moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (03/11/89)
Well, there it is, sitting on my desk and humming quietly to itself, a Mac
SE/30 (or, as I prefer to call it, an SEx -- let's see if I can start a
trend) with 4 Megs RAM and a 80 Meg internal drive. (Quantum, I belive --
the 18 msec. access time drive. I can believe it -- the thing is *fast* )
Moving from my old Mac Plus wasn't a completely painless experience, but it
hasn't been traumatic. However, there are a few things people might like to
know (and a few questions I would appreciate having answered, if you know
the answers):
1) The biggest problem, once System Software version 6.0.3 had been
installed on my Mac, was that the old Cirrus 40M tape drive we have no
longer works with the SEx. More specifically, the software (RainyDay --
what a prophetic name!) hangs. This isn't too surprising, as Rainy Day
seems to be circa 1987; however, I have ~120 Megs of PD software stored
on those tapes, and I can't access it from my new whiz-bang machine.
And LaCie has discontinued both tape drive and RainyDay.
Soooooo... I'm spending this weekend dumping things from tape on my Mac
Plus, moving it to my old Dataframe 20, then attaching both to the SE/30
and re-archiving the stuff with either DiskFit or Redux. BTW, if anyone
has any opinions on what software to buy for archiving software to tape,
I'd appreciate hearing them. One of the nice things about RainyDay was
that it allowed you to store multiple "volume backups" (i.e. where the
entire drive or partition is copied to tape, instead of individual files
-- much faster) onto a single tape. Most tape backup systems I've seen
allow only one volume per tape. I remember a MacWeek article about some
new archiving system that archives onto just about any medium -- one
that has gotten a lot of good advance word-of-mouth; however, they were
talking about a list price of around $200, which is a bit rich for my
blood (have to see what MacConnection would sell it for...).
2) Games. On the good side, Tetris works, and that's all that counts to me.
On the other hand, a *lot* of games don't work, or more likely partially
work. Falcon runs quickly and smoothly, but it has horrendus flickering
of the main display (this is Falcon 2.0, btw), which makes it almost
unplayable. Question: does this occur when playing Falcon on a Mac II
or IIx? I've heard a rumor that MacConnection doesn't recommend Falcon
for the Mac II -- haven't checked though. Other games that have
problems: PT-109 runs smoothly, but no sound will play! The sound menu
is grayed out. I haven't tried out Sub Battle Simulator, but it's so
close to PT-109 that I suspect it may have the same problems (however, I
note that there is a Sub Battle Simulator version for the Mac II.
Perhaps an upgrade will be possible...).
[I should mention that this is with all sorts of cdevs and inits shut
off, thanks to my new, legal version of Aask. And the RAM cache is
off, too.]
Finally, started up Apache Strike and got the old, familiar "something's
in high memory, bucko, so we aren't working" message. I haven't tried
Dark Castle or Dark Castle II yet, but I'd bet I'll see similar
problems. Major coincidence: Charlie Jackson, president of Silicon
Beach, was in Seattle showing off Digitial Darkroom (*drool*) and
SuperCard (*DROOL*), and after his talk I got a few minutes talking with
him in the back. When I mentioned that Apache Strike wouldn't run on
the SEx, he groaned and said he thought they'd fixed this problem in
6.0.2. He suspected that the problem of 6.0 and 6.0.1 loading something
into high memory had been repeated in 6.0.3, but that he didn't know,
and that S.B. wasn't going to mess around with these programs to get
them to work around the high memory problem. "You'd think they'd notice
this problem in Apple's System Software division," he said, "since they
play Dark Castle down there all the time."
Anyone else running either 6.0.3 or with an SEx seeing similar problems?
Maybe I've been virus-infected (ack! ack!). I note that Apache Strike
is up to version 1.1 -- maybe I'm still running 1.0. Oh, well...
Haven't tried yet: Lode Runner, Trust and Betrayal, Balance of Power
(the old version), Smash Hit Raquetbal, Gato, and various PD games (I
have few hopes for running Continuum on the SEx). I'll let you know
what I find out next week....
3) Weird font problem. I had one shareware font, Beverly Hills, which
really acted up under the SEx. I had it stored seperately in font file,
accessed by Suitcase II; whenever I opened a document using Beverly
Hills, however, the document would be unreadable -- characters all
overwriting one another with huge blank spaces in between. Changing the
fonts to any other font name would make the text look normal (this was
under FullWrite Professional). Using Font Harmony on all my font files,
and eventually loading them all into the System File didn't solve the
problem.
In deux et machina style, though, my Beverly Hills upgrade I ordered a
month ago showed up the next day, and the new version fixed the bug. I
am curious, however, if anyone knows what the problem might have been.
Funny FONDs?
-----
Outside of that, though, the SEx is wonderful. HyperCard hardly delays at
all; FullWrite is completely usable, speed-wise (however, upgrading everyone
to a 68030 processor is NOT the right solution, as two corporate
salespeople, one from Ashton-Tate and the other from Apple hinted at
yesterday). The only disappointment is that I keep expecting VersaTerm
would run faster than 2400 baud... Quiet, stays cool, and the sound is
amazing. I do a lot of sound digitization, and I always re-sampled sound
down to 11 kHz on the Mac Plus, because it was tough to tell the difference
between 22 kHz and 11 kHz on the Plus speaker. You can tell on the SEx
speaker -- 11 kHz makes me wince. I'll have to re-digitize a lot of things
(probably in stereo, though the SEx speaker only plays mono; however, I've
got some stereo Sony headphones plugged into the SEx stereo jack). And the
software (including all my INITs, believe it or not) run fine. Pretty
impressive, all in all...
And no, I'm not sorry that I didn't wait for a IIcx. I knew about it when
the SEx came out, but decided that I neither wanted nor needed color or
multiple slots at this time -- and could add them on later if I felt like
it. It's a nice box, though; I imagine that the main sellers in six months
will be the Mac SE and the IIcx, with the Mac IIx and the SEx somewhere
below those.
Home, massive archiving and a lot of video rentals await....
"She used to be a superstar -- now she works for
you. Life can be cruel."
---
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
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