knnngt@ukma.UUCP (Alan Kennington) (12/18/85)
++++++++what is a line eater??!++++++++ On the subject of printers, the Panasonic 1091 works really very well with the ST, and seems to be somewhat better and cheaper than the Epson printers usually recommended. The basic interpreter seems to arrive very slowly because Atari ran out of them, or so they told me on the phone. Perhaps they've paused to take out some of the very numerous bugs. Richard Frick said, when I asked him about bugs, straightaway that the basic was very embarassing. He must have been having a lot of people telling him about such things. Eg, hex$ of anything but an explicit number gives the string "50". But it's not too bad for wiling away the hours waiting for the development kit. They said the basic was being sent out 4 to 6 weeks late. But that is exceeded in my case. Anyway, what I wanted to say about the developer's kit has now been saidby someone: that is, that it costs an extra 21 dollars for ship/hand, above the 300 for the kit itself. Does anyone know how to get a full screen dump on the printer? I guess it's probably not so simple. But what would be very nice is a program to print out summaries of disk contents, like a program advertised at an excessive $50 for the Mac. And finally, while waiting for my dev kit, I am just dying to know how the basic interp opens files and sends data to a disk or printer. I'm writing a disassembler in basic, and it would be nice to send stuff to the printer. Especially I'd like to use all the things my printer can do without going through someone else's software. And in conclusion, I approve of comparisons of At vs Am in this newsgroup. It's a darn sight better than reading some of the biased and incompetent stuff that comes out in magazines. And in net.micro.atari, the few gems of wisdom easily compensate for the dribble (including the present note). So long. Alan Kennington.