[net.micro.atari16] Screen dimmer, PD software, etc.

oyster@uwmacc.UUCP (Vicarious Oyster) (05/30/86)

In article <304@atari.UUcp> neil@atari.UUcp (Neil Harris) writes:
>The people at Solar Powered Software make a set of products...
>
>I recommend that you go for the whole set, which is called *******.  In
>addition to the crt saver, it includes an auto-booting ramdisk of adjustable
>size (by editing a text file) and a print spooler/formatter.
>
   It amazes me what people have to pay money for!  These "products", and
many I've noticed like them, are not so much products as relatively simple
utilities.  Such utilities should be (and are, to a large extent) available
free on any BB worth its salt.  I mean, can you believe somebody is actually
*selling* 'make'?!  Luckily, we have kind and generous people like Mssrs.
Franco and Fish (for the Am*ga), who selflessly give of their time and
machine use so the rest of us will benefit from PD software.
   Anyway, my first project is writing a ramdisk utility like the above, but
with the added feature of automatically copying specified files to the
ramdisk (they'll be listed in the config file along with the size).  This
will be public domain, especially as it is based on Mike's Ramdisk.
So if you're willing to wait awhile (my C compiler is due Any Day Now),
you won't have to buy one.  Also, I'll look into the screen dimming,
just to be perverse.  (Would one "merely" have a short program monitoring
the mouse and keyboard, which would twiddle with the color values after a
certain amount of time, and then reset them at the next keyboard/mouse
activity?  I know how that kind of thing is done on the 8-bit line...)

   On another topic... perhaps that monitor with the built-in disk
drive actually functions as a bulk diskette eraser (:-).  Actually the
IBM PC I`m using right now has two floppy drives immediately under the
extremely static-y (staticky?) monitor, and I don't have any problems
with it-- and if IBM can do it, *surely* Atari can! (:-)

 - Joel Plutchak
   uucp: {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!oyster
   ARPA: uwvax!uwmacc!oyster@rsch.wisc.edu