ewhac@well.UUCP (04/23/87)
[ "All these black people are screwing up my democracy." -- Ian Smith ] Our news feed at the WELL apparently was having problems, then made up for it by dumping a ton of news at us. I just finished getting through about 400 articles. I'd like to update you on my status, and why locals haven't seen me in my cape of late. But first, a few replies to some past articles: > >From: fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) > > CONTENTS OF DISK 66 > ------------------- > Melt Another display hack from the master himself... > Includes source. > Author: Leo Schwab > No, Fred. As pleased as I am for having generated inspiration for eye-candy across the Net, I can't take credit for another's work. Melt was written by Stephen Coy. Another error I've been meaning to correct you on is the source of "Sproing" on one of the earlier disks. You attribute it to me. Not true. Someone else hacked "Oing" to include sound. The name of this person escapes me. > >From: spencer@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Randy Spencer) > Subject: Re: AMIGA 2000 and IBM compatability > > Sorry to pick on you Leo, you were just the last to post about my message. > But while I have your attention, where does one purchase: > } ________ ___ > } \ /___--__ > } ___ ___ /\ ---##\ > } / X \_____ | __ _---)) > } / /_\-- -----+==____\ // \ _ > }___ ( o---+------------------O/ \/ \ > } \ / ___ \_ (`o ) > } ____ \___/ \_/ > } Recumbent Bikes: > > I see the .signature file all the time, but I never see bike stores that > sell them. I don't even see people riding them, but I hear they are: > } The _O_n_l_y Way To Fly! > I get this all the time. The recumbent I ride is manufactured by a company called Rans Products in Hays, Kansas. Mine is the Rans Stratus, and costs $775 assembled (sort of; UPS won't ship it *fully* assembled), $440 for a painted-frame kit. Phone number is (913) 625-6346. It is unfortunate that more bike stores don't sell recumbents. I've owned mine for about four years, and would never go back. Strangely enough, a lot of bike stores will *service* recumbents (at least mine, anyway), since they use mostly generic parts (apart from the frame, seat, and handlebars). Note: I have no connection with Rans Products, other than they give me recumbent bicycle parts in exchange for money. > >From: kinner@wsucshp.UUCP (Bill Kinnersley ) > Subject: Re: New IBMs? Amiga runs circles... > > I can envision at a future time somebody allocating a background > bitmap, rendering (and filling) the ellipse in the background by the > most efficient method available, then blitting (ClipBlitTransparent?) > the resultant ellipse into the target area. I would assume that the > result would be faster than the writepixel-per-dot than is now done? > > Great! Then maybe someone can teach Intuition to do its window rendering > into portholes. (Could bols ewhacs give us a demo of this sometime?) > Oh, great. Someone *else* who wants me to clip against a circle :-). (You see, there's this friend of mine who, upon my finishing a general-purpose windowing/drawing package for a dumb graphics terminals at school, uttered, "Great. Now make it clip against an arbitrary polygon." He'll learn...) > >From: grr@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (George Robbins) > Subject: Re: The Next Amiga > > BTW, do you have any ideal how long overdue the Zilog Z80,000 32 bit processor > and Z8070 16/32 bit FPU are now? "Real Soon Now" -> years**2 > Oh, *I* remember that thing. Wasn't that announced back in 1982 along with the Z800? I thought that project died a slow and painful death. > >From: keithd@cadovax.UUCP > Subject: Re: Vsprite stuff > > I don't know if it is a VSPRITES or a hardware problem, but I have noticed > an odd anomaly related to sprites. > > If I run oing, the bouncing ball-sprites program by Leo, and then go > into preferences and move my screen over to the left, one of the sprites > will break up and spread out vertically all over the screen. I've never > gotten around to trying it on other machines, so I don't know if it > is specific to mine or not. > Display shifting via Preferences is done by telling the display hardware to start fetching bitplane data earlier on the scanline (which causes the screen to shift to the left). It is possible to cause display fetch to occur so early that it will overlap the sprite data fetch. Where display data fetch and sprite data fetch collide, display data fetch wins. Thus, for overscan (i.e. 'morerows') or heavily left-shifted displays, sprite DMA can be adversely affected. Personally, I just twiddle the monitor's horizontal positioning control :-). > >From: fdfishman@watcgl.UUCP > Subject: Rapid Stimulus Displaying on the Amiga Help > > Now on a personal note, Leo posted a program called ing to the net awhile ago > which required a program heapmem.o to compile, what is heapmem and where could > I find a copy of it. > Heapmem.o is where Manx keeps all the UN*X-compatible memory allocation functions (a la malloc(), calloc(), etc.). It lives in their 'lib' directory. Lettuce most likely has their malloc() stuff in lc.lib. -------- Now for the new stuff. Lately, I haven't been attending local meetings in my cape. I keep having to explain this to people, so I thought I'd abuse the net one more time and explain myself one *last* time. Every possible medical calamity that could befall me has done so in the past three weeks. 8703.31, I dislocated my kneecap (don't ask me how; it's embarrassing), and was promptly stuck in a cast. Soon after that, I developed what the doctor called "H-flu" which caused me a severe sore throat. He put me on an antibiotic to knock it out. A week later, I had an allergic reaction to the antibiotic, and woke up one morning with a rash covering my entire body (underneath the cast, too). Fortunately, the sore throat and rash are gone, and the cast is coming off Monday. But during that time, I haven't been feeling well. In fact, you might say that I haven't been feeling myself lately. Since I was feeling like someone else, I decided not to wear the cape. Employment: I've been hired. I currently work for Dan Gorlin Productions (current product is "Airheart" for the Apple ][e; we're porting it to the Atari ST; no Amiga plans currently). Wouldn't you know it: The day after I was hired, I got all sorts of calls asking if I wanted to work for someone or was interested in marketing anything I might write through their company. I'm still very uncertain as to whether or not I like this job, so further job offers are not being ignored. Besides, I like the attention. Keep it up, please! Miscellany: Has someone formed a Leo Schwab Appreciation Society? Over the past few weeks, I've gotten a couple of calls out of the blue from remote corners of the U.S. who were just calling to say thank you for all the weird display hacks. I can't tell you how good this makes me feel. I do this mostly for fun, and it makes me very happy when others have fun, too. My profuse thanks for your kind response. I also worked out a new acronym for BCPL: "British Compiler Programmers are Lousy." (Apologies to the european audience.) Given that I'm working now, display hacks from me may not be forthcoming for a while. But I promise, I'll get something bizarre going. I also plan to play with sound a bit, too... Oh, yes. One final, totally unrelated thing. I hear tale that the one and only -=RJ Mical=- is now a father. Apparently, his wife gave birth to a baby boy Tuesday. How 'bout that? Assuming I can stay out of the hospital, I'll be back to myself by the next FAUG meeting. As always, I remain... _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ ________ ___ Leo L. Schwab \ /___--__ The Guy in The Cape ___ ___ /\ ---##\ ihnp4!ptsfa!well!ewhac / X \_____ | __ _---)) ..or.. / /_\-- -----+==____\ // \ _ well ---\ ___ ( o---+------------------O/ \/ \ dual ----> !unicom!ewhac \ / ___ \_ (`o ) hplabs -/ ("AE-wack") ____ \___/ \_/ Recumbent Bikes: The above opinions don't The _O_n_l_y Way To Fly! reflect my employer's.
keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle) (04/25/87)
In article <2927@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes: > Our news feed at the WELL apparently was having problems, then made Speaking of the Well, does anyone know the latest on Captain Crunch? Did he get out of that counterfeit BART ticket pinch and get his gear back? Or is he breaking rocks on some island somewhere? > It is possible to cause display fetch to occur so early that it will >overlap the sprite data fetch. Where display data fetch and sprite data >fetch collide, display data fetch wins. Thus, for overscan (i.e. >'morerows') or heavily left-shifted displays, sprite DMA can be adversely >affected. > > Personally, I just twiddle the monitor's horizontal positioning >control :-). Yeah, but you can't do that on videotape. Stuff just comes out too much to the right on everybodies TVs. I guess no one knows what 'centered' means in NTSC, I never got any response there. > Miscellany: Has someone formed a Leo Schwab Appreciation Society? >Over the past few weeks, I've gotten a couple of calls out of the blue from >remote corners of the U.S. who were just calling to say thank you for all >the weird display hacks. I can't tell you how good this makes me feel. I >do this mostly for fun, and it makes me very happy when others have fun, >too. My profuse thanks for your kind response. Yeah, I have to agree, your little hacks have been the most fun of anything I've seen out there. I was over at a friends house a couple of weeks ago, going through my PD disks to see if he wanted any of the latest net utilities etc. and he saw 'robotroff' on a disk. "What's robotroff do" he said, and I just kinda said "oh, nothin' much" and quickly changed the subject. Later, I slipped robotroff onto his main boot disk when he wasn't looking (put it in the :s directory, named it 'date' and put it in his startup-sequence as :s/date). It was real late, and he never rebooted that night after I left. I heard about it two days later when he called up with a message on my answering machine "alwright Doyle!, what the hell are these little aliens doing with my pointer!". He had looked around for something fishy on his boot disk, but naming it 'date' completely fooled him. "You wanted to know what robotroff did!" I said. Lotsa laughs. Thanx again Leo. Keith Doyle # {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax}!trwrb!cadovax!keithd # cadovax!keithd@ucla-locus.arpa