Z4648252@SFAUSTIN.BITNET (Z4648252) (08/21/89)
Hello everyone,
I just returned from the World of Atari show at Dallas and, from a
user's point of view who bought over $300.00 worth of goodies, it was
fantastic. If there is an Atari Fest in your area, you owe it to yourself
and your developers to attend.
Meeting the ST gurus, programmers, and developers is a treat. Everyone
which I met demonstrated patience, in spite of the constant crowds, and were
more than eager to discuss modifications complete with the hows, whys and
why nots.
One program utility disk which I purchased and am so impressed with
that I'm barely able to contain myself is DC Utilities by Double Click.
There have already been ample reviews and mentions of this disk so I'm not
going to sum it up. However, I do wish to praise one program and rate it
as a "must have". On the disk is a program named DCSQUISH. Basically, it
'squishes' any executable program, saves a copy of the original, and gives
you an executable squished copy back. Disk space savings appear to average
about twenty percent with some squished files being much higher in savings.
I have saved 800k of disk space in my C partition, if that is an indicator
of savings. Time of execution of the squished program? It is FAST. On
my Mega2 ST with original Mega roms (1.2), I noticed that Flash, executed
from floppy, came up one second QUICKER.
Again, nothing but praise for this program and my thanks and
congratulations to Double Click for such a utility.
Another product which I am now wooing over is Turbo 1.6. It does
everything that you have heard. I booted up WordPerfect, loading in a
four paged file. My Mega, of course, has the blitter. Doing a down arrow
scroll, it took the Mega without Turbo 1.6 to reach the end of the document
in 23 seconds. Installing Turbo 1.6 gave me a time of 21 seconds. Without
the blitter but with Turbo, the time was 27 seconds. With both turned
off, well.........forget it. Wasn't even worth timing!
Turbo 1.6 gives such an improvement and approaches the blitter in
performance that I don't really see the need for the purchase of the
chip. This is from my impressions as a user and I know nothing about
what is going on behind the scenes of the blitter. However, Turbo 1.6
"has arrived". It is a product worthy of purchase and even for the Mega,
makes a substantial improvement.
World of Atari is a great opportunity for the user. I hope that if
any other Atari Fest occurs and it is reachable by you, then by all means
go. Meeting and talking with the programmers gives one a great appreciation
of the products used and indeed, you will feel as if you, as the user,
are part of the process.
Larry Rymal in East Texas <Z4648252@SFAUSTIN.BITNET>