c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young (WHY)) (11/30/87)
<Lions and tigers and... line-eaters?!?> More news tidbits! This past weekend (Thanksgiving), I talked to a friend of mine, who is a dealer, and I found some things out. The new version of pc-Ditto, which works with monochrome, is out. It was shipped last week, and should hit the stores (and theatres near you) soon. This store where my friend works will be one of the first to receive the Atari laser printer (should be next week). They are going to be... (get this)... $1900! Wow! What an economical price! :-) This dealer told me that the only good purpose for them will be to help persuade his customers to buy the $1400 Epson laser printers he carries ($1900 with extra Meg and a half, plus some other stuff). He also says that the $5000 repair kits have changed. Now it depends first on what type of dealer you are. His plan with Atari is, they call him every 60 days and ask him what parts, computers, printers, etc. he has in the store for repair, and they send him complete hardware and swap the good for the bad. Well, I bought Word Perfect! In the first fifteen minutes, I found two bugs. First, I locked up the program when I loaded a non-ASCII file (at least, I think that's what the problem was). The second time, I found that the text cursor in monochrome was always a line above the actual text. My dealer friend says that resizing the window a few times can also mess up WP's idea of page margins. Another dealer I know says that, apparently, WP Corp. never tested WP in monochrome, so most of the bugs only show up then. Accord- ing to him, if you don't use the mouse at all in monochrome, you should be okay. It's great, I can use the documentation for weight-training. :-) Music Construction Set (by Richard Plom of Intersect Software) is being distributed for the ST by Electronic Arts. For once, I'm impressed. This program has everything that Music Studio (ugh) had, and more. It's fully GEM-based, for one thing, as opposed to inventing its own interface. The menus all make sense, and you can design waveforms with more flexibility than on Music Studio. MCS lets you put things like vibrato into the voices, and supports MIDI as well. It also comes with a little accessory which, when activated, can load and play MCS songs in the background, while you're cheer- fully trashing your GEM Desktop. In fact, the music playing survives even changing resolutions (it's really weird to see that blank screen while the ST does that, and hear music all the time). It does crash, though, if you load a song while inside a program, or if you load one while it's still playing another one. Alas! that I do not have even one meg in my ST! I got to see some of the CyberMate demos and now I really would like to be able to run them. As an aside about pc-Ditto: yes, you can use it on a 520, and it will run Lotus 1-2-3, somewhat slowly. It also runs dBase III rather well. I also got to see the blitter in action, finally. Someone mentioned that there was a demo similar to the flying bird one, but with 5 or 6 birds. It really flies (ahem!) with a blitter. Shiny Bubbles fairly zips along! Finally, not a news-bit, but a question. Where are all the Spectrum pictures coming from? I mean, most of them seem to be digitized, but I don't think any of the digitizers out for the ST so far have software to handle that format. Do the folks have an in-house one, or a good conversion program from Amiga HAM pictures? Disclaimer: I'm not associated with \ /\ /arner the latest revision of SANITY. \/ \_/ Address: ucbvax!dorothy!c9c-eh |oung c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU \__|
Jinfu_Jinfu_Chen@cup.portal.com (12/01/87)
There is a IFF -> Spectrum translator by the author of Spectrum posted in GEnie. Also they are selling a new program to allow you use ComputerEyes to digitize pictures in over 4000 colors. I don't know if you can order the program from Antic or from Trio Engineering(the firm writes the Spectrum program). I am pretty new to the net and don't know how to post a binary file yet, otherwise I would post the IFF->Spectrum translator program here. Jinfu CHen
mikeb@hpqtdla.HP.COM (Mike Bryant) (12/01/87)
>to buy the $1400 Epson laser printers
Could you confirm this price!!!!
IS it plus taxes or with 0K RAM or something?
Over here the Epson is 1350UKpounds best price plus 15% tax.
1UKpound=$1.8 (and rising :-) )