing NDA with many added features. Peekit - Look at the text content of any file to see if it can be printed. The HiBits can optionally be cleared while viewing. Icon Folder SS Icon - Icons for use with the SoundSmith music program ProDOS Tools Folder Finder Killer - Strip out all those annoying Finder Data files that you seem to collect. Automatically and painlessly removed! Nifty List - Version 2.92 of this most indispensable aid for proj ers. Now updated to include all the latest Tool calls for System 5.0.2. Games Folder Pyramid - From the same stable as Solitaire, another riveting game of cards. Lunar Lander - The classic game updated to full GS Graphics. é Apple2000 August 1990 Disk Drive Servicing (ERB ais Sea Roger Larcombe examines his disk drives with D.A.D.S and S.T.A.T. and puts his mind at rest Having Problems? Having Occasional problems with your disk drives ? Worried about los- ing that precious data ? Well now you can relax with two new products from ASKY D.A.D.S. Answer and S.T.A.T. Ifyou are receiving the dreaded I/O ERROR occasionally or getting clicks and whirs from your drives when loading files then this could be a sign of impending doom, either your disks are dodgy or the drives themselves are in need of attention. but how do you know when is the time to service the drives ? You could just send them to your dealer every six months, but that would be expensive if they onlyactually need it every 12 or 13 months. The Answer Here is the answer to your prob- lems, two new disk drive analysis tools from ASKY an innovative Cali- fornia based firm. The two utilities both use a novel technology which I have not come across before which is a spiral track very accurately written onto a special disk, the disk also contains the various programs re- quired and is self booting. The spiral track allows the software to test ex- tremely closely how well your drive reads and writes disks at various points across the surface and also checks for various other parameters such as signal strength. Most tests actually measure the error distances in thousandths of an inch from a known ideal situation. S.T.AT. The first of the two products is called S.T.A.T., (S)piral (T)rack {A)nalysis (Tjool, this is a drive analy- sis tool for end users who simply want to know when their drives are getting marginal and should be sent for over- haul although it performs almost all the tests in the higher product and does them to the same accuracy. The tests performed can be seen in Fig 1. The tests can be run as a set auto- matically and you can even configure the program to suit your own needs. For instance if you are worried about some particular aspects ofyour drives then you can configure the automatic sequence to make only the related tests. You can also configure the test parameters to suit your own needs, for example if you don't need such good drive speed accuracy you can open out the span tosuit. Al] ofthese configurations and indeed testing it- self is fully menu driven, all you have to do is put the disk in the re and boot up, ASKY even gives recommen- dations of what to do if the disk won't boot, but lets hope that your drives never get that bad ! When you boot you first geta keane image of a disk drive whilst the pro- load up, then an introductory screen which informs you what S.T.A.T. can do and some good advice - firstly, always take drives under warranty straight back to the dealer in cage you should void the warranty, and secondly to ensure good resulls use a cleaning disk before running the tests. Pressing any key takes you into the main menu where the eight tests are listed under A to H and each item's selection letter is highlighted showing that it is currently selected for auto test. From this point you can either press one of the menu keys to de-select the item from auto test or ‘L’ Figure 1 the mechanism. boot track) accurately. read it back. A) Clamping - Checks that the disk is clamped securely at the centre hub B) Track zero - Checks that the drive can seek and find track Zero (the C) Write/read - Checks that the head can write a track and afterwards D) Speed - Checks that the drive is between 295.5 rpm and 304.5 rpm E) Cam linearity - Checks for linear movement radially across the disk. F) Hysteresis - Checks for backlash in the head drive mechanism. G) nment - Checks positional accuracy over a given track. H) Head read span - Measures width of track the head can read. to run the auto test routine, there is also useful help screen available by pressing *?', and the configuration menu is obtained by pressing ‘0’. After the tests have run, which takes about 30 seconds for a full set, the results are displayed on the screen as passed or failed in text format and this can be printed out typing Control-P. Pressing the space yt a bar graph display generated from inverse text characters shows whether the test was passed faile: and if passed then whether it was optimum good or marginal. The re- sults can be more useful to anybody whoalso has the more detailed product D.A.D.S. Answer II, which can take them in numerical form and convert to actual error distances etc., for this reason the results are available in numerical format by pressing "W’. The system ts easily used and ideal for those Apple users who want to make regular checks on their drives 80 as to avoid sudden catastrophe in the form of data 1088, It could also be useful for any central service depots who can issue it to users and have centrally the use of D.A.D.S. Answer IL. It is definitely a good buy at a price of £60.00 including VAT and UK P&P. DAD.S. The second product is known as D.A.D.S. Answer II, (D)rive (A)nalysis (D)iskette (Tool, this is intended more for people with experience of adjust- ing drives for alignment etc. and in- cludes all the tests previously men- tioned in S.T.A.T. above again to the same stringent standards plus some minor extra tests. These are ; file access which checks that full files can be correctly interpreted and trans- ferred, write protect which just checks the switch and interference which looks for modulation of the signal from the drive often caused by bad contact between the head and the disk. Booting this disk gives a similar graphic to S.T.A.T. whilst the pro- gramme loads up, after which is an- other welcome screen which gives some essential advice for novices or fiddlers ; if you don’t have much ex- perience with drives use the system as a diagnostic tool only and again don't attempt to repair items under warranty. Pressing any key will now gives the main menu, which is very similar to S.T.A.T.’s except that there are more tests available listed as A to Kandalso there is now an extra menu available under‘N’ - the autotest menu. Pressing ‘L' runs a full set of tests automatically, pressing any of the other letter gives a single run of that particular test. The autotest menu allows you to select which items are run in an autotest sequence, once in this menu all the tests are listed with their key letters highlighted, indicating that they are selected. Pressing any onc of the keys causes the highlight to disappear August 1990 Apple2000 &B 15 from that letter and thus the test to be omitted from the autotest routine. The configuration menu allows the numerical test parameters to be ad- justed if required. where a numerical value is appropriate. All the configu- rations can be saved on the diskette if necessary for future use by pressing Control-X and the original values can be restored at any time by pressing Control-Y. ., D.A.D.S. Answer II gives its results in the form of actual measured values where possible and in passed /failed format otherwise, all measurements are listed as ‘mils’ and the manual indicates that a mil is equivalent to 1/1000 of an inch so most of us would probably be more comfortable calling them ‘thous’. As each test is carried out, the result is displayed on the screen and at test B the user is prompted to remove the disk, this is dons with the drive still spinning and as you pull the disk out the message changes to reinsert the disk. The remainder of the tests now follow through with their results be ing displayed on screen. Again results can be printed out by typing Control- P and the tests can be easily rerun by pushing the space bar. HARD-TO-FIND, The configuration menu allows use of either the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standards, the original ASKY determined parameters which are actually stricter or special standards to suit your own require- ments. These can be saved for later use by pressing Control-X and the original values restored using Control- Yas with S.T.A.T.. The manual lists in very great detail how the tests are performed, what the tests mean, why the individual results are soimportant and what to do about problems when they occur, it also tells you when you had best leave it to some body else. Conclusions ‘The D.A.D.S. Answer II is very easy for even the novice to use, although it is obviously aimed more at either the experienced user or the service engi- neer, The manual gives sound advice and lots of useful and interesting in- formation. The product itselfis clearly made to the very highest standards by ASKY in order to achieve such good results and shows a high level of initiative by its designers. 1 won't hesitate to (ae a copy at the price of £150.00 as it can easily cost you this much fora full overhaul on a couple of Product : D.A.D.S. & S.T.A.T. Publisher: ASKY Available from : MGA SoftCat 41 Cinque Port Street Rye East Sussex TN31 7AD 0797-226601 Price : £150 & £60 WYSIWYP édddd ede edd Value : Performance Documentation : drives. ASKY are bringing out a range of new and interesting items for the Apple II range recently all of which seem to be both innovative in techno- logical terms and well priced, let's hope they keep em coming. Roger Larcombe e UNIQUE PRODUCTS FOR APPLE Il ENTHUSIASTS ‘Most reputal IIgs Batteries When your ligs loses track of time and can’t emember your contrl panel settings, it means your bbatay is dead. Since the ligs battery is soldered fo the ‘actualy want you to pay fr ‘aw replacements. No soldering ‘uy compattie itium babery ineructons, NO-001 ‘Stide-On Battery for ligs Cheap 3.5 drives For months you've been asking us to carry lnwxpenaivo 3.5 drives. For months what you've wanted wasrtt avalatie in a hive we could eupport But $14.95 row AMR hae produced an 800K 3.5 crive thate Just Tica an Apple 3.5 at a fracton of Apple's $429 price huge inks igor lies Pls eek darshan. Alo werks.0n ale wih AMA's disk contro or on your Macintosh. ‘AM-001 AMR 3.5 drive $199.00 AM.002 AMR 35 controlier for ile $59.00 Prosel 8 and 16 Prosal is a comprehensive disk utlity, » Prosel 8 works in the ProDOS & environment, Prosel 16 (Indices Prosel 6) in te GS/OS environment of the ‘Asai ligs. Indiudes Ble and disk copy and backup ilies, program select, scheduler, and much more. GB-001 Prose! 8 $40.00 GB-002 Prose! 16 $60.00 Stack Support ‘Stacks have arved in the Apple Il kingdom and wore teady to ofc chare to the first Apple Il pblcaton about hypermedia. itt pubiched 6 tee a your ac a cet of stacks and distributed on 3.5 disks. ‘Stack Cemtral inciudes the latest information on Aprie Whypormeda developments, auhoring ip, cp at and aunde, and amples of the best public domain and sharewae tacks wo can fed Races HyperSfo SC Stack-Central, six 3.5 disks $42.00 HyperStudio HyparStudio Is the first program to take full advantage ol the sound and graphics of the Apcie figs. Its HypaCard-the, for those of you familar with the the lis and ne serpting language ie eae wade sn ed cares port od ek RW-005 $128.00 SCWH-1 Special yporSuto’Stack Cont at$139.00 Network Connectors These are the connectors you need to create an ‘AppleTalk network. Not only do they cost less than ‘Apple's connectors. these work with inexpensive telephone wire (not supped) rather than Apple's ‘expensive, special cables. You need one connect for ‘each comgute and printer on fhe network. 0E001 Moduitet &-pin 0E-002 Moduttet 9-pln $34.95 $4.95 A2-Central” 1S ST INo Risk Guarantee! it you arent completely satisfled with your purchase, return the merchandise in tts refund your money in full. We beck our products! ‘Our 45-day unconditional guarantee means you take no risk on any product you buy from us, original and we will News and solutions ‘co you trac of Apa Comuter’s incessant message that only the Macintosh is a serious computer? Thousands of paopte tks you subscribe to ou monthly Apple It newsletter, A2-Cemtral. Its a small, pacconalized publication concerned only with the Ju Information about te Ade I, Just 8 pages fin, gach issue is profssionaly typeset ard packad ght wit answers the questions Agple I Users around the world are asking. Its fora ttvee-ting binder, indexed each February, and is considered by many to be the single most important Inlrmasn resource in the Appel word. ‘A.3.5 dick subscription is also available, which Indudes both a paper newslater and the i text of hat Jeeve ina dink flo lor Mib xt saarchas. The remainder ‘ofthe ck ie Mad wih programe tom our tubecrbers, trom our library on GEnia, tach notes, system disk ‘updams, and oft hot sau, At Ascent Esan tye Bn fax/phone/mail order company serving the Apple II communi Apple Il books We cary instock vituly every book in pint thats about the Agple Il, From Addison- Wesley's Apple 1b AapieWWorks Ties and Techniques, we have them al Wie for our free catalog or call and ask about the book you're interested in. We also have in stock the iaks for many books. Full Set Specials You can got every issue of A2-Cemtrat we've ever pubiichec-tive years wort of Apc Il ps. wicks, and ‘olutons to your problems—for ust $39. Paper back Inloxmaton, FS-N indexed back issues, $39.00 FS-D Back Issue text on 3.5 disks $39.00 FD-001 FastData Pro, for searches $49.00 A2-Central Po Box 11250, Overland Park, KS 66207 voice: 919-469-6502 item # qty _j_pnce name © Send me your full catalog FREE! USA. fax: 913-469-6507 adr, al, auriace shi 0 Visa ©) MasterCard rep canon Mates (TH DOO card number a M291 expiration date OO August 1990 The New Talking Stickybear Alphabet A review of the new llgs version of this favourite program by Dave Ferris Anyone who has already discovered Optimum Resource's Weekly Reader Software, particularly the Stickybear series of educational programs will probably have been impressed by their quality and ability to get a child's interest and hold it. Now, to this line, has been added ‘The New Stickybear Alphabet’ spe- cl for the IIGS. It makes excellent use of the SHR graphics and sound capa- bilities of this machine. ‘Talking ABC comes supplied on 2 x 3.5" discs, a boot/) disc and data aise The Gooner of bot acs may be installed on a hard disc, but the key disc is always required for startup. The program requires a minimum of 512K when booting from floppy disc, more to launch from the Finder, depend- ing upon the OS version. The Program It starts with an animated, vocal wel- come from Bedford Stickybear, then continues with him climbing up and down a ladder pointing to one of three selections. Pressing any key will select the activity he is pointing to. These are:- Q Alphabet. Selecting any letter will result in an well animated picture being displayed to illustrate that letter, usually with sound effects. There are two pic- tures for each letter. For instance A is for acrobat and also for airplane. In addition Stickybear will say the letter and also what it stands for. af QLetterHunt. In thisactivity Stict asks the child to press a letter, for exam- ple“Press the letterT”. Iftheletteristyped correctly, one of the two pictures will be displayed as before, with Stickybear say- ing the letter and what it stands for. Ifthe first attempt is incorrect the letter willbe displayedon screenand Stickybear says “This is T. Press the letter T. ae second Bie is Ane kaa Stic! is is T™ in then Se ee ee important, as it ee the child getting frustrated with the program because they get ee one letter. Italso avoids the trap that some programs fall into, where the display is et spectacular and fun if you get the answers wrong. O Fast Letters. Stickybear appears on the screen and will say any letter of the alphabet thatis typed in. Theletterisalso displayed on the screen. Documentation ‘This is minimal, but then not much is required. It does include instructions for hard disc installation, and how to teach achikitostart the . Italsocomes with st tions for additional activities, but not as much as there could be. Conclusion Unlike the o1 Stic! ABC, riginal Stickybear this version displays letters in both Up- perand Lowercase, tohelp children learn them in both forms. The voice synthesis is clearand easy to understand, and even the animation of Stickybear when pronouncing the letters for Fast Letters attempts to match the mouth shape to the letter. Although the recommended age range for this program is 3 to6years, ithasbeen field tested by my (just) 2yearolddaughter. She has found it a delight to experiment with, and any time she finds me working on the computer, instantly demands ‘Sticl var!". Optimum Resource claim that this program will advance computer aware- ness in children. I can confirm that, if! leave an unlocked disc box on the desk, Ican be sure to findadisc in the 3.5" drive (correctly inserted). Fortunately my daughter hasn't yet found the switch to turn the computer on. Thisisanexcellent program that I have enjoyed playing with as much as my daughter. It's only problem is the differ- ence between English English and American English. For instance ‘Z is pronounced zee and aeroplane is spelt airplane, but | think we can live with these minor details. What I would like to see now is a talking version. « info Product : New Sticky Bears Publisher ; Optimum Resource Available from : MGA SoftCat 41 Cinque Port Street Rye East Sussex TN31 7AD 0797-226601 Price: £37.95 WYSIWYP £85 for 5 disk LabPack Value : eééeed Performance : ééddd Documentation: déédd The Stickybear Alphabet Copyright ©1988 by Optimum Resource, I Bedford Stickbear and friend? August1990 ~ Apple2000 _ Game Plan Robert Hornby gets himself tangled up in a variety of action packed games ARKANOID Arkanoid fs a kind of version of the old game “Brick Out” but a lot better. In the game you control a small Vaus escape module, battling your way through 33 levels of hard bricking. trying to destroy the space walls. You have one objective, toseek and destroy the Grid monster, a mighty force field that is holding your mothership and stopping it from getting away. ¢ game starts with a short theme tune before getting into the game. I played it with paddles but you can use a joystick. The first level is a basic ‘knock them out’ but as the levels progress you get bricks which take several hits to destroy. There are also old bricks which are impossible to destroy. In the game there are things to help you, for as you destroy certain bricks and colours, letters fall which represent lasers and other helpful items. Some of them don’t always help. If you don't have these items, you will use a small energy ball which bounces around the screen, though you must deflect it at times to stop its going out of play and therefore losing a life. In the final game screen you take on the Grid monster who bombs at you and if you're hit, you're dead! The monster is shaped as a human head and coloured gold. If you hit him for long enough he turns green and blows up. One tip is not to stay in one place for too long or the bombs will hit you. The screens you see in the game are shaped as a square with the bottom missing. There, on that bottom part, your Vaus module sits, moving left and right, deflecting the balls thatyou control. On the top side, just off the game playing screen is the score area telling you what round you're on and your score. The graphics for the game are okay but are a bit basic thou, background makes up for that with its bright patterns. There is not much music to the game and the sound effects are poor. Taito have made better games but still the game overall is quite good. aie Arkanoid is also available for the Igs. Robert Hornby (aged 13) &2e 18 AUTO DUEL Auto Duel is a car game based on the board game by Steve Jackson and is set in the future when the right of way goes to the car with the biggest guns. The game begins with a full screen plan of New York. Here you can move your man around, entering the shops to choose what you want to buy or what you want to sell. You start off with 2000 dollars. It seems a lot till you find it costs that much just to buy weapons so it's off to the arena, acombatarea, where there are different levels of cars after you have killed the driver. The next stop is the A.A.D.A where you can get jobs which you can take. The jobs you get range from taking fish to a pet shop or taking disks to Origin. Many jobs pay well, from 100 dollars to 50,000 dollars. But some you won't be able to get depending on the amount of prestige or money you already have. Also at the A.A.D.A. you can get road information about the latest traffic conditions. youre sick, drop in at your local old cross. Here you will be able to uy a clone which is an exact picture of you and all the money you have is recorded in this clone too. So when ou get killed, you are returned to life this clone - good hey? Also here, you can have your health brought back up to 3 from whatever level it is al it. Want to rest? Drop in at the Truck Stop. Here you can sleep, up to9 days ata time; here you can have your battery recharged. ‘Then you can buy body armour which gives you an extra 3 body points which can help later in the game. Lastly, you can get a bus trip to another town. This costs 100 dollars but is an easy way to travel. There are many other places to visit including Joe's Bar and the salvage play from Amateur to un- 2 yard but we must set foi limited. You start on Ama- on the journey. You can teur where you get your own leave New York down one car and a machine gun with of3 roads. Once out on the 20 rounds. Once started, S o road, you are at the mercy you go round the large scroll- ofthe computer's cars as you ing arena blasting out all the battle your way down the cars found there. Once you have highway to the next city. You done that you will come out. if still meet cars with lasers and anti- alive, and receive $2000 which tank guns - can you reach the should help to get a new car ve from the assembly lines. If however you get killed you'll have to start again. At the assembly line you will be asked what to name your car and what type you want - from asub compact to avan. Then you are asked what weight you want your car to hold so you choose that. Afler a few other things, you choose your weapons which will probably save your life once on the road. You won't be able to afford a good weapon but you may just be able to afford a machine gun and ammo (20 rounds a time). Now your car is ready, pay the man and get out. Other places you will find in the towns are the bah et shop where you can buy lasers, flame throwers and mines; all having a deadly purpose. With lasers you do not need to buy ammo because they run offthe batte: that’s in the car, 99 shots in all. (Costs 8000 though). Then there ts the garage where you can repair your car which costs $50; and you can have mechanical lessons which will improve your chance ofsalvaging other next town without dying? Itis a challenge at first but as you complete more jobs you can buy better weapons. Then you can repel the firepower. There are over 12 towns to go to each with a different layout. Some have only two shops while others have more. Good luck, you'll need it. The game comes with a 32 page manual telling you all you need to know. Alsoyou getakey pe to help ro The game is un and takes hours to complete. Its a bit like Elite but on the ground. Graphicsare pretty good but some road scenes could be improved. This game is a real challenge. It needs a joystick . Robert Hornby (aged 13) ¢ ULTIMA TRILOGY 1, 2,3 ULTIMA I Ultima I is the quest to destroy Mondain, an evil wizard who has sent the Armies of Darkness to devastate the tranquil kingdoms of Sosaria. Apple2000 August 1990 Defenceless in the face ofsuchan attack, the people flee in vain to the mighty strongholds. The quest to destroy the power of darkness is on. You control one man who is the only one who can save Sosaria. ‘The challenge is t for you will have to kill countless numbers of Ores, gremlins, knights and the Necromancers, an evil race of wizards, not as powerful as Mondain but still hard to defeat. without being killed yourself. The game Is set on a plan view scrolling as you move. There are 4 professions to choose from, and 4racesofinhabitants in the world. There are many people to 5; to, demons to fight and lastly, the frontiers of Space tobe conquered. However, this can only be done after you have collected enough money tobuyashuttle with which you can fly around the galaxy attacking Mondain's fighters who attempt to destroy you and stop you completing the game. Watch out for the Sun though, it can easily destroy you. The game is well set up but the graphics are not brilliant though the game is very addictive and provides hours of entertainment. The game itself was made in 1980 and has been updated to 1990 standards but, looking at the screen, this doesn’t seem to have happened. The game on its own is #24.99 but you can buy it from MGA in a set. Ultima 1, 2. 3 for #49.95. The game is set in 4 overhead maps which scroll as you go. You can get to each map through boat travel but first you need a boat which you can buy at you local town. The town ‘graphics are black peut white an ae impres- sive. The undergroun feons are not brilliant but eae The map is good but could be improved. The Space view needs improving a lot more. But the pabhics don't seem to matter cause of the plot which unfolds as you complete missions given to you from kings who hold out in their castles. ULTIMA II Ultima II is set in the same world. Evil has attacked once more under the command of an Enchantress, daughter of Mondain. You play another hero trying to save the world. This time the game is set on a world map, scrolling as you move, on an 8 x 8 screen. The plot is mainly the same but the graphics are better and more colourful. Also on this game you can pass through door ways which lead to different time zones, future, leg- end, A.D., B.C and Pangea. are different - all have new en- August 1990 emies to kill. This game is bigger and better than the first one but not as addictive. ULTIMA III The third is easily the best with new maps, bigger and better graphics and also a 4 player attack team which can take on up to 12 enemies on a separate screen allat once. The game starts ona scrolling screen set on a large island but other areas can be explored. When you meet an attacker, you switch to a dif- ferent screen where you battle the en- . When first starting, do not try to attack too powerful warriors because enemy. The only clue you have is a word scrawled in blood saying EXODUS. All the games follow the same plot but all have new things to them and each is an improvement on the previous game. There are hundreds of people to talk to and fight. The game comes in a nice box which helps show the plot. Inside there is a book written in the old English style which makes it look very impressive - and so it is. Also, there is a qu uick key pe which makes it easy for those who ate reading before playing. This is a great set of 3 rel by paaroving you will be destré about an Orc attac! |. The from an unknown is that old games are still love Robert Hornby (aged 13) NEW KIT 8/90 JAE 3.5 Dre ed Enginaar sxzons Hey tompaitie 3 8 00K caaycnan adeabie to Pedi n Jdnve, @ pertect second dre lye Extended Enhancement Kit AppIerMGA) “268.95 [Dy demand, a low-cost upgrade for ile tars wating tun mage software ine [Publish-it! Prondes both @ 64K extended lad-column card as wall at a complete ile JEnnancement Kit. (Apple's price for the} later 1 £69 on its own’) PROMGRAMER (SCRG) “£149.50 [An inexpensive EPROM programmer tor ‘Apple I The unt plugs into any standard] lperipheral card slot and allows you to program any standard 27nnn ‘series EPROM trom 2708-27512. Though not intended a3 a production tool, the e830 of Card. Arractive quacity, dis: counts on EPROMs are available’ trom| IMGA SohGat to EPROM Programming] fas exes u des oregon] [a ew memory ei ies and alt mosal fe wn ~a lexpansion connector. This price ISe6K and the board may be sxpanded 1 MD "using stangard 256Kx¢ RAMs Sie Ben (Orange Micro) (etcaes Grappler CMsaiGS_ Connects les es, WO an tae 3 3-6 Ca tron