The Rainbow Vol. 09 No. 01 - August 1989 - TRS-80 Color ...

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memory. Wh at's the nex t step in the evolution of Multi-Mentt? ·'Multi Tnnls. which lets yo u create buttons and scroll bars," Alphonso sa id . "''ll probably add thi s capability to Multi-Menu. but I may release it as a separate package you can integrate with Multi Menu. " If I make it a se parate package, I'll inclu de all the things needed to build a completely mouse-driven inte1face,'' he said, " including automatic dialog boxes and an automatic method to open and read or write to a file selec ted from a I ist of files presented in a dialog box simi Jar to the Macintosh standard file dialog." Alphonso believes there 's a speed problem with Multi-Vue. noting that the time required to update the mouse pointer drags clown the system a bit. But he had n' t seen the new GShell+ module. whi ch was enhanced by the OS-9 Users Group. What else does Alpha Software se ll ? "Le,·el II T nnls is a group of programs that does a number of things I' ve always needed to clo." Alph onso said. " It gives yo u wild card commands to efficientl y move files around . There's a set of tree di spl ay commands that give yo u a visual ass ist when yo u are tryin g to find a file. You can li st an entire directory and actuall y break out any fi le. " The OS-9 Lerel/1 BBS Release 3 .0 is Alphonso's most popular program. "We have more than I 00 people using it,'' he sa id . Ou r users are spread throughout the country and Canada. We're busy now setting up a support group fo rthe board. Mike Camera will take charge of the new service. Not all of hi s customers. are usin g it to run a pub lic bulletin board. A few are using it as a pri vate E-Mail system. Some even use it as a menu to run their own OS-9 app lications. "Most people reall y li ke it. '' Alphonso sa id. "Especiall y the people who prefer OS-9. I' ve had a few people who don ' t know a lot about OS-9 a1icl have had troubl e running it. Others said it forced them to run OS-9." Did he have to overcome any techni ca l problems whil e writing it? ''We II . there was the carrier-detec t problem,'' he said. "The AC I APAK driver has thi s capability built in. but it doesn't always wo rk quite right." Alphonso wrote a routine th at ki ll s any process started by the parent if carri er detect is lost. It also took him a whil e to solve the baud-rate detection problem. The program now se ts itse lf up fo r 1200-baud operation and wa its for a use r to press the ENTER key. Depending on what OS-9 returns. it sw itches the speed up or down. Alp honso was able to te ll which direc- 124 THE RAINBOW August 1989 ti on to sw itch the speed to because one speed ret urn s an arrow, the other returns a junk charac ter. He checks thi s character, then resets and goes. If nothin g happens in four seconds. he resets and goes back to 1200 baud. A pub I ic doma in version of Gala tic Cnnflict . a game first published in THE RAINBOW in November, 1986, is now bundl ed with BBS Release 3 .0. It was translated to BAS IC09 by John Sebella and Melvin Gaskins of Hobart, Indi ana. Hyper-Tech - Another Rising Star Keith Alphonso wasn't th e on ly yo ung man at RAINBOWfest, Chicago determined to capture a piece of the pie crea ted by OS - 9's increased popularity. We were also pleased to meet and interview Eri c Cri chl ow ( HYPERTE on DEL PHI) and hi s fri end Chester Simpson. Eri c, 17 and Chester, 19, teamed up with Mike Haa land to form Hyper-Tech in June of 1988. Together, the trio plans to introd uce several exc iting new OS-9 products in the near future. C ri chl ow's labo r of love is Shel/mate, a $25 program that em ul ates the popular hands-free fil e management techniques of the Mac intosh and Ami ga on an OS-9 stage. It's used to copy, delete, move and rename f iles. It can also li st files. print them or di splay pictures from them - even arc and de-arc them. "Shel/mate lets yo u perform essentially every operation you could ever want." Crichl ow sa id. " It's especiall y handy when you need to move a large number of files and want to do it with ve ry few keystrokes or mouse moves. When I' m through I hope Shel/mate will have everything Multi-Vue has built into it-and much more. Besides, it's my fi rst C program . .. ev,e rythin g I learn will go into constant upd ates of the program. So how did Hyper-Tech get started? "We felt the Color Computer 3 offered an amazin g amount of potenti al no one was explorin g under RS-DOS or OS-9,'' Cri chl ow sa id. "We fe lt the on ly way to do anything to help the CoCo reach its potential was to write some programs ou rselves." By thi s tim e, Chester was already proficient with assembl y language programming under RS-DOS. Mike and Eri c were starting to learn C. Cheste1· was already workin g on graphi cs and animation programs under RS-DOS. Chester began to design a graphi cs and animat ion development system. Mike started talking to di stri butors and learn ed there was a big demand for easy an imation programs. Chester's passion became a major projec t. Chester's OS-9 product is so youn g it doesn't even have a name. An RS -DOS version already on the market is ca lled Jnwgemaster. JmagemastN runs on a 128K system and ed its 64-by-64 pi xel graph ics images th at can be used to create grap hi cs images fo r autom ati on sequences. Eri c and Mike wa nt to do many thin gs . "Tandy and Microware gave us much power and opportunity in the OS-9 Level I I windowing system. Hard ly anyone has clone anything with it," Crichl ow said. "We wa nt to do things with Multi-Vue win dows that most people think are impossible.'' For example? "Graphics! Me nu s' A clipboard standard," Cri chl ow sa id. I' m also attempting to set up windows yo u can move and resize. I fi gure it can do it th e same way Multi- Vue does. If you cli ck on the menu ba r, but not on a se lec ti on. it will know yo u are ask ing to move the window." How will he do it? 'Til dei ni z the window and give yo u a box the same size as your original window . Then. after yo u move the box and res ize it. I' II read the parameters of the box aga in and open a window the size yo u want at the locati on yo u req ues t. In th e meantime, I will have saved a buffer wit h all the data that was in your wi nd ow ori ginall y. After I crea te the new window. I'll write it back out aga in. MVCanvas Promises Speed a nd Ease MVCam·as is another Hyper-Tech product that lurks on the immediate horizon. In fact. it may be available by the time you read thi s column. " We plan fo r MVCanms to be j ust as fun cti onal as any RS-DOS pai nt program - bar none," Simpson said. " It will also be just as quick. You' ll be able to access a popup menu th at hold s all of the draw in g tools from the menu bar at the top of your sc reen. Thi s means you' ll have th e entire screen free fo r yo ur arti sti c masterpiece," he sa id. "MVCc/17\ 'C/S is an intelligent program.'' Mike grabs a piece of the screen and holds it in a buffer, then uses a Mulli-Vue ca ll to make the buffer hi s pointer. Thi s lets Multi- Vue handle moving the image around the sc reen. MVCanms also supports large fonts. While Mike works on the program , Chester is creatin g the new fonts- rang in g from 8by-8 to 24-by-32 pixels using lmagemaker. It was th e impress ive speed of MVCan ,·as that prodded Chester to make the move to OS-9. To him , speed is everything. Simpson is presentl y workin g on a graphics program that can transport im ages back and forth between RS-DOS an d OS-9 programs. He hopes to be ab le to save an image to the OS-9 clip board. transfer it to an RS DOS disk and then load it into lmagemaker
-or vice versa. The beta version of MVCanvas I received May 5th had the font capabilities installed. You could also load and save clips and manipulate them. It also has an Undo feature command at the top of its edit menu. Just think, they told Mike it couldn't be done. Hyper-Tech had not yet announced the price of MVCanvas during RAlNBOWfest. The first people to hear about the new program will most likely be people who check into DELPHI or CIS. Hyper-Tech plans to post a demo there as soon as the program is ready for release. After they release Shell mate and MVCanvas, Eric, Chester and Mike hope to do a lot with integrated Multi-Vue windows and graphics packages. Disto4-in-1 Board with RGB Hard Disk Chris Rochon's wife, Johanne, gave birth to a beautiful baby daughter earlier this year. At RAINBOWfest the couple's company, CRC Computers, gave birth to another great OS-9 product. The new 4-in-1 card, designed by RAIN BOW 's Tony DiStefano is an answer to the Multi-Pak hater's dream. When you add this plug-in card to your Disto Super Controller II, you can throw away your Multi Pak Interface. With this combination you have a floppy disk controller that does not halt the processor when it's reading to or writing from the disks; a real-time clock; a Centronics parallel port; an RS-232 p01t able to work with Tandy's AC I APAK drivers; and a hard disk interface able to communicate with either an SASI or SCSI disk controller. You're in business! I kept my Multi-Pak because I use the 512K RAM disk card, also designed by DiStefano and sold by CRC. This outboard RAM disk is indispensable to me when I am experimenting with a C program or running the fantastic mouse-/menu-based word processor, Window Writer, from Owl Ware. The new 4-in-1 from CRC is fantastic. It comes with cables designed to plug directly into your hard disk, as well as your parallel and serial devices. All its components are rated at two megahertz, so you no longer need to slow down your CPU when you perform 1/0. Yet, the cables aren't all you receive with CRC's 4-in-1 card. You also receive OS-9 drivers for the real-time clock, parallel port, RS-232 port and the hard disk interface. And not only do the drivers come in the package, they are easy to install and work well. All you need to do to get up and running with this new card is to OS-9 a new OS9B OOT file, using the OS9Ge n utility. But, I expected the best. The drivers were written by Kevin Darling. Despite the enthusiasm, that' s only half the good news. Next month, I'll tell you how we're using the new Disto/CRC 4-in-1 card with a new SCSI controller, and drivers from Roger Krupski at RGB Computer Systems. This combination was made in heaven- especially for people who want to be able to reserve a portion of their hard disk drive for RS-DOS use. But the best thing about this combination is that it lets you boot automatically into OS-9 when you turn on the power. Again, we'll have more about this combination next month. Robert Moody's Maxie Maxie, Robert Moody's deluxe BASIC09 icon editor described in the July column, is not included this month because of magazine space limitations. However, because we want you to share our enthusiasm, the 28listings that make up Maxie are included on this month's RAINBOW ON DISK. The executable I-code modules, as well as the source code are also available for downloading from the RAINBOW ON DISK section of the DELPHI Color Computer/OS-9 Online Forums. Because Robert Moody wants to share his bag of tricks with the rest of the Color Computer Community, we will print the BASIC09 source code for Maxie over the next three issues so that you can study one short module at a time. After we've mastered the pieces, we' ll dig into the main program and see how Moody brings the total product together by excercising the smaller and shorter tools. It's amazing what people can do once you get them started. Maxie was born after Moody studied the listing of our MVShe/llast August. It 's an amazing program. In it you'll find many secrets to fully exercising the Multi-Vue menus system, getting the most out of your CoCo's mouse, and performing magic using 0S-9's GET/ PU T buffers. TCP-IP for OS-9 We ran into James Jones from Microware at RAINBOWfest Chicago and he had good news for amateur radio operators. He had just received a public domain version of Phil Kam's TCP-IP implementation from Peter Dibble. It had been written inC using the OSK (OS-9 68K) compiler. Peter received it from a German group, and promised to send me a copy. I' II try to get it in the OS-9 Users Group library. When I receive it, I'll try to put out a note on the packet radio network also. That' s it for August. I hope you're enjoying your summer and will join us again in September for more exciting OS-9 news. Until then .. . Keep On Hacking! NEVER BEFOREII INTRODUCING THE SUPER DISK Never before has there been a system like the SUPER DISK and it's companion manual. Here are it's main features: THE SNOOPER Examine ALL tracks and sec· tors of a disk, even those meant to be HIDDEN. Read, write, copy, auto-search for file starts (even multiple start addresses). Do quick hex to decimal conversions. Find SECRET data! Auto-analyze disks to discover unusual formats, and MORE! THE PROTECTOR Authors, protect your work! Use THE PROTECTOR to defeat PIRATES. The SECRET methods revealed allow you to create virtually unlimited protection schemes, including multiple level protection. Even protect BASIC programs! FORMAT PLUS Custom build your own secret disk format. (Use with THE PROTECTOR) COPY PLUS Will automatically analyze and copy virtually any disk. You'll need this to make copies of your disks made with THE PROTECTOR! THE MANUAL contains instructions to fully utilize THE SUPER DISK. Also included are facts about copy protection NEVER BEFORE published. Learn the untold truth about disk management. Authors, you've spent days, weeks , months developing commercial software. Don't Give It Awayl Protect it! THE COMPLETE SUPER DISK SYSTEM $49.00 SPORTSware SUMMER SPECIALS WARGAME DESIGNER II $24.00 WGD ICON DISK #1 14.00 INVASION NORTH 14.00 ATTACK ON MOSCOW 14.00 ROBOT COMMAND 14.00 DUNGEON WARRIOR 14.00 GHOST HUNTERS 14.00 ORC AMBUSH 14.00 ZULU REVENGE 14.00 DESERT RATS 14.00 FORT APACHE 14.00 TECH WARS 14.00 ROTC 14.00 ISLAND DOMINATION 14.00 MAIL MASTER 10.00 GRIDIRON STRATEGY 19.00 WEEKLY WINNER 2.0 15.00 NEW CATALOG ON DISK 3.00 BLACK GRID 19.00 COC03 WHEEL Revised 4/89 19.00 COC03 HINT 19.00 BIG SCREEN 12.00 FUN PACK Flipped Disk, Pegs, Flags 18.00 CC3 CRAM 12.00 CC3 FLAGS 19.00 MASTER DIR 19.00 PENINSULAR WAR 19.99 THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN 19.00 REBELS NORTH 19.00 QUATRA BRAS 19.00 VISA & MASTERCARD accepted FREE SHIPPING SPORTSware 1251 S. Reynolds Road, Suite 414 Toledo, Oh1o 43615 {419) 389-1515 August 1989 THE RAINBOW 125
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Page 80: 78 Table 1: Vendors from Microware'
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Page 133: DISTO DC-7 • Mini Disk Controller
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The Rainbow Vol. 09 No. 01 - August 1989 - TRS-80 Color ...

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