AKISUJAR@NUSVM.BITNET ("S. Sujarittanonta") (03/10/90)
RE: PC-SPEED AND CONFIG.SYS Greg Csullog mentioned in his message on the Ref: subject "Does anyone out there want to report about Supercharger?" I got my SuperCharger which I order directly from Beta Systems Computer AG, Frankfurt/Main. During waiting for delivery I have been talking and Fax to the their Executive Vice President a few times. He sound to be a very nice guy and speak perfect English. My SuperCharger comes with Software Version 1.21 which resolved the Serial port problem (its assigned serial port as COM2) It manufac- ture by Siemens, a well establish German Electronics Firm. The workmanship is superb the plastic casing is metal plated inside (a la Macintosh casing) the PC- Board is a lot neater than my MEGA4 mother board. I temporary fitted with 8087 5MHz co-pro as the recommended 8 Mhz chip is out of stock here. Connecting it as a last chain to the Megafile 44. [ I have 3 cartriges one each for Atari, MS-Dos (Dos 4.01 is included with SuperCharger), and Macintosh format (which done by directly connecting Syquest to Mac Plus with homemande cable and format -ting with Mac CMS HD Util Version 5.53.] I tested run AutoCAD Released 10, the Intergraph MicroStation at the speed faster than when these 2 programs are run- ning on the 286 machine with 80287 co-pro. There are following problems which I doubt that they could be solved. 1) The Hercules display mode give wrong aspect ratio, the circle displays as eliptical and the AutoCAD side menu is disappeared to the right side of the screen. It require side scrolling with "/" key. 2. MicroStation uses Sentennal Pro hardware lock plugged to parallel port and need signal from pin 10 to activate. The parallel port on Atari has floating pin 10 (NC) therefore althought I have a licensed software it only work in Demo mode which shut itself off after 15 minutes from boot up time. I still could not figured out how to connect pin 10 to Yamaha chip which also function as MIDI as well as parallel controller chip. Any suggestion on this matter will be deeply appreciated. Main reason for getting SuperCharger rather than Pc-Speed is because of it Co-Pro socket as most programs that I intended to use require Co-Processor. The display is in perfect aspect ratio in CGA mode it is very clear too and with monochrome monitor it shown in grey scale. It come with a heavy transformer the air freight for 3 units cost me DM.225 due to the weight of these transformers. So far I am very happy with the Superchar- ger and prefer to run AutoCad with it than on the IBM AT. Print out also quite fast but it hard to judge as I also have the TURBO16 installed in my MEGA. Just load the Go Script, MS-DOS postscript emulator into my hard disk but have not have an opportunity to try out yet. My printer is HP LaserJet IIP with only 512K RAM. WordStar 4 run very fast too. Booting up DOS from the hard disk takes ony few seconds. I will report again if I come across anything worthwhile. Suthipuntha, School of Architecture, National University of Singapore.