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ASK THE GURU - Apple2.Org.Za

1. Fig 2 A lle dual character generator adaptor ASK THE GURU usually a simple matter to find the screen routines in your problem code and trap out anything in the 40 5F range and subtract 40 so it becomes 00 1F instead The tearing method in my En hancing your Apple Vol I SNATCHMON VERSION 1 0 SYNERGETICS 1300 THATCHER AZ 85552 ALL COMMERCIAL RIGHTS RESERVED BEGIN AT HEX 8000 TEXT HOME VTAB 12 HTAB 7 PRINT FLASH CLEAR PRINT REM C100 CFFF GRAB POKE 32763 160 POKE 32766 44 BEFORE MOVE POKE 32768 0 POKE 63 128 REM ZERO 8000 S80FF POKE 49159 0 POKE 66 00 REM MOVE C100 SCFFF POKE 49158 0 PRINT REM D000 DFFF GRAB POKE 60 00 POKE 63 223 CALL 32763 IIE MONITOR GRABBER FOR EPROM BURNERS COPYRIGHT 1984 BY DON LANCASTER AND BOX 602 428 4073 KR KKK RK RK ERK KKK k k k k k k GOSUB 2000 MONITOR SNATCH IN PROGRESS HTAB 14 POKE 32764 00 POKE 32767 254 POKE 60 00 POKE 66 01 POKE 60 00 POKE 61 193 POKE 67 129 POKE 61 208 POKE 66 00 REM MOVE D000 SDFFF SAMS 21822 makes this super easy You can also write those people who sold you all the software but chances are they will try to sell you a new up grade rather than give you a free patch kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk TH
2. LOCK AWD SYS Fig 3 ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 promptifier patch 27 3 and his great Open Apple magazine pass on these part numbers of other television sets that include a direct linear RGB input J C Penny 2220 Magnavox RF4254WA Magnavox RG4378BK Quasar TT6290XE Quasar TT6298YW Sanyo AVM210 Sanyo 12C700 Sears 42701 Sony KV20XBR Naturally the interfacing details may vary with these other sets If you use one of these please send along your interface circuit so we can share it with other IIgs users And a question for all you IIgs people Do you want to see a Lancaster cookbook on IIgs interfacing solutions What Causes Picture Noise in the IIgs Monitor A linear RGB monitor is a wideband analog electronic system and thus is highly sensitive to any noise source of any type At the normal brightness levels in the usual room illumination any pic ture noise in the stock Apple IIgs monitor will range from totally negligible to barely observable But if you are a night person and if you try turning the monitor s contrast and the brightness down to low late evening settings you may find the picture noise and the snow to become objection able What you have done of course is reduce the signal to noise ratio in the process of reducing the brightness and contrast I have had a handfull of callers insist that this was a major defect in the Apple monitor that absolutely must be immediately
3. 4 3 Far Eastern typefonts 31 4 Finishing materials contest 24 4 Floppy disk care 19 1 Flushing copy protection 18 1 Free technical magazines 1 3 Getting inside information 5 1 Great mouse surface 17 1 Hacker foods contest 28 2 Halftone imaging 11 5 Heat transfer ink 31 4 Hewlett Packard Laser Jet 29 1 Hewlett Packard and Postscript 30 1 Hex and decimal to ASCII 18 1 Hidden grand piano 21 6 HIRES applewriter dumps 17 1 HIRES entry points 10 5 IBM and IIc file exchanges 30 2 Imageworks video card 15 4 Isometric drawing 9 4 Keyword indexer 16 3 Kroy Kolor 25 2 Kroy Kolor over Coburn 28 1 Laser printer info 2 4 Laser printing economics 28 3 Laserwriter badges 16 4 Laserwriter first impressions 6 1 Laserwriter gossip 15 1 Laserwriter gray deputrifaction 25 5 Laserwriter letterheads 20 3 Laserwriter plus 13 1 Laserwriter plus bugs 14 3 Laserwriter reference 30 1 Laserwriter rumors 11 1 Laserwriter versus Laserjet 10 3 Low cost air valves 2 1 Machine language contest 20 2 Machine language study 5 1 Macintosh disassembly 21 3 Macintosh most used graphic 23 5 ASK THE GURU Mass teleportation 26 4 USGS data bases 13 4 Meowwrrr puss de resistance 17 1 Motors for robotics 3 3 Vaporlock bugs 9 3 Multiple video monitors 24 3 Vaporlock interr
4. For a real joke check out the Scotch Binding System This one sticks to the sides of each page shingle like and is bizarre even for 3 M This is perfect bound and handles up to 25 pages I guess I m down on this system because 1 their demo fell apart in my hands and 2 120 is too much to spend on a machine that can be replaced with a short scrap of sewer pipe Winner 1 to date is the Personal Velobinder binding system This method is not a perfect binding system in that two ingenious snap in plastic strips clamp all the pages to gether The maximum limit is around 25 pages Some good looking already prepunched covers are stocked The cost is around 30 50 for a starter left sleeve 520 175 459 519 170 ct2 498 502 30 516 508 90 500 525 155 467 540 170 ct2 511 520 75 500 538 135 450 568 135 455 580 45 455 608 135 428 608 135 432 585 90 408 555 100 ct2 left hand detail 413 548 70 442 546 50 ct1 newpath kit and around a quarter for the strips and fifty cents for the covers Some tips You must use a minimum of four hands while you are punching Be ab solutely certain the punch is clear of snitzels and be sure the pages are completely set home before you punch You get only one chance to punch things correctly Blow it and your pages are lost Pages can be added or else removed at a later date For a permanant document just add a dab of PVC ABS cement to weld the pins to the strip
5. January 1987 The most used Macintosh graphic JSR 1000 3E25 Original booting link JSR 1003 1186 Get program disk back JSR 1006 11A1 Load or run program segment JSR 1009 1341 Append string JSR 100C 1366 Erase screen window JSR 100F 136E Scan keybuffer for escape JSR 1012 139D Init screen window JSR 1015 14D1 Character to screen JSR 1018 179D Hex to decimal ASCII conversion JSR 101B 1815 Diagnostic hang JSR 101E 17D1 16 bit divide u v JSR 1021 1818 Blork speaker amp clear keybuffer JSR 1024 1823 Relative cursor to absolute JSR 1027 1837 Screen help prompt JSR 102A 1842 Flagged desktop full check JSR 102D 1850 Desktop full check JSR 1030 1850 Bottom screen line prompt JSR 1033 186C Load and run desktop manager JSR 1036 187A Save screen line to 0900 buffer JSR 1039 18B4 Grab stack passed parameters JSR 103C 191D Get numeric selection JSR 103F 1A77 Hilight part or all of screen line JSR 1042 1AFC Close RAM bitmap JSR 1045 1B00 Open RAM bitmap JSR 1048 1B0B Init applications screen JSR 104B 1B2B Set change flag JSR 104E 1B34 8 bit multiply x y JSR 1051 1B4E 16 bit multiply u v JSR 1054 1B84 Move down in memory JSR 1057 1BAC Move up in memory JSR 105A 1BDF Revert to previous screen JSR 105D 1BF1 Press space to continue JS
6. Show me a New Postscript Utility For this month s Postscript utility PII show you how to make your own point rule the single most needed and most asked for Postscript end user accessory While you can use any unit of measurement you like in Postscript including inches centimeters pixels or even in furlongs But the default mea surements are always made in printers points In Postscript there are 72 points per inch compared to a real printers point which is very slightly smaller Anyway figure five shows you a ruler you can easily create These are most useful for just about any layout task that involves Postscript The actual ruler appears in figure six You may want to cut this 30 220 translate 125 rotate 2 tick one out and laminate it in plastic but printing as many copies of your own as you need is a better choice The ruler is printed dia gonally on the sheet You can then cut it out to the usual ruler shape There are two main reasons for the diagonal layout First you can print a ruler 11 inches long this way and still do so on a plain old piece of paper while using the stock Postscript letter frame device Second most Postscript speaking laser printers nor mally will not have precisely the same scale in the X and Y directions A scaling error of one to two percent is normal and is at least partially caused by paper stretch A diagonal ruler if printed on the same machine w
7. You ll also find a larger system called the Cold Knife Velobinder This binder usess heavier strips with a ratchet system to lock the two strips together The thickness is one inch maximum You can bypass the need for their 450 punching and binding machine with 5 worth of parts a drill press and some free plans I will be happy to send you Bound cost is around 40 cents plus the cost of the cover itself Winner 2 is the system I am presently using to bind my self published Ask the Guru reprints This is the new Unibind IT system that is now available through Leonards Distributors This is a perfect binding system that consists of 11 x 17 clear vinyl covers with a colored backing strip Hot glue is pre applied to the cover You put the pages into the cover and then pop the works into a toaster style machine for half a minute or so Then you whop the cover onto a cooling plate and set it aside to cool Several tips on all this 412 562 150 391 550 110 391 540 90 410 528 25 ct2 145 255 moveto 350 0 rlineto 0 455 rlineto 350 0 showpage rlineto closepath fill Fig 5b curve tracing aide concluded 30 6 ASK THE GURU Patience and close attention to detail is absolutely essen tial Be sure to thoroughly jog the pages before you begin A real mechanical jogger is almost a must Watch the centering between the top and the bottom of the pages and the oversize cover Use a spoon to sharpen the cr
8. ably will be interested in It is called Passport and instantly will let you convert almost any IIc Ile II gs file to almost any Mac file in either direction Including word pro cessor files Appleworks and even those EDASM assembly listings There are a few gotchas though The program only runs on the Mac side and then only with a Mac plus and a hard disk You also have to work with 3 5 inch disks so they can fit in the Mac drives Finally the early versions are very buggy and are prone to blowups At this writing the release of Passport is still hush hush So you ll just have to inquire through the usual sources for your copy Try out the gold channel with a R2 priority by using a password of KNOCK WURST ALA KING Five minutes beyond the deadline for last month s col umn Apple dropped the price of the LaserWriter by 1000 Naturally nobody would have the unmitigated gall to quote you the Apple list price of 4995 The Laserwriter street price is now somewhere in the 3450 area if you shop around carefully enough What is the story on the Laserwriter plus The only difference between a Laser writer and a Laserwriter plus are eight missing EPROMS These EPROMs do give you a few new and interesting fonts but the yield and the service problems on these chips has been an absolute disaster for Apple to date Since these chips are both ridiculously overpriced and in fact are undeliverable bootleg sets
9. gram to explore Postscript Are you ready for this Applewriter Ie That s right A good old Apple Ile can explore Post script far easier and far better than a Mac can at least right now at reasonable cost WPL speaks Postscript as if it were its native tounge Even bit mapped graphics are trivially includable as text files And you don t need an Appletalk connector or driver All you do is plug the RS232 output from your Ile serial card into the RS232 input on the laser printer Proof that this is far and away the best route to explore Postscript is the derogratory and underhanded name the Mac people have put on such a sneaky low tech trick They call it the etch a sketch mode We ll have lots more on the many wonders of laser print ing sometime else Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU July 1985 Disassembly aliasing A Shuffling algorithm Machine language study Getting inside information Apple II to Ile conversions ounds We are already 7 to release 5 0 This month I can use your help on something If some one calls me with an Apple question or a 6502 machine language problem I can often immediately help or else may know where to send them to get an answer But not so with all those CP M Compac Commodore 64 Timex Kaypro the Rat s Mouth Zero Atari Heath et al problems Could some of you out there clue me in to the best user groups specialty magazines that are actua
10. grays are converted to black and white dots by using a special halftone screen mask Halftone screens will pro duce a dot whose size dep ends on the gray scale at that point in the photo or video image You might want to magnify some of the ads right here in Computer Shopper to see how those dots change shape and size as the areas lighten or darken Most halftone screens are rated in dots per inch One popular traditional screen size is 120 DPI which means that there are 120 120 14 400 gray dots per square inch Screens are usually twisted to a 45 degree angle so that the dot structure is minimized Other screen angles may be used in higher quality work or for special effects The standard Laserwriter screen is a very coarse 60 DPI which explains why it looks so lousy Because the Laserwriter resolution is 300 DPI in both directions 60 DPI translates to a 5 x 5 square having a total of 25 dots As figure one shows us you can get 26 gray levels out of this screen by selectively printing or not printing each dot Which dot gets printed when is set by the dot spot function The default spot function is 1 X X Y Y a math function that starts at the middle and works its way to the edge of the 5 x 5 array Each X and Y value as mea sured from the center spot is dithered slightly so that as you get darker and darker only one new dot is picked up at a time To visualize what is hap pening here g
11. newpath 90 90 moveto 0 250 rlineto 250 0 rlineto 0 250 rlineto closepath clip clippath save snap exch def fill snap restore clear fix flush mark 10 37 sin pop repeat def mark moveto fix lineto fix curveto fix closepath fix print flush pathforall pstack flush showpage Fig 5 A Postscript fontpath utility 26 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU IIgs monitor options Postscript point ruler Die cutting with a laser Applewriter promptifier Improved IIc absolute reset May 1987 he horror story for this month involves several T readers who are having their hard disk subdirectories trashed when they were using the Copy IT Plus utilities Apparently this is rather well plowed ground There definitely have been major defects in earlier versions of this code which supposedly have been fixed in current releases Central Point Software who are the suppliers of Copy I does have a quite low cost Apple Hgs VIDEO OUT DB15 male Red Video Red Ground Green Video A Green Ground 00000 Blue Video Blue Ground Comp Sync Doo Ground 00 Sound Ground Cable Shield RGB Enable Sound Enable and a very aggressive upgrade program If you are using hard disks with this software be certain you do have the latest version and call them with any futher problems Adobe Systems the Post script people have a new and free set of Postscript Devel oper Gu
12. showpage end of listing Fig 2B The rest of Meowwrrr 17 4 best magazine specifically for personal publishing was Tony Bove s Desktop Publishing This has since gone big time as Publish It is now put out by the PC World people There are two free house organs you ll most definitely want to pick up One of these is Colophon which is edited by Adobe Systems This gem has far and away the most outstanding examples of laser printing art available today The second freebie house organ has to be both the most fantastic and the most bizarre magazine ever published any where It is called U amp LC and is published by the Internat ional Typeface people You are supposed to sound like a commercial artist or art director when you request your free copy Three trade journals that I have found rather useful are Printing Impressions Paper Film and Foil Converter and Electronic Publishing How can I have Two Monitors in a Ile Here s another question that keeps coming up over the help line To recap That so called enhanced Ile mon itor is incapable of running much of the older H and early Ile software Worse yet the dealer doing your upgrade will try to steal your existing monitor and character gen erator ROMs from you when the upgrade is done I have shown you one solution in a previous column What you can do is program a double wide 27128 EPROM for each of the CD and EF monitor ROMs
13. the accumulator Then OPICK ASL A TAX LDA ADDFILE X PHA LDA PHA RTS ADDFILE 1 X Double pointer and move to index Get HIGH address byte and shove on stack Get LOW address byte and shove on stack Return to option Important Addresses in the address file must all be ONE LESS THAN the intended option address Fig 3 A forced subroutine return option picker Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU June 1985 E T watching Apple Ie upgrade A Softalk replacement Dual character generator Applewriter triple header ee Toto I don t think we are in Kansas any more My are there ever a lot of you out there The helpline phone has lit erally been ringing off the hook And mostly with in telligent and well thought out questions And amazingly some of them are even solv able one way or another As a reminder I am some what of an Apple freak and an assembly language person so the further you stray from the way the truth and the light the fewer and the man gier the rabbits I can pull out of the hat To join in the fun write or call per the box at the end Calling is better than writing and best calling times are 8 5 Mountain Standard time This month s news item is super important What is The Real Word On The Apple Ile upgrade Firstoff this is not an up grade at all It is a lateral arabesque If you have had your Ile for a while and if you
14. 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 6 Verify 5937 5A2E per the above code Verify 5A2F 3A 51 7C 50 7 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 2 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Scrunchifier patch 21 2 question consider this If the machine does not immed iately blow up with a misused password then there has to be some method of circum venting the password use In which case that password accomplishes nothing useful in the first place Here s the horror story It turns out Apple was much too zealous in all their password protection on the Laserwriter If you do forget your pass word or if someone else un knowingly or else maliciously changes it or if some system software blows up in the worst possible way then your Laserwriter will self destruct Screw up your password and you first have to swap the internal computer board out at a cost of nearly 1000 Then you have to send many of your downloadable fonts back to the software house where they will be physically exchanged only once The bottom line Mess up your password and you are out 1000 three weeks time and some utterly unbelievable hassles Say you wanted to do in a quick copy service chain that rents Laserwriters In half a morning s time you could easily cause them 50 000 in damage and shut them down for three weeks or more The solution First leave your Laserwriter password at the default value Any attempt whatsoever to change it wi
15. 14 2 Apple RAMcard snooper 20 1 Apple resources 29 2 Apple rumors mongered 16 1 AppleTalk vs 9600 baud 28 2 Applesloth printusing 32 3 Appleworks slot 2 IIgs bug 31 5 Appleworks utilities 23 3 Appleworks virtual memory 21 3 Applewriter booting tricks 8 5 Applewriter clock access 19 4 Applewriter 47K limit fixes 32 2 Applewriter Ile stretchifier 2 2 Applewriter IIgs modem use 30 3 Applewriter IIgs patches 25 3 Applewriter 2 1 stretchifier 23 4 Applewriter creepifier 24 2 Applewriter fast boot 29 3 Applewriter nullifier 20 2 Applewriter scrunchifier 21 5 Applewriter swallowifier 22 4 Applewriter triple header 4 5 Applewriter tweedlifier 26 5 ASCII control commands 12 3 Bar codes 10 2 BASIC program editing 8 1 Bezier curves 8 3 Binding systems survey 30 4 Cassette tape reliability 1 3 Commodore integrated circuits 7 5 Copy protected monitor 12 3 Cubic splines 8 2 Curve tracing 13 4 Curve tracing with Postscript 30 7 Index Index Customer complaints 9 2 Desktop publishing secrets 17 2 Desktop publishing tools 29 5 Diablo daisywheel stuff 2 1 Diablo 630 emulation 6 5 Die cutting 27 4 Digital image processing 15 3 Disassembly aliasing 5 4 Dual Ile character generator 4 1 Dual Ile monitor 17 5 Educational software sales 6 1 E T watching
16. 2600 when the printer was bundled with a Mac a hard OOOO O0O00O O 00 OO00O O 00000 OO OO00O OO O000O0 OOO OO0O0O 0O 00000 O 00800 OO O0O00O OO O000O0 O o9 OO ee e O disk and a CAD package But you should beware of prices that are hundreds of dollars under dealer cost The odds are pretty good that they will find someway to make it up somehow And guess who pays All of which tells us that there is now virtually no cost advantage to all those gutless imitation Laserwriters that are chronically unable to give you full page graphics can not handle large type sizes and do not have a powerful 0O0O O0000 D COe 0CO O 00800 OOO O000O0 O O0 OO OOOO OO00O 00 OOO00O 0000 OO00O C O O00900 OOO0O0O OO000O O O O O O O O O O O O00 ee e e O O e e O O e e O 00800 OO000 Figure One Stock 60 line Laserwriter screen gives 26 grey levels but has a very grainy sunday funnies look 11 1 and standard typesetting lan guage built in Speaking of which Adobe Systems the Postscript peo ple now have two fine books available These texts largely replace the older and hard to get Inside Laserwriter Addison Weseley publishes both of them These are the Postscript Reference Manual and the Postscript Tutorial and Cookbook I do have a few extra copies of these on hand here The Laserwriter also made Infoworld s product of the year award By the
17. Appletalk or 9600 Baud Why 9600 Baud of course Why else would I ask such a stupid question In theory Appletalk should be roughly 25 times faster than standard 9600 baud serial data transmission In reality the current software and use protocols can hopelessly crip ple AppleTalk to the point where 9600 baud is faster Figure one shows proof I ve taken two identical files from my Postscript Show and Tell and run one of them at 9600 baud on a Ile and the other over AppleTalk on a Mac As you can see the Ie at 9600 baud is significantly faster than AppleTalk on a Mac The IIgs is even faster To get your 9600 speedup though it is very important that the de facto baud rate is also remotely near 9600 baud Some telecomm programs are written so cumbersomely re quire so much disk access and execute so slowly that their actual transmission rate is ridiculously slower The worst offender in this sort of thing is MacTerminal It is so slow as to be totally useless The effective baud rate of Applewriter is around 7800 Baud in the 9600 mode but this can be very greatly improved by using the IIgs We ll note in passing that the Laserwriter lets you run at 57600 baud so I will eventually let you know what the ultimate transmission speed will be What does all this prove Well this conclusively proves that 1 An Apple Ie is much faster than a Macintosh that 2 you should always beware of people bearing b
18. BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 47F7 20 5D 46 Change 47F7 20 62 46 5 Verify the above change 6 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 5 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Creepifier patch 24 3 ASK THE GURU Applewriter right margin you want but set the printer card to an infinite or at least much wider right margin Tell me About the 5 Toner Cartridge Reloads The toner cartridges used in both the Laserwriter and the Laserjet laser printers cost nearly 100 each and are only good for 2500 copies giving you an operating toner cost of around four cents per page Yet you can easily reload these cartridges up to six or more times by using a three minute process that costs 5 and needs no special tools If you are an owner of a laser printer you ll gain dra matically lower toner costs while at the same time pro ducing much blacker images These blacker images result first because the cartridgewill not get up to full blackness until after the second or third reload and second because the refill toner is most often a much denser black than the original If you do not own a laser printer this could be an in teresting and most profitable sideline business for you since toner cartridge refills can easily be resold for up to 19 each Fig 6 Add this hole to the fresh toner tank top Fig 7 Add this hole to
19. Grab the LOW address byte and shove it on the stack Then RTS Viola Should you have jumped to the option picker code you end up jumping to your new address If instead you have JSRed to your option picker May 1985 code as a subroutine then you ll end up JSRing to your option This method is consistent fairly fast and short It also bypasses a bug in the jump indirect code in early 6502 s It does this by eliminating any need for indirect jumps There s two very important gotchas The addresses MUST get shoved on the stack HIGH BYTE first and LOW BYTE second Also the addresses in the address table must all be ONE LESS THAN the inten ded addresses The reason for this is that the RTS on a 6502 goes one beyond the address on the stack when returning from a subroutine With the code shown the addresses go into the table frontwards or high byte first If you put the addresses in the usual 6502 position page or low hi form be sure that you end up shoving the high byte onto the stack first Where do I get Information On Laser Printers Apple has a brand new 75 Inside Laserwriter notebook This does include a thorough discussion of Postscript the brand new Forth like type setting language that placess this laser printer head and shoulders above all its shoddy look alike imitators Also included are the driver Continued on page 4 6 Enter with the range checked option number loaded in the
20. That Applewriter word processor on an Apple IIe can easily be used along with the Laserwriter to produce small quantities of business cards at incredibly low cost This can even be done in real time at a mall trade show fair or swap meet A typical card is shown in figure five Ten cards are normally printed at once using a 2 x 5 step and repeat procedure I ll be happy to lay a great Postscript step and repeat on you for free if you ask Anyway there are two ef fective routes to Applewriter created business cards Let s call them the cheap route and the fancy route With the cheap route you REGULATING REPAIRING MICHAEL RUCKS NEW BALDWIN PIANOS RT 1 BOX 10 TUNING 428 7569 GUARANTEED USED PIANOS SAFFORD AZ 85546 REGULATING REPAIRING MICHAEL RUCKS NEW BALDWIN PIANOS RT 1 BOX 10 428 7569 GUARANTEED USED PIANOS SAFFORD AZ 85546 Fig 5 Typical step and repeat business cards 21 6 actually print the final cards 10 up on your Laserwriter The advantages here are that you can make a profit on as few as ten cards can deliver on the spot and can easily make changes and revisions And that final quality while somewhat modest is more than acceptable to most individuals craft persons or small business users Par ticularly for those people who simply would not pay the going rate for traditional cards from an old line printer Normally you would pri
21. The back side has a no skid fish scale pattern on it Fig 1 A typical AppleWriter text file 17 1 ASK THE GURU What is so Special About the Laserwriter I receive an unbelievable number of calls on this one so let s repeat ourselves one more time Those knockoff imitation laserwriter ripoffs are not even in the same league In fact most of them are an out right joke The Laserwriter has an internal full page and full res olution bitmap giving you unlimited text and graphics mixes in any combination in any drawing order The knock offs do not The Laserwriter has an incredibly powerful Postscript typesetting language built in that easily handles full page mixed text and graphics des criptions Postscript is 100 percent compatible with many real typesetting machines so you can instantly upgrade your output to 2650 DPI at any time with no change in textfiles or applications pac kages The knockoffs do not even dream of this Postscript often lets you dramatically speed things up For instance with Postscript you put your form letter into the printer only once and then simply erase and reprint the name and address each time Which is ridiculously faster than resending the en tire letter for every name on the list The Laserwriter has some extremely flexible and built in font machinery Any single font can be shown in any size from 3 point to 65 000 point in any direction or along any a
22. and no damaging pokes will be made to exactly the wrong place in the IIgs Thus no blowups will occur Be sure to use the control panel on the IIgs to set your printer values Option O J is no longer active By the way be sure to use the printer cable connection from last month to get proper printing using Applewriter on a IIgs There are lots more IIgs patches to follow so be certain to stay tuned This Month s Contest We will split this month s contest so you ll have two wildly different ways to win March 1987 Just show me how to win the swordfight and solve the angle problem over in Leather Goddess of Phobos Or else tell me the exact Centigrade and Farenheit equivalents for the normal home iron settings of cotton wool synthetics silk etc As usual a free Incredible Secret Money Machine to the ten best entries and an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner What is Postscript Postscript is that exciting and new page description lan guage from Adobe Systems that is rapidly becoming the de facto desktop publishing standard for laser printing and typesetting There are plenty of highly outstanding advantages to Postscript First and foremost This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile The patch allows printing on a Ilgs by defeating any attempts at setting serial d
23. and similarly program a double wide 2764 EPROM for the char acter generator A changeover switch on each socket then flips you from old to new But there is now a better way Computer Accents now makes a small plug in board that fits your Ile and accepts both the old and the new character generator and the old and new monitor ROM pairs The product is called the Switchback and sells for 59 95 plus 2 50 shipping and handling To use this board unplug your present ROMS plug in the switchback module and then plug in both your old and new ROMs This method is far easier than programming your own EPROMs There is both an in ternal and an external change over switch available The only little gotcha is to make absolutely sure your dealer does not try to steal your old chips when he does your upgrade Two ways of preventing this are to do the upgrade yourself using the Apple kit or else remove both monitor chips and the character generator before you take your IIe in How do I do an Applewriter HIRES Dump And yet one more repeat question that s good for at least four help line calls a day The easiest way to do a HIRES dump with Applewrit er is with post processing The big advantages of post processing are that it works with just about any mix of printer printer card and graphics dump software and that it takes no program mods and needs little in the way of programming smarts To do a HIRES dump
24. around it Should you have a very long routine just split it up into individually called mod ules so as to prevent any stack overflows You also have to remember that you cannot print within 1 4 inch of either side or 1 8 inch of the top or bottom of your sheet You can show or not show the cut marks by using a tick true def or else a tick false def command The particular repeatproc shown includes a sequential numbering routine In fact your output will be a dozen business cards with sequential numbers on them The num bering is done by creating a numeric variable and then in crementing it for each repeat The numeric variable is then converted into a string and printed as needed Variations on this theme will let you select a different routine for each position on the sheet This is handy for say printing three different bumpersticker messages at once or doing a three panel brochure Be sure to write or call for more info on all my neat Postscript goodies 29 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU August 1987 Curve tracing secrets Binding systems survey IIgs Applewriter modem Toner cartridge reloading IIgs cables and connectors report this to you until a few weeks after the Aya tolla s Bar Mitzvah but the Hewlett Packard people have gone Postscript Honest Actually if you remove all the hype and all the wishful thinking from their announce ment all they really did was acknowledge t
25. elegantly solve other awk ward problems the computer people long ago have come November 1986 up with the concept of virtual memory These days though the term memory management is often used instead With virtual memory you set up a fake or imaginary memory area Into this imag inary area you put one or more linked lists of real mem ory addresses Each segment of virtual memory or VM has a length and a link The length equals the total number of vm bytes used by this particular segment The link is the starting vm address of the next segment of this particular file For instance a word pro cessor file might start off with a segment of vm that starts at vm address 1356 This particular segment of available memory may be too small to hold the entire file so it links to another vm seg ment at 39FC and so on The last file in the chain will have a 00 link so we know we are at the end of the file as well as the end of the list Each vm address will be related in some fixed way to real RAM The linked list lets you connect many dif ferent pieces of real RAM Fig 3 Bee s Piano 21 3 ASK THE GURU pedals 276 375 90 276 365 90 276 365 0 305 365 0 305 365 90 305 375 90 305 375 180 276 375 180 ctf 297 366 90 297 312 90 ctb 280 366 90 280 314 90 cta 291 366 90 291 312 90 cta 293 316 55 321 345 55 cta 280 316 55 321 363 55 cta 280 354 5 298 353 5 ctd gsave 0 5 tra
26. fixed In reality it is just about impos sible to build a video monitor that is noise free over all of the possible brightness and contrast levels What Sony did on the Apple monitor of course is to optimize for the minimum noise at the usual brightness and contrast levels There is a simple solution for this night person pro blem Just run your monitor at the usual daytime contrast and brightness and put some neutral density filter such as a piece of transparent gray plexiglass between you and the screen Show me an Improved Apple IIc Absolute Reset Pve had an absolute reset package available for some time that will let you uncon ditionally drop down into the monitor on a Ile an enhanced Ile and for those earlier IIc monitors non 3 5 What this does is perform an EPROM monitor chip swap to do the equivalent of the CALL 151 from any point in any pro gram regardless of the copy protection in use The absolute reset remains invisible until called upon A normal control reset resets in the normal way as intended by the program And a normal control open apple reset does the cold boot in the normal way including all the hole blasting that destroys your code besides putting bulldozer tracks into the HIRES images But should you keep your finger on the open apple key for four seconds after doing the control open apple reset you will automatically get dropped down into the old monitor with y
27. more aware quick copy cen ters are snarfing these up So far availibility is limited only to those copy centers that still intend to be in business six months from now The terms and access vary so be sure to check around Several local 1p psr0 p qclsrd psz0o 2 ppr pin Starting Page Number gt A ppn A pin Left Margin in tenths of an inch gt A psx A pin Printed width in tenths of an inch gt A psy A pin Printable characters per line gt A prm A plm0o pin Print how many copies 0 none gt A p pin High legibility mode Y N gt B ppr pin Top line gt C ptl c ppr pin Is everything OK Y N esc gt C ppr ppr pes Y C pgo3 pes y SC pgo3 pcs N SC pgo1 pcs n C pgo1 p needs pm0 or pm6 p ppr fix centering p b 4 f lt gt cj gt lt gt j esc U esc esc Q B esc O lt y pgo5 pgo6 5p u f lt gt lt esc D gt lt write transfer file pnd ny Izzz p plmo prm240 ay psr0 more Fig 4A WPL Diablo Laserwriter auto formatter August 1985 ASK THE GURU ppr set margins p b p f lt lt gt esc M lt y p F Helvetica Courier b f lt lt esc Q F lt y 7 fI y p psx 1 pgo7 f esc 9 y p 8 fil y p psy 1 pgo8 p f lt lt esc O0 esc Y lt y p pr justify top line must be customized PUUUDUCCLCCLT A gt Lanc lt gt
28. pitch abs 0 866 mul xside atan pitch 0 It neg if def isospiralsetup pitch exch def 2 div srad exch def pitch1 pitch 8 div def sp0 srad 0 86 mul srad 0 5 mul 30 fudge2 add def sp45 srad 0 818 div 0 pitch1 add 90 def sp90 srad 0 86 mul srad 0 5 mul pitch1 2 mul add 150 fudge2 sub def sp135 0 srad 0 705 mul pitch1 3 mul add 180 fudge1 sub def sp180 srad 0 86 mul srad 0 5 mul pitch1 4 mul add 150 fudge2 sub def sp225 srad 0 818 div neg 0 pitch1 5 mul add 90 def sp270 srad 0 86 mul srad 0 5 mul pitch1 6 mul add 30 fudge2 add def sp315 0 srad 0 705 mul neg pitch1 7 mul add 0 fudge1 add def sp360 srad 0 86 mul srad 0 5 mul pitch1 8 mul add 30 fudge2 add def def sccw360 isospiralsetup sp0 sp45 sp90 sp135 sp180 sp225 sp270 sp315 sp360 def sccw45 isospiralsetup sp0 sp45 def sccwrear isospiralsetup sp45 sp90 sp135 sp180 sp225 def sccfront isospiralsetup sp360 180 sub sp315 180 sub sp270 180 sub sp225 180 sub def scw360 isospiralsetup sp360 180 sub sp315 180 sub sp270 180 sub sp225 180 sub sp180 180 sub sp135 180 sub sp90 180 sub sp45 180 sub sp0 180 sub def Nockwasher rear bottom loop gsave 0 thickness neg translate newpath mark diameter width 2 mul sub pitch sccwrear curvetrace stroke grestore main loop mark diameter pitch sccw360 3 copy pop 150 3 copy pop exch width 0 866 mul sub exch width 0 5 mul add 150 diameter width 2 mul sub pitch scw360 curvetrace close
29. reduce that artwork to a litho negative and then cut a photo silk screen The silk screen process is then used to print the actual shirts Since this business is both highly competitive and quantity sen sitive you are probably far better off in using an existing service for your actual shirt production A Postscript speaking laser printer such as the Laser writer is absolutely ideal for generating the original over size art for T shirt printing Particularly useful is the ease with which you could handle large typography along a cir cular or arbitrary path Copyright c 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All Rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains intact requires pixellineremap of figure four ZapftDingbats findfont 60 0 0 60 0 0 makefont setfont sprockethole moveto 0 8 rlineto 5 0 rlineto 0 8 rlineto closepath fill def filmclip 0 0 moveto 0 100 rlineto 65 0 rlineto 0 100 rlineto closepath fill 1 setgray newpath 2 15 moveto 0 70 rlineto 61 0 rlineto 0 70 rlineto closepath fill 4 3 5 sprockethole 17 3 5 sprockethole 30 3 5 sprockethole 43 3 5 sprockethole 56 3 5 sprockethole 4 88 5 sprockethole 17 88 5 sprockethole 30 88 5 sprockethole 43 88 5 sprockethole 56 88 5 sprockethole 0 setgray 2 setlinewidth 0 0 moveto 65 0 rlineto stroke 0 100 moveto 65 0 rlineto stroke gsave 12 78 moveto 90 rotate show gres
30. the hole shut Please send me your toner tips and horror stories so they can be passed on And be certain to return the defective cartridges so the quality con trol people at Canon can clean up their act And should you have any opinions on a poor design that purposely goes out of its way to make a refillable cartridge unrefilliable you might men tion this to them one way or another as well UPDATE Feb 87 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 41 42 43 44 45 46 Fig 3 Hexadecimal and ASCII equivalents 18 4 ASK THE GURU How Can I get Filthy Rich This Month Naturally you can use my Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities and Applewriter on a Ile driving the Laserwriter Surprise surprise The scam this month is window decals You can easily create pro fessional full color window decals that show store hours giant letters etc through a window or glass door You can do so in a few minutes at a tiny fraction of the price a sign shop charges Being all on the inside the decals are pretty much immune to most vandalism Figure four shows you a typical decal as printed while figure five shows us the way it appears when you view it through the glass The key secret lies in the Laserwriter s ability to print backwards To do reverse printing just send out a 1 1 SCALE 612 0 TRANSLATE command You then print on transparent self stick acetate Now for the sneaky
31. the letter outline is traced in black Some extra kerning is re moved between the r and the g to force a much more This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile This patch lets you redefine the substitute NULL control command from its default value of _ 1F US or CHR 31 This patch works by replacing the control command to the desired substitution Note that this patch is needed ONLY if you require use of _ for another printer command Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 4C40 as a C9 and 4C41 as the current null substitution character stock value 1F Change 4C41 to the intended control character Use 1F to return to a default _ or 00 for no NULL character at all Verify 4C40 4C41 for a C9 followed by the control command you just selected 7 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 4 A NULL patch for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 20 4 ASK THE GURU 746 First Street Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 Symergetucs 602 428 4073 Fig 5 A custom letterhead design done entirely in POSTSCRIPT visually attractive spacing The street address and the phone number are done by stretching Helvetica out so far that it now picks
32. third party interface cards Figure one sums up the main changes to the new 2 1 version of ProDOS Apple writer There are only a few dozen bytes of code that do change unfortunately they make the program longer Thus any custom patches designed for the 2 0 version will NOT work on the new 2 1 version Changes in this upgrade include a later version of the ProDOS operating system a switch to high ASCII output but primarily while you are actually printing a change of the actual program modules to type 0C files instead of SYS files some slight changes to the modem code and a very minor alteration to the DOS Options menu Many of the Synergetics patches to ProDOS Apple writer can be modified to run under ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 But they will not run as is and should not be installed Write or call for more info on these UPDATE Oct 86 etc Are the Apple Monitor ROM s Copy Protected The amazing answer to this question is that yes the Apple monitor ROM chips are copy protected But only if you try to copy them with a ridiculously expensive stand alone EPROM programmer And therein lies a tale I started getting these wierd helpline calls a few weeks ago in which the people were claiming they were unable to copy those Apple monitor ROMs Naturally the Apple itself is able to read its own monitor My Snatchmon pro gram can also read the same monitor chips again with no problems What could be ha
33. throw away the inverter and the batteries getting rid of both their cost and their inefficiency Now in a water pumping operation you have one goal and one goal only You want to put as much of the water into the tank as you can and do so as efficiently December 1986 as can possibly be done So Jim reasoned that he would design the pump to fit the sunshine rather than us ing inverters and batteries to make the sunshine fit the pump What he came up with is a new variable displace ment pump mechanism When the sun is shining brightly the pump makes long strokes and lifts lots of water When the sun shines a little the pump makes short strokes and lifts less water At night the pump makes zero strokes and does not lift anything What about clouds Jim put a hefty flywheel on the pump so it can coast through brief cloudy times A very simple small and rather efficient CMOS microcontroller then monitors the flywheel speed Every now and then it will adjust the pump displacement to exactly match the energy This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K lle The patch eliminates a complete trip through the glossary whenever an open apple lt or an open apple gt is done greatly clarifying repeat saves or restores of saved characters It works by trapping out these two open apple commands before they are processed as glossary co
34. to the file and the patterns will tell you whether you have ASCII messages or not Thus aliasing is useful to pin down text and disk message files In figure three we try to disassemble a list of module address vectors Once again we get a bunch of aliases this time involving off the wall operand addresses Note here the pattern with each second byte being the same number and the addresses usually but not necessarily always work ing their way slowly upwards through memory Finding op tion picking lists is essential to cracking any longer code In figure three we dis assemble legal code but start at an illegal entry point The first two or three addresses will alias but the code us ually will straighten itself up and fly right after several lines The key here is reason ableness Often other parts of the code will show you the Continued on page 7 5 22 BRK PID BRK ROR BRK STX BIT PEREP BCS PHP 2 RTS ORA ASL JSR AND 2 10 12C0 801C 00 Fig 6 The great aliasing contest see text Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU August 1985 Typesetting an ad Diablo 630 emulation ProDOS TYPE command Educational software sales Laserwriter first impressions e have got us some really heavy topics this month so let s just jump right in with both feet Explain the ProDOS TYPE Command That TYPE command in ProDOS lets you change any file type into any other file
35. you can switch over to a shorter printer card You can leave the IIgs lid off Or you can turn off the RAM disk which will slow down Apple works somewhat You can also move to slot 4 or slot 7 with your parallel card trashing your choice of either the mouse or Appletalk How can I Fold a Sheet of Paper As we found out a few issues back folders and any similar printing machinery are outrageously priced making all of them totally unsuitable for most desktop publishing needs The Quill Office Products people did recently loss lead a folding machine so it cost only five times what it should have instead of ten but this might have been a one time special sale Figure two shows you a totally manual folder that I built for 5 It will accurately align even the heaviest index stock All you do is insert the paper snap it with a flick of the wrist reverse the paper and repeat the process You then sharpen the creases with a spoon Since then I have recently come across one astounding piece of machinery called the Execufold letter folding ma chine You hand this stylish toaster beast one two or three sheets of paper It then does a Whap Whap Ploot and throws a perfectly folded and accu rate edged result back at you That fast Pricing is 140 net and 220 list Which is insanely cheaper than the traditional old line units On the other hand I d like to see the same machine go for less than half that Rig
36. your justification widths for you will guarantee cobwebs on all of your Laserwriter output The bottom line At least for low end applications you will always get the fastest Postscript code operation by always having your Postscript printer do all of its required tasks internally Use nothing but a word processor or plain old editor on your host I found a great new source of toner and wiper pads for cartridge refilling This is Alan Shepard and his new Lazer Products outfit Alan does manufacturer all his own wiper pads so there is no supply problem And no he doesn t mind your using his pads with toner from other sources Alan even has custom lite pads available with less than the usual amount of silicon oil impregnant These are handy to up the quality on your Kroy Kolor output but should not be used over large numbers of copies As you know from last month there s this hot new independent national Post script bulletin board you can access at 409 244 4704 There is no access charge except for your own ads Alan Kalka is the sysop for this exciting new resource Only he is having trouble coming up with a good name for the board For this month s contest just name our Postscript BBS As usual an Incredible Secret Money Machine to the best ten entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two to the overall winner Alan will also throw in some small prizes of his own
37. 18 slightly to the left of the speaker Make sure the dot and notch go to the left Fig 2 Absolute reset for the original Apple llc ASK THE GURU There used to be a per ipheral known as a language card This was a plug in card that fit slot zero and held six 2316 ROMs If Integer BASIC and that old absolute reset ROM went into the card it was called an Integer card If instead the card held the autostart ROM and Apple sloth then it was called an Applesoft card These cards had a magic red switch that let you flip between operating systems making your Apple a II or a I per your choice If you can still find a lan guage card with an original Integer BASIC ROM set in it this gives you a second route to an absolute II reset But note one detail The red switch does not immed iately switch you between monitors To do an absolute reset you have to flip the red switch and then reset Note that a CALL 151 from Apple sloth drops you down into the autostart ROM while a CALL 151 from Integer BASIC gets you into the old absolute reset ROM This happens regard less of where the ROMs are sitting These language cards got replaced by plug in RAM cards that let you run other languages that include Pilot Fortran Pascal etc At this time images of both BASIC versions were placed on the system master disk On a cold start with a RAM card what ever language that was not in the machine got loaded into
38. 298 157 194 323 70 220 331 15 ct2 209 328 115 218 311 20 240 312 60 ct1 right hand 159 377 220 138 400 90 160 440 40 180 4450 205 436 45 220 418 10 252 415 70 235 395 180 206 395 135 197 377 80 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke 155 400 90 158 380 80 178 369 45 ct2 177 392 100 190 363 0 203 376 80 ct2 right glove detail 179 444 120 168 421 110 ct1 186 445 115 177 420 95 ct1 192 443 110 188 419 90 ct1 more Fig 5a Postscript curve tracing study aide 30 5 August 1987 that demands an expensive machine and needs a contin uous source of non standard and expensive supplies sold through a two tier distributor and retailer network that is absolutely forbidden to ever discount anything On the other hand the laser printing user just wants some cheap way to attractively hold pages together Thus there is no way that a binding systems manufacturer will ever provide a cheap and simple method to attractively hold pages together for it is not in their best interests to ever do so I have now sorted through dozens of different binding systems and have concluded that we need something new and exclusively suited for new age small quantity laser printing Something easily built by the end user But until that certain something shows up Pd like to tell you about the dozens of systems that I have checked into picking the best of the wo
39. About Applewriter the Active Filter Cookbook Apple Assembly Cookbook and Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets along with his Introduction to PostScript videotape Don s current software offerings include both his PostScript Show and Tell and his PostScript Technical Illustrations plus numerous companion disks for his various books Don is the head honcho of Synergetics a new age design and consulting firm specializing in Apple computing laser printing electronic prototyping desktop publishing technical writing and in innovative software development His avocations include firefighting cave exploration bicycling and of course tinaja questing ASK THE GURU Table of Contents JI A OT BSF WH WM FF Cassette tape reliability ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Free technical magazines Programming an EPROM Random number generator Low cost air valves Pneumatic actuators Secret Apple manuals Your own tech venture Applewriter Ile stretchifier Option picking Laser printer info A tough I O circuit Motors for robotic use Diablo daisywheel stuff E T watching Apple Ile upgrade A Softalk replacement Dual character generator Applewriter triple header Disassembly aliasing A shuffling algorithm Machine language study Getting inside information Apple II to IIe conversions Typesetting an ad Diablo 630 emulation ProDOS TYPE command Educational software sales Laserwriter first impressions II reset hassles
40. By the way most of the Ask The Guru Postscript routines will be available on this board ready for your instant downloading There are two levels to the board To get at the real goodies you have to put one Postscript routine on for every ten you take off We ll be continuing our new Don Lancaster s Laser writer Corner sidebar this month Be sure to look for it near the end of this column Oops I almost forgot to throw an advetorial at you Heaven forbid My Postscript May 1987 Show and Tell is now av ailable for use on virtually any word processor or comm program on the Apple H IIc Ie Hgs what s their name s PC AT XT and clones the Atart ST the Mac Mac Plus and even under UNIX I also have a brand new Postscript Technical Illus trations package for Apple Mac and IBM This includes some outstanding schematic isometric pictorial curve tracing and layout examples All are unlocked and easily adaptable to your own needs My Introduction to Post script VHS user group video tape is now shipping as is my self published Ask the Guru reprints that cover everything worthwhile clear back to day one edited indexed and fully updated Onward and upward What Monitors Work With the Apple IIgs Our helpline is overloading with people who want to use different RGB monitors on their IIgs Which monitors will work with the IIgs and how can they be connected Firstoff note there are tw
41. Corrects a byte in the original code that is just plain wrong This patch works by replacing a glossary full test byte with the correct value 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 2B56 67 Change 2B56 OF BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 2 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Glossifier patch 22 2 changes of any kind There are also some very severe problems involving hard disks Some disks particularly the ProFile will lose data or may else plow themselves in the fast mode For now do not use an older hard disk with the IIgs until this problem gets fixed A few of the earlier IIgs machines tend to have sound that sits there muttering to itself While this sound level is very low it could drive a night person up the wall if they are working in a totally silent room Some of the routines seem to mutter on purpose as a user prompt I don t much care for this If muttering is used it should be a selectable option Another big compatibility problem with earlier programs is that the built in clock does not use the same access rules as do the earlier Apple clock cards Software modificat ions will definitely be needed for access The IIgs built in clock is seperately available as a desk accessory My own IIgs clock seems
42. E POKE 15074 96 POKE 15077 240 POKE 15090 136 POKE 15093 76 POKE 14721 00 POKE 14722 22 POKE 14724 155 POKE 14725 208 POKE 14727 230 POKE 14729 230 POKE 14732 196 POKE 14735 14 POKE 14737 00 POKE 14738 22 POKE 14740 155 POKE 14741 208 POKE 14743 198 POKE 14745 198 POKE 14748 208 POKE 14751 252 POKE POKE 4730 211 4733 220 POKE 14746 211 POKE 14749 238 182 POKE 17398 57 POKE 17437 57 TEXT HOME A IT WORKED PRINT PRINT PRINT PRINT TEXT HOME AS Will not verify as AWIIe GOSUB 980 PRINT PRINT PRINT PRINT END GOTO 960 TEXT HOME CLEAR END GOSUB 980 END patch ABORTED PRINT Fig 3B Applewriter Stretchifier continued 2 4 ASK THE GURU Noisy screen machine FOR N 1 TO LEN A PRINT MIDS A N 1 GOSUB 1020 REM Clickety clack NEXT N RETURN ZZ PEEK 49200 PEEK 49200 FOR M 1 TO 17 NEXT M RETURN FOR N 0 TO 700 NEXT N RETURN Do NOT use this program on either factory diskette Use only on your THIRD or higher backup copies This patch gives an exact repair for two character escape sequences For three character imbedded sequences bank characters by using esc esc to bank two characters or esc esc to bank one character This also works for non escape imbedded commands In the above listing D stands for control D All other brackets are real Fig 3C Applewriter
43. Ground Fig 2 Improving cassette tape reliability Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU April 1985 Low cost air valves Pneumatic actuators Secret Apple manuals Your own tech venture Applewriter stretchifier elcome once again to the second release of our brand new Com puter Shopper column Ill do what I can to find answers to reader hardware software or supply problems Just call or write per that address in the end box Best calling times are 8 5 week days mountain standard time Pll send a free booklist and a special goodies list to you when you respond And even more neat stuff if you are an Apple hacker As before we will gather all of the names and numbers together in an appendix at the end We ll try to keep them all current Some of these sources are very hard to pin down elsewhere so be sure to save these listings Here goes Any Ideas Involving Low Cost Robotics It never ceases to amaze me that low pressure pneu matics has never taken off Yet air pressure systems in the 3 to 6 psi range have enormous advantages First off low pressure air is cheap and low tech It gives you lots of linear force easy and simply It can amplify since most of the muscle comes from the air source This means you do not directly have to provide high power electronic drivers as you do with solenoids or servo motors Air also goes around corners beautifully particularly robotic elbows Mos
44. Next as figure five shows us comes slide under wiring Since these symbols are all opaque they will position themselves over the top of any wires By putting the wire des criptions early in the textfile and the symbols late in the textfile all of the wires will magically stop at the exact edge of each symbol Usually you put your symbols down first and then slide the wires under them This mind boggling trick is done simply by entering wire descriptions above the symbol callouts in your textfile but while entering the wires after you enter the symbols Note the sneaky use of self breaking wires Observe the white space every time the vertical wire ducks under a horizontal one This can get handled automatically through the drawing of a thick white horizontal wire and then the redrawing of a thin black horizontal wire on top of the white one Finally the lettering and the callouts are added to get the final and full sized result shown in figure six Note that any font of any size can be used and that you are free to stretch or squash the font either in the vertical or the horizontal direction If the slight rattiness of this final image is not good enough for you a single phone call to someone with a Linotron 300 will instantly upgrade the image to a 2650 dot per inch resolution You also have the option of print ing oversize and reducing the final result with a litho cam era or reducing copier Don La
45. RAM Card Dissasembly Script that reveals all the hid den secrets of this exciting new memory expansion card Moving right along What does the Law say On Ripping off Type Fonts Nothing whatsoever To quote Typeface des igns in the United States with rare exception are not pro tected Typeface names are protectable This statement is from a house trade journal of the leading proponent of contin uing type font licensing What it says is that you can rip off an exact copy of just about any type font and can do so completely legally On the other hand they will nail you to the wall if try to use their name on your ripped off font As a practical matter I would suggest avoiding out right theft of any newer fonts from any of the major typo graphy houses I would also suggest using Apple s convention of naming your custom fonts after cities To go one step further I per sonally use very small towns instead Towns such as Guth rie Mule Creek Granville Elgin or Bonita My favorite cheat book is J Biegleisen s very old Art Directors Work Book of Type Faces from Arco Publishing The curvetrace routine in my Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities makes grabbing your own high quality fonts very easy to do The Laserwriter normally uses analytic fonts that are described in the Postscript language Important advan tages of analytic fonts are that they look better can enlarge smoothly tak
46. Stretchifier concluded Continued from page 1 3 Naturally the best way to improve your cassette tape reliability is to use a floppy disk instead Nonetheless there is a very old and little known trick that can dramatically improve the reliability of most any cassette system If you could quietly listen to the tones as they are going into the computer you can immediately spot most pro blems level settings noise hum or low battery hassles You can also bypass starting clicks and pops This just takes a ten cent modification to your tape recorder The mod is shown in figure 2 The trick is to alter your output jack so the speaker is connected in series with a 330 ohm resistor orange orange brown whenever anything is plugged into the output jack We have shown this jack as an old fashioned one to make the connections clearer Regardless of its shape when you inspect your output jack you should find three leads One permanently goes to ground or a supply line One permanantly goes to the amplifier output stage And one switchedly goes to the speaker When something is plugged into the jack that something ends up between the amplifier output and the ground while the speaker gets disconnected All you have to do is solder a resistor across the switch contacts that disconnect the speaker If you are careful you may not have to do a completely disassembly of your recorder If you can get down to
47. The 28756 is the address of that particular location in which you want to put the carriage return This will of course change with your use application The 13 here is the actual ASCII code for the carriage return The Apple Keys column can show how you would enter a certain control code from the Apple keyboard As an ex ample a L means to press the control key hold the control key down press shift and L release shift and L and then release the control key This gives you a form feed entered directly into your textfile or whatever Some word processors will want you to use a verbatim entry mode For instance to place a form feed into an Applewriter file press V L V The first V says to be gin verbatim entry What will follow will be placed directly into your textfile rather than immediately acted upon The L is the form feed that gets placed into your file The final V cancels the verbatim entry so that any new control characters can actually be used for control purposes in stead of going into a textfile Finally the Original Use column shows us what the intended purpose of the con trol command was whenever ASCII was first standardized Most of the original uses do still apply today It would be extremely stupid to redefine a carriage return as anything else On the other hand the more oddball and obscure commands such as the group seperator or range seperator are easily diverted to speci
48. VU 7 WHY Fig 4 A Fancy cubic spline border JOQQOD0000000000 A ASK THE GURU So how can you tap these cubic splines for your own profit and enjoyment You can do this with or without a Laserwriter One route is to get yourself a copy of Inside Laserwriter study it and then log some hands on time on a rental Laserwriter at your nearby copy center Otherwise it is off to the nearest full technical library Bezier s original papers for some strange reason are all in French He is translated in Numeric Control Mathemat ics and Applications by A Forrest and A Pankhurst and published by Wiley in 1972 This seems to be out of print so check a large technical library or a microfilm service The best and the most consistent source I ve found for information on the cubic splines along with many excellent bibliographies are the various SIGGRAPH pro ceedings available from the Association for Computer Machinery These usually do appear in the number three issue of each year s ACM Computer Graphics quarterly Those 1983 and 1984 pro ceedings are especially useful I have yet to see the 1985 SIGGRAPH paper listings The advance promotion does promise at least one new conic spline paper An obvious money making idea that involves splines would be to apply them dir ectly to Apple or any other HIRES graphics routines so that free form curves can be handled as gracefully as ordinary boxes
49. a New Postscript Utility In continuing our once a month series of the Postscript utilities for the Laserwriter and similar printers figure five is a listing of the single most often asked for Post script code routine This listing lets you return the exact path of any imaged character in any font to the host It works with all fonts from all sources including all internal fonts all externally downloadable fonts and all custom fonts of your own The returned path is in its open or trapezodial form and is easily adapted April 1987 This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS initially ran only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile The patch improves the prompting tones when in the fast mode on a llgs It works by lowering the pitch and lengthening the duration of each tone in the pair 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 2260 80 Change 2260 DO Verify 2265 AO Change 2265 FF Verify 2267 80 Change 2267 FF BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 4 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 tweedleifier patch For Laserwriter version 38 or earlier initgraphics 100 100 moveto Palatino Bold findfont 100 0 0 100 0 0 makefont setfont S false charpath clip
50. a double size 128K address space That second 64K switches only on indexed instructions so it is primarily intended for use as data storage No RAM or ROM inside but you simply won t believe all of the ready for your use peripheral circuitry stuffed into this beast How does 40 I O lines 9 timers a four input A D converter two dual phase stepper motor drivers a Centronics port a pulse pos ition modulator a two way UART serial interface and a synchronous serial I O sound The operating power is around 150 milliwatts but this can be greatly reduced by lowering the clock frequency and can be almost entirely shut down to 5 microamps with a sleep provision If that s not enough for you there are enough pins on the package that you can also put it to use as an emergency cheese grater The obvious uses would include such things as data recorders hydroponic garden ing controllers cattle feeder setups cable tv intelligent taps student trainers hot tub month s pump cyclers solar powered array interfaces for general robotics weigh scales cotton picker tooth setters student trainers numeric controlled machine tools etc Several minor gotchas The 64 pin 70 mil shrink DIP package is oddball so sockets may be very hard to find An 8X clock is needed and a large block of the page zero addresses are reserved In addition there are not enough pins to go around so they used the Motor
51. and 2 universal enough that you might change the position size pitch width or thickness without resetting to zero each time As per usual an Incredible Secret Money Machine to the twenty best entries and an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner Let s make this the greatest lockwasher contest that ever was held anywhere OK gsave 0 diameter 2 div dup 0 866 mul exch 0 5 mul pitch sub neg moveto 0 thickness neg rlineto 0 thickness neg translate mark diameter pitch sccfront curvetrace 0 thickness rlineto stroke grestore def demo remove before use 200 300 translate 10 dup scale width 2 5 def diameter 15 def pitch 4 def thickness 2 5 def 0 067 setlinewidth 1 setlinecap 1 setlinejoin lockwasher showpage Fig 4b Postscript lockwasher code concluded 31 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU October 1987 T shirt printing Pixel line remapping Printusing and friends Applewriter s 47K limit The ultimate hacker food umor has it that the newer version 2 2 of Appleworks is now in the final beta testing stage Supposedly included is a spelling checker of some sort and a cure for the IIgs 768K page crossing bug It is not clear whether the ability to handle proportionally spaced columnar text in the spread sheet or data base modes has yet been picked up By the time you read this the new IIgs ROM upgrade should be available Check you
52. and a half Tee shirts Two interesting additional sources you might like to check into For all sorts of printer stuff including heat sensitive ink corner rounders bumpersticker stock and the Coburn like materials try the Supply Line people Another good source is Southern Sign Supply Are Far Eastern Typefonts Available Sure thing Just contact the Institute of Typographical Research Their many fonts include Arabic Bengali Bur mese Combodian Denvana gari Gujarati Gurumukhi Kannada Lao Tian Limbu Malayalam Meetai Oriya Simhalese Tai Ahom Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan and Urdu They also stock some of the more obscure fonts What is the Appleworks Slot 2 IIgs Bug It s all caused by the fan Huh Here is how this week s wierdest helpline call went It seems the fan on a real IIgs interferes with put ting any reasonable sized card in slot one If you place a parallel printer card into slot 2 it will work fine for most other programs but Apple works will refuse to print to it at all It may even hang up What happens is this the IIgs operating system assigns Slot 5 Drive 1 to that first 3 5 inch drive and then assigns the RAM card to Slot 5 Drive 2 The second 3 5 inch drive is then assigned to Slot 2 and Drive 1 Appleworks checks slot 2 finds it is a disk and refuses to print to it There s several cures to this You can use an upgraded Ie that does not need the fan Or
53. any software that actually works is suspect of being obsolete and cer tainly could not possibly be state of the art This can very seriously damage your credibility It would be almost as stupid as letting one of your programmers horror of ultimate horrors actually speak to the people in your 1 Place the 28 pin machined contact DIP socket pins up and identify pin 2 Carefully bend pin 26 towards the center as shown Pins are numbered backwards from usual when they are viewed from the bottom Push a single bare machined contact socket pin onto pins 14 27 and 28 as shown advertising department The first thing you want to do is seperate your customer service phone from the order phone Select a suitable Sub Saharan African nation for your customer service depart mant Then make sure that the employees can only speak Swahili using a very heavy Icelandic accent Above all be certain that your recep tionist has latent tendencies towards cannabilism But the quickest and simp lest cure for most unhappy customers is to print up some small and bright labels that say BETA RELEASE and then attach them to all your disks before you ship Beta release software is not sup posed to work and all your customers will be overjoyed in participating in the leading edge of software development technology Can I Put Two Different Monitors In an Apple Ile By now it s more than painfully obvious that t
54. anything so things like envelopes labels or business cards have to be hand fed Turning to nit picking the laser engine itself does show some rather bizarre human engineering You need con tinuous access to all four of the sides and the top of the printer including the ability to simultaneously observe status lights at both the front and the back of the machine An unreachable and often used selector switch requires that you add a shaft extender before you can even put a knob on it let alone use it The paper tray is far too shallow to the point of being a joke An unnecessary U turn in the paper path adds to the jam potential and limits paper weight but accomplis hes nothing useful And while ridiculously quieter than most other printers a laminar fan redesign could make the si lence totally eerie That eight pages per minute rating is the absolute top speed on repeat copies and then only after you custom flip a magic prefeed software switch that ups the wear and tear on the laser engine It is very easy for a fancy image to take several minutes or more to process and output Which is like buying a 165 mile per hour bicycle and then finding out it only goes that fast when dropped off a very high cliff On the moon Still the print speed is very respectable Awesome even The print quality is quite impressive on a wide range of different papers The gray images tend to blotch a little on high r
55. be familiar with This one is called the Apple Devel oper s Express It consists of a humongous quarterly binder that is sent free to dealers clubs and developers The ambassador for your local user group has a copy And of course to find your local user group you call 800 538 9696 and then ask for extension 500 At any rate each package consists of bunches of data sheets literature and product announcements There are us ually a few demo disks some magazines and several other oddments This service is definitely worth looking into If you do want to participate in this for your own products the cost is around 1000 or so Which can be a real media bargain Apple also just released two public domain sampler disks These are so bad that they should immediately be des troyed on sight Out of the 40 000 or so public domain programs now available today these two disks are definitely in the bottom forty One disk boots up with ProDOS not Available The other comes up with This is not a Macintosh disk shall I initialize it No menus at all no internal operating system and both totally user vicious The ProDOS diskette does have a copy of Freewriter on it This is a stripped zero cost version of Applewriter that is an ideal first word processor for most junior high school students If you can though try and get a free copy of Fredwriter instead through many of the California BBS systems This i
56. be simpler Put the disk in the drive Have you or your glossary type in the P DO OPTIMA OBLIQUE You can then flip over the disk when you are prompted to That disk flipping could of course be gotten rid of by using a 3 1 2 inch drive a hard disk or a RAM card So with a little thought you can easily handle files of just about any length at all with Applewriter All it takes is a bit of planning and the magic of WPL and your own self prompting glossaries A disassembly script for Prodos Applewriter 2 0 and much more on all this appears in my Applewriter Cookbook By the strangest of coinci dences I do seem to have a few autographed copies on hand here Tell me all about Print Using Every once in a long while something gets buried so deep in the Apple lore that years can go by without someone even mentioning the totally obvious Which of course will both mystify and befud dle any of you newcomers Uh about that largish dead dinosaur that s rotting in the front yard Why everybody knows about that Uh huh Quite a few dialects of the BASIC language do have a printusing command that lets you decide the exact format tabular data will appear in Which is particularly impor tant for dollars and cents especially when you do not want zeros suppressed in the pennies and the dimes slots It is also handy any time you want to set the overall pre cision of a math result When Applesloth BASIC was tra
57. can They are also sorely needed by the Mac What would be really neat is to be able to real time move the influence points Can I Run Applewriter From BASICS SYSTEM Doesn t seem to work very well does it You might like to boot ProDOS Applewriter from BASIC if you are adding a hard disk system setting a modem are writing a com bination program that can include both Applesloth and WPL routines or if you are integrating things into a large RAM card I needed this two language ability for my brand new two volume Applewriter Laserwriter Utilities The solution is very simple once you spend the hours needed to ferret out the real culprit The BASICS SYSTEM does not automatically set prefixes for you Before you do the AW SYSTEM just do a PREFIX D1 and you are home free There is a second more subtle and rather stickier problem though BASICS SYSTEM may want to use a program that is named as NN Fig 5 Covered wagon built with cubic splines STARTUP to start off your application And ProDOS Applewriter may want to use a wildly different program named STARTUP to run a WPL supervisor or just to load glossaries and so on How can two wildly dif ferent programs share the same filename and not get mixed up They cannot So what I did was change a single byte in BASICS SYS TEM so that the name of the new startup program is now STARTUX I then named the modified routine as BASIX SYSTEM The
58. carried between 45 000 and 65 000 titles The chains that are driving the older stores out of business only carry 4500 to 6500 titles while stocking many more copies of each title This causes a 10 1 reduction in available shelf space for your work Third are the infamous publishers committees made up of total idiots that do not have the slightest idea who you are or why your material will sell The committee will usually sit on your book for fourteen or more months and then tell you the manuscript is rejected because they feel it is not timely The marketing people are even worse If lots of other books exist then that market is overcrowded If no other books are competing with yours then your market is unproven But if you print up a few copies on your own and sell them to demonstrate the demand really is there you are guilty of the heneous and unpardonable crime of skimming Fourth mergers and buy outs have reduced the number of publishers so there are less places to submit books Fifth the services that a traditional publisher can offer an author have been greatly diminished You can now do your own arwork all of your own layout your own editing your own typesetting and even your own printing with quality that is more than competitive and much more likely to give you exactly what you want Before you had no resonable choice but to use a publisher for these services Sixth older publishers
59. def buttonproc gsave outsideclover 8 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke insideclover 5 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke grestore def 0 setlinewidth gsave buttonproci gsave 0 475 dup scale 30 40 translate buttonproc grestore def gsave 300 300 translate 4 buttonproc1 90 rotate repeat grestore newpath 2 setlinewidth 300 300 65 0 360 arc gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 4 setlinewidth stroke 1 setlinewidth 0 setgray newpath 0 90 setgray 0 3 setlinewidth gsave 300 300 translate 7 65 0 moveto 65 0 rlineto 13 8 rotate 65 0 rlineto closepath gsave 0 setgray stroke grestore 13 8 rotate repeat grestore starpath dup 0 exch 2 div rmoveto starheight exch 0 3635 mul def 18 rotate 0 starheight neg rlineto 72 rotate 5 0 starheight neg rlineto 36 rotate 0 starheight rlineto 108 rotate repeat def 0 setgray 300 300 65 0 360 arc 4 setlinewidth stroke 0 setgray gsave 300 300 moveto 50 starpath gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke grestore gsave 300 300 translate 0 setgray NewCenturySchlbk Bold findfont 30 0 0 30 0 0 makefont setfont Convention 1986 55 90 152 insidecircletext Safford Arizona 40 90 138 outsidecircletext NewCenturySchlbk Bold findfont 25 0 0 25 0 0 makefont setfont AFFA 53 90 56 insidecircletext Fig 3 A Postscript badge drawing program 16 3 ASK THE GURU an esc group sep erator makes a good ending marker These are ignored by most printers but be sur
60. either 8 or 16 ROM chips Two ports one for the laser controller and one for serial I O A rather unusual pair of stablemates as port chips a 6522 along with brace your self a Z80 SIO Presumably some features are available in the Z80 chip that aren t available in the 6551 that you would expect to find in this socket The ROM holds the Forth like Postscript interpreter along with the resident fonts The average font uses around 12K of memory but this can vary all over the lot A sec ret compaction scheme has been used to squash the fonts down to this size Note that the bytes needed by the font description are completely independent of the final character sizing on the page Further only a single font description is needed for all possible output point sizes and image directions Over on the RAM side one megabyte is used for the full page bitmap Another 256K is used for a font cache that converts any currently active fonts into a character bitmap so they can be rapidly read This solves the dilemma of having a very compact des cription of a font yet still providing both a very high resolution and fast imaging of the characters when they are needed What is New In Small Control Computers I just ran into a brand new control computer that I am really impressed with It s called the VIP and is made by Bukowski Robotics VIP is an abbreviation for a Very Intel ligent Peripheral 65C02 o
61. esc MLanc lt a pr unjustify paragraph ends y p p b p pi p e 9 f lt gt lt p pgoa pgob f lt gt lt gt esc X lt c f p pgod pgoe dp f lt gt lt gt esc X lt ppr fix paragraph indents p b f lt gt lt gt esc X esc M lt A p p Fig 4B Auto formatter continued more outfits charge 12 per hour including a Mac and 50 cents per page Another one is rumored to offer real 2600 DPI typesetting off of a Mac based Postscript disk for a buck a page Including free corrections How can I typeset my Own Computer Shopper Ad How about with the Laser writer at your local quick copy center It shouldn t cost over a dollar or two A sample ad is shown you in figure two It was written completely with Applewriter on an Apple Ile Including the graphics Postscript is a Forth like language whose commands start with values and end with what to do with those values Strings to appear on the page are placed in parenthesis The X or horizontal value always comes first followed by the Y or vertical value The full details appear in Adobe s Postscript Cookbook and the Postscript Reference Manual How Do I fix Laserwriter s Diablo Emulation Mode Like everyone else in the industry those Laserwriter people are telling you that which is not so when they claim that their Diablo 630 emulation either works at all or even approximates all the features availabl
62. fast mode Apple did announce a brand new Version 2 0 of Apple works that will give you extended memory access and reasonable tones Applewriter won t print on the IIgs One temporary cure is to use your older super serial card instead of the in ternal IIgs serial ports Outside of that nit picking detail Applewriter seems to work ok at normal speed but in the fast mode you have to make some patches to keep the tones normal the cursor flashing rate under control and to set the proper inter character delay for serial printing I will have patches on these shortly At the faster speed you ll find Applewriter to be much smoother and even more fun to use The speedup is most noticable on things like WPL routines long searches and on the reformatting that takes place after disk access Very nice There seems to be one big problem with the power sup ply The rundown time is way over 30 seconds The good news here is that you can now coast through more and deep er power line glitches without any problems The bad news is that you can zap a board if you insert or remove it within half a minute of turning the power Off So be sure to wait at least 40 seconds after power down before making any IIgs card This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile It eliminates the potential ability to overwrite the glossary and destroy the program
63. feature Where to start on all this Firstoff see if you can t beg or borrow a copy of the older Apple Tech Notes as published by the International Apple Core and available through member IAC clubs This is a big fat notebook that held the answers to all of the questions that were asked to Apple on all of their products While a pre IIe era book 1981 82 there is plenty of good stuff in here especially the very rare Applesloth mat erial in section 2600 The best insider book on Applesloth that I know is All About Applesoft published by CALL A P P L E Included is complete and thorough cov erage of pointers variables memory space arrays etc that you need to know to in telligently use this language A rather good Applesloth source code capturing process that includes extensive and thorough comments is called Applesoft Source Code On Disk and is available from S C Software To avoid copy right hassles the program does require an Apple with Applesloth in it before it can run This utility is best used under the S C assembler On to DOS and ProDOS The finest DOS book is of course Beneath Apple DOS by Quality Software the All about DOS again by CALL A P P L E is another good choice and the two books very much complement each other For ProDOS there s Beneath Apple ProDOS by Quality Software and the ProDOS Technical Reference Manual A2W0010 directly from Apple While no All About ProDOS exis
64. for save command or when an adventure program discovers that the giant clockwork arm adillo is indeed awake and is feeling on the mean side Routines that let you go to any of a number of different places in a simple and orderly manner are known as option pickers They are usually used whenever you have to go to six or more different locat ions particularly if all of the selections involve more or less random keystrokes or wild mixtures of letters and control characters The forced return theory is elegant sneaky and excruc iatingly simple Say you go to a subroutine in a machine lan guage program The return address of the subroutine gets remembered on the stack so the program can remember where to go back to On a subroutine return the pro gram goes back to whatever called it Now for the sneaky part What if you force a fake sub routine address onto the stack and then call for a return Instead of going where you came from you return to the new fake address and pick up there Figure three shows you a 6502 example First you de cide which option you need as a hex number Next you range check that option to make darn sure you can go where you think you want to Next you double the num ber by doing an accumulator shift left or ASL Then you transfer the doubled option number to an index such as the X register Then go to a table of addresses Grab the HIGH address byte and shove it on the stack
65. from one make and model of a computer to an other The first step is to move the actual image of the program or text file over to the second machine The second step is to modify that image so it will run in its new home The first step is suprisingly simple To move anything from one personal computer to another just convert that anything to a disk based text file and then send that file over a serial interface to the second machine Often serial RS232 communication at 1200 baud is a good choice using standard printer or modem utility software This will result in a literal and exact transfer of the text from the first machine to the second O O O O O O 00 0800 OOOO O0O 0 O80 OOO January 1986 Note that there are no ma chine limitations that become involved with this technique so long as each machine has enough memory to receive the file and so long as the hand shaking on the serial channel works The brand of micro processor and the operating system does not matter in the least In those cases of a program written in a higher level lan guage it is usually far better to transfer a textfile copy of the listing of the program to the other machine rather than transmitting the actual pro gram itself The reason for this is that the parsing and in terpretation of the program may differ wildly between the two machines The new ProDOS operating system on the Apple Ile very
66. funny on the screen just change the switch to the other position Several gotchas Be sure to use only premium machined pin contact sockets and strips for your adaptor Do NOT use June 1985 a toggle switch And unplug both ends of the Apple line cord and rest your hand on the power supply when instal ling the adaptor Make sure that the dot and notch points to the front of your machine By the way I have a free CLARIFIER patch that lets you run Applewriter Ie on an enhanced Ie or a IIc with minimum problems I also do have a free listing of all the changes needed to do an ab solute old monitor reset on the new Ie Write or call for full details Let s briefly run down the reasons your old Apple pro grams may be incompatible By far the most common pro blem is the mouse nest in the character generator Those screen codes between 40 5F will appear as mouse char acters instead of in inverse upper case While there are two possible codings for in verse uppercase on older Apples the 40 5F range is far more common especially for software flashing cursors The adaptor of figure two will solve these mouse nest problems If you are a ma chine language person it is 2 A000 00 00 24 Pin DIP Plug 0 6 0 6 6 6 0 6 0 0 0 0 GONG TEGO GEG DECC DECC DKG DG CS MES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 D D DOLD 28 Pin DIP Socket
67. graphics people while the enthuasiasm is call ed the tension The oldest of cubic spline techniques are called Bezier Curves The newer and more powerful versions go by the seperate names of B Splines and Beta Splines There are also Conic Splines available among lots of others Many of these fancier splines are more powerful and more flexible but they are not as easily or as quickly done on a smaller microcomputer Some are three dimensional One way to get different curves is to move the influ ence points around and see what happens Let s see if we can t second guess what we can or cannot do with a single cubic spline Firstoff rotate figure two around 360 degrees Obvious ly the same shape curve can be generated in any direction so long as the relative posit ion of the influence points with regard to START and END does not change Now let us get back to figure two right side up If both influence points are above START and END then the curve will remain above START and END If both influence points are below START and END then the curve will stay below START HEE ERE PER GS HE HE HS ASS HRS AR GARE GC HC ACS Ne NGEH NE SN So AS SS ON ON E CL we Ye YH we whe rh WN G Fig 3 Sample page from a cubic spline catalog 8 3 and END If both influence points are between START and END then you will get nothing but a straight line If one or bot
68. grestore stroke mouth 213 448 25 240 445 35 ct 226 450 75 275 400 0 300 411 35 ct 300 411 155 308 402 0 ct right ear 223 501 150 262 580 30 262 580 60 275 518 85 curvetrace gsave 0 40 setgray fill grestore stroke 232 502 85 26257050 262 570 70 270 520 90 270 520 135 232 502 180 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke 2 setlinewidth nose tension 3 8 def 300 428 60 315 425 90 302 413 180 300 428 60 curvetrace 0 setgray fill tension 2 8 def right eye 255 482 45 295 450 15 295 450 120 272 442 160 262 474 80 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke left eye 310 450 60 329 470 60 329 470 95 321 450 150 310 450 150 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke 318 454 70 329 462 30 329 462 100 326 453 90 326 453 170 318 454 150 curvetrace fill eyebrows 0 3 setgray 264 498 20 280 488 60 296 471 20 296 471 160 280 473 150 264 498 155 curvetrace fill 312 468 60 327 492 75 327 492 70 328 482 90 328 482 120 312 468 160 curvetrace fill 0 setgray right eyeball 277 445 100 280 458 70 280 458 30 291 450 20 291 450 155 279 445 160 curvetrace fill whiskers 210 392 30 282 412 0 curvetrace 1 setlinewidth stroke 205 404 20 286 416 5 curvetrace stroke 318 416 10 388 416 0 curvetrace stroke 322 422 15 385 431 10 curvetrace stroke 325 427 25 383 442 20 curvetrace stroke neck fill 2 setlinewidth 236 391 moveto 241 398 lineto stroke
69. have some WPL based solutions on this if you need them Note that there are two problem spokes on any 96 petal daisywheel element Since there are a total of 96 printable ASCII characters and since space and delete are needed for their own uses you end up two codes shy Thus there are two hidden spokes on most daisywheels The Diablo way of accessing these is with an imbedded esc Y for the one petal and an esc Z for the other On the TITAN 10 the two hidden spokes are the cents and the closing single quote On the BOLD PS wheel they are the and the closing bracket And changing the subject slightly customized daisy LOAD 4 parallel micro port wheel elements are not all that expensive especially if you only need a single special character or two Camwil has a special process that breaks off one petal of a stock wheel and replaces it with your own custom symbol Where s Enhance II Would you believe right here in my hot little hands My Enhancing your Apple II Volume II SAMS 22425 is at long last in print You can get one now either locally or else autographed copies are available directly from me What s in it Unconditional and absolute reset for the Ile superb print quality tech niques for word processors a Castle Wolfenstein playing aides set a brand new and software only VAPORLOCK exact field sync more on the tearing method of quickly analyzing unknown machine language c
70. ies or else I will send you a free listing of this new super dooper routine along with a figure one original when you call or write 19 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU October 1986 Apple i d bytes Laser letterheads RAM card snooper Applewriter nullifier Machine language contest et s start off with a few l loose ends First and most importantly don t miss next month s issue of Computer Shopper You just might find a thing or two in it that just may be of more than passing interest to you For those of you that are into creating your own type faces for most any display plotter or printer there s an interesting book you should know about It is called the National Bureau of Standards Special Publication 424 and the price was only 3 The first little gotcha is that this item is permanantly out of print Possibly you can borrow a copy from a library with a large government doc uments section The original catalog number was SD C13 10 424 The second gotcha is that their fonts are intended for stroke graphics rather than for raster scanned graphics so there s not a lot here that you can immediately put to use I have also found a better way to open a Canon copier or laser printer toner tank for refilling Instead of cutting or scraping a hole in the tank you simply melt one A min iature 25 watt soldering iron MACHINE FBB3 38 Apple Il EA Apple Il Apple Ill SEA 0
71. in machine language routines for hex to ASCII and ASCII to hex conversion Specifically FDE3 will convert the low hex accum ulator byte to ASCII FDDA will convert the entire accum ulator to a hex ASCII pair F941 will print first the X register and then the accum ulator as four successive hex digits Finally FFA7 will rev erse the process and convert the ASCII characters in 003E low and 003F high into a two byte hex value You can tear apart this code for a quick study on conversion details The inner most secrets of easily and rapidly tearing apart machine language code appear in my 0011 0000 30 0011 0001 31 0011 0010 32 0011 0011 33 0011 0100 34 0011 0101 35 0011 0110 36 0011 0111 37 0011 1000 38 0011 1001 39 Fig 2 Decimal and ASCII equivalents 18 3 Enhancing your Apple II vol ume I SAMS 21822 Tell me All About Toner Cartridges The Canon laser engines such as the LaserWriter or LaserJet use a plug in cart ridge that includes toner the photosensitive drum corona charging and includes just about everything major that is likely to need servicing in a xerographic copy machine These cartridges cost from 65 to 100 each and are only good for 2500 copies Worse yet there are def inite quality control problems and not every cartridge is usable over its whole life Every once in a while a cartridge flat out refuses to give decent blacks partic ularly
72. is done by using a plastic funnel and dumping one bottle of toner into this hole all the while tilting and shaking slightly After refilling scotch tape the hole shut and replace the label Add a new label on top of the existing one and write the cartridge history on it Include the date the brand of refill the number of the refill continued on page 25 6 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU March 1987 IIgs Books and Manuals Applewriter IIgs Patches A Postscript Rubber Grid More on the Omnicrom Color De putrifying Laserwriter Grays score on who is doing what to whom then get yourself a free subscription to Computer Reseller magazine For instance we see that the Macintosh computer once again leads in unit sales and the Mac people should be rightly proud of this Why this means that those Mac people have finally gotten to the point where they are a mere five percentage points behind the combined IIc and Ile unit sales And as will come as no suprise whatsoever to long term Ask the Guru readers the very best selling printer in the world today is The Apple Laserwriter That s in terms of dollar volume while the Imagewriter printer leads in unit sales Epson does beat out Apple in total units sold spread out over several machines And those sales figures are for all printers on all personal computers as reported in a trade journal that has a fair to middlin bias towards the In credibly
73. just gone Postscript for all their desktop publishing products Which once and for all guarantees that Postscript is now officially the standard page description language One side effect of this has been the 2 1 splitting and quadrupling in value of the Adobe stock to an all time record high So Pll reverse that hot stock tip I previously gave you Sell Adobe and take your 400 percent profit After all there s no need to get greedy Speaking of Postscript do not forget we have this hot new BBS on line at 409 244 4704 Most of the Com puter Shopper listings on Laser Printing Click to Clunk times v 47 1 A MEOWWRRR Puss De Resistance Appletalk on a Mac 9600 Baud on a lle 19200 Baud on a ligs 90 seconds 70 seconds 58 seconds B IIGSBLK IIgs Block Diagram Appletalk on a Mac 9600 Baud on a lle 19200 baud on a ligs 45 seconds 30 seconds 22 seconds Fig 1 Appletalk is slower than 9600 baud 28 1 ASK THE GURU Defeat the test page on power up Let the machine run continuously Arrange your work so that similar jobs are processed together Use a fast communicating computer such as a Ile rather than a slow communicating one such as a Macintosh Avoid Appletalk like the plague Download persistent utility routines on first power up rather that prefixing each file with the needed code Use the latest available ROM version for your laser printer or typesetter Do not use i
74. key information need ed to do all this appears in the supplement to Quality Software s Beneath Apple ProDOS You first BLOAD BASICS SYSTEM A 2000 TSYS D1 Then you find the file that stashes the name for the startup disk On ProDOS V1 0 1 or V1 0 2 the needed STARTUP file will begin at 21E6 and is coded as 21E5 53 54 41 52 54 55 50 Change the 50 at 21EB to 58 Then save to a new diskette by doing the BSAVE BASIX SYSTEM A 2000 E 47FF TSYS D2 You can thus end up with two programs on your disk STARTUX is one that BAS ICS SYSTEM will boot while plain old STARTUP is the one that Applewriter will use Since they have different names there are no mixups possible My STARTUX on the new utilities package boots up in Applesloth and gives you a choice of running your Apple writer of doing the HIRES bitmap conversion using a mixed Applesloth and Ass embly routine or of exiting to Applesloth The Applewriter STARTUP loads the PGLOSS Postscript single key glossary for the Laserwriter sets the prefix to drive two and boots a WPL supervisor that gives you a menu of all the utilities From this menu you select any of the mind blowing routines that are available Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU November 1985 Vaporlock bugs Dual Ile monitor Isometric drawing ProDOS disk space Customer complaints or all those of you that F just can t survive on a single fix of all these goodies per month
75. kind with the smooth pins that can be safely plugged into another socket These can be sep erated by a pair of dip strips leaving room for the 74HC04 inverter between the two soc kets The 74HC04 can have its pins bent up over its own top and can be directly soldered in place The adaptor normally is only needed for the F8 ROM socket You then can plug a 2716 EPROM into the adaptor creating any monitor funct ions you like any way you want to Should you run into card clearance problems consider adding a short piece of 24 conductor flat cable as an extension socket Keep the cable as short as possible if you do this If you really want to get fancy you could use a 2732 EPROM instead and a switch to flip between a stock and a new custom monitor Put one monitor on the bottom half of the 2732 and the other on the top half then switch the most significant address line This would be similar to the dual character generator we looked at a few columns back that eases the unmiti gated disaster of the new Ile lateral arabesque Where Can I Get Oddball Commodore Integrated Circuits While I have not personal ly checked them out Boufal Services lists a wide variety of Commodore chips and stuff including the rare and hard to get 6560 and 6567 VIC chips and the 6581 SID integrated circuits Wonder of wonders they also have KIM 1 s at very attractive prices The KIM 1 was far and away the greatest microc
76. megabytes of RAM disk Just as soon as the prices drop a tad more on the 1 megabyte RAM chips you can quadruple your storage up to 32 Megabytes In fact you can do it today One megabyte RAM chips are certainly available but they are not yet cost competitive with older 256K dynamic RAMs And should you attach a single intelligent drive to the usual DB19 disk con nector on the IIgs you can control up to 128 different drives at once This would obviously take a beefed up power supply but it can definitely be done Astoundingly the present firmware but not the drives themselves is capable of supporting up to five giga bytes per drive for the mind numbing total of a half a terabyte of data on line at once Which is not too shabby for a personal computer And particularly since next year s CD ROM s should drop in just fine thank you The normal and usual setup for most IIgs users is to daisy chain four dumb disk drives placing a pair of 3 1 2 inch drives nearest the IIgs and using a pair of 5 1 4 inch drives as tail end Charlies The only little problem here is that the IIgs and all of the newer Apple drives use a DB 19 connector But many of those older Apple drives used a 20 pin DIP header connector instead that has wildly different pinouts What can be done here There are at least two ways you can use these older 20 pin drives on the IIgs The quickest and simplest is to go ahead and use a
77. middle of your file by breaking the list and inserting or deleting vm segments from the list Several vm lists can be used The free list can hold all of the available memory A non purgeable list holds all of the files that must not be deleted or changed A purge able list holds program mod ules that can be bumped out of vm if something more im portant needs the area Virtual memory manage ment consists of maintaining linked lists of free memory purgeable memory of and non purgeable memory As a vm area gets removed from one list it gets added to another The tricky part is to make sure that things don t end up in very tiny segments involving very long lists Normally the total am ount of vm will exceed all the real RAM available This helps the fragmentation pro blem considerably In the case of the original Appleworks the virtual mem ory is 128K bytes although only 55K of this is mapped to real RAM In new Appleworks 1 3 the size of vm depends on how much memory expansion card you have in use For instance with no card you still usually get 55K while with a 512K card you get a desktop area of 503K bytes It is convenient to always use a 16 bit vm address regardless of the number of bytes in vm A 128K vm memory consists of 256 pages of 512 bytes each So the high 8 bit byte of our vm address can pick which of the 256 pages we are going to start on or link to The low 8 bit byte can tell
78. new freebies And now let s throw a bone or two at all you new comers to this column 1 Initialize a new 3 5 disk on the Ilgs using the llgs system 2 0 utilities Do NOT use a third party product or an earlier INIT routine Copy AW SYSTEM as the FIRST system program on this disk Use either Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 Copy a patched version of AWD SYS SYS PRT and TAB PRT You can also copy your favorite WPL STARTUP program and glossaries Optional HELP routines may also be copied at this time Copy the program P8 from your Ilgs system master disk 2 0 Then RENAME the P8 file as PRODOS Your disk will rapidly boot as ordinary ProDOS To access the control panel from within Applewriter do an open apple ctrl esc Note that you have a choice of using unmodified AWD SYS with a Super Serial Card or of making the ongoing patches shown here in CS Fig 2 Applewriter Ilgs control panel and fast boot 29 2 What Apple Resources Are Available There are many good and useful sources for information on your Apple computers if you just know where to look or who to ask A local club or user group is the best place to get useful contacts and hands on local help You can find the user groups in your area by using the listings right here in Computer Shopper or else by calling 800 538 9696 and asking for extension 500 An outstanding source of technical information on all the Apple products is the A P D A
79. not be used Instead an alike but different somehow patch should be used This patch goes in a different location is slightly longer and has a different checksum To build an absolute reset for the new Ile Use SNATCHMON to copy the new Ile monitor BLOAD IIEMON C A 8000 CALL 151 82C8 EE F4 03 AO 1C A9 C5 20 A8 FC 2C 61 CO 10 OB 88 DO F3 4C 59 FF CO CO 00 00 00 BSAVE KREBFMON C NEW IIE A 8000 L 1000 Burn the new CD EPROM Use KREBFMON C NEW IIE for the low 32K and IIEMON D for the high 32K If your burner can handle a whole 2764 at once combine and move your files downward to a suitable buffer space in memory For instance do a BLOAD KREBFMON C NEW IIE A 2000 and then a BLOAD IIEMON D A 3000 This gives you an 8K buffer starting at 2000 Note that you will plow DOS if you try using an 8K buffer that starts at 8000 Note also that the self test on the new Ile behaves differently on the new lle than the old Expect some page two garbage and an ocassional flash followed by a System OK message after a minute or two Fig 1 Absolute reset for the enhanced Apple lle ASK THE GURU Just be sure to call or write per the end box Best calling times are on weekdays 8 5 Mountain Standard Time On to the goodies How do You do a IIc or A New IIe Absolute Reset I have recently shown you how to do an absolute old Ile reset to the old monitor that eliminates the hole bl
80. now total 35 when you add up all the variations But before we go on be sure to watch out very care Figure One To draw a smooth curve first pick a few data points 13 1 fully for who is calling what a font On the gutless imitation Laserwriter knockoffs one single font gives you only one way of showing one size of one particular typestyle only in one page direction On a real Laserwriter or on a Laserwriter Plus one font can be shown in any size from 2 points on up to 65 000 points in quarter point inc rements That font may be imaged in any direction or along any path besides being stretchable leanable or twist able in any direction and cap able of being outlined shad owed gray shaded clipped three dimensioned patterned and who knows what elsed Thus one Laserwriter font equals at least several billion knockoff laser printer fonts That s assuming you are not very creative If you are then one Laserwriter font equals a totally ridiculous number of imitation knockoff fonts Beware of knockoff hype Back to that brand new Laserwriter Plus Some very subtle bugs in the old ROMs were fixed in this upgrade There also are some speed improvements of interest to those intent on using a new Macintosh Plus as a Laser writer driver Using an Apple He still remains faster however Par ticularly since you can now serially communicate at up to 57600 Baud The Laserwriter Plus also proud
81. odd rule to blacken the inside of the letter You can approach cubic splines from two different ways Chances are you will like the intuitive or try it and see route instead of the analytical or mess with all that hairy math method The cubic splines lend themselves beautifully to experimenting and playing with them Anyway figure two shows us what is involved in using a cubic spline once the micro computer or printer has been internally set up or program med to handle them The object of the game is to build a curve from a point marked SECOND LP d Fig 2 Cubic Splines use influence points ASK THE GURU START over to a point named END To get from START to END you go by way of two influence points The posit ioning of the influence points set the shape of the curve you will get The direction you leave from START is decided by the first influence point The direction you enter END is set by the second influence point The distance from START to the first influence point or the distance from the second influence point to END sets the enthuasiasm at which the curve will move in the intended direction Once you have left START the smoothest possible curve that can be drawn with a pair of X Y cubic polynomials can then be drawn The first cubic polynomial handles the hori zontal motion The second takes care of the vertical The direction you head in is known as the bias by the computer
82. of an new electronic three way air valve for low pressure robotics How does thirty cents sound Thirty cents They are called automotive EGR valves and originally were made by the Carter Carburetor people For many years now they have been available surplus from C amp H Sales Jerryco Herbach and Rademan BNF Sales Surplus Center and all of your usual mechanical surplus outfits Your nearest handy dandy junk yard is also crammed full of them Incredibly these have gone begging You ll find that Jerryco has far and away the lowest valve pricing the most outrageous catalog and the most mind blowing array of other good ies Where else under one roof can you get a genuine joystick for a B 17 bomber lumber grading crayons a matched set of 24 official US Army urine speciman bottles candle molds or a dummy howitzer shell Be sure to check them out Figure 1 shows you a typ ical valve You power it with 12 volts DC to connect the air source to the load Removing power vents the load to ambient through a filtered vent at the rear of the valve coil The side pipe goes to the air source You can make a simple manifold for several valves by taking a piece of thick large diameter tubing and punching one pin hole in it for each valve Then push the front arm of each valve into the pinhole A push on pressure seal is all you need at 3 5 psi Medium power electronic drivers such as a Sprague ULN 2813 eas
83. of typing his name in every time you need a new number One random number can be most useful though as a seed to generate a sequence of pseudorandom numbers PSR1 cs al COUT TTT e COT TTT 2 To generate a new random one or zero take these two bit locations EOR them together and put them in the carry flag 4 Repeat once for each needed gt 3 Rotate the carry left into PSR1 Rotate left into PSR2 Rotate left into PSR3 Then rotate left into PSR4 The carry will now hold a one or a zero out of a pseudorandom sequence that is a total of 2 147 483 687 bits in length bit of your random number Fig 1 A good random number generator ASK THE GURU Generating pseudorandom numbers is not trivial Apple sloth tried it and they failed miserably As is well known there is a fatal flaw in the Applesloth random number generator Some of its con trived sequences can almost be acceptably long Others are as short as 191 values before repeating This leads to dis tinct unrandomness in many BASIC game programs And no the published reseeding fixes don t help much all they do is bury the problem and make it slightly more subtle Figure one shows a good pseudorandom number gen erator that has no bad habits and easily passes the less exotic randomness tests It is a model of a circular pipe with 2 147 483 687 marbles in it The pipe has a one marble wide glass window in it Half of t
84. off the inside riser tube and cut the snout so it sticks up two inches or so from the cap You then dump the toner into the bottle and gently squeeze the bottle into the cartridge Presto No funnel and less than one tenth the mess Other ways of making the holes in the cartridge include the Unibit plastic drill from Vise Grip or hot melting with a 45 caliber cartridge To shatter several of the myths going around A com plete cartridge disassembly and rebuild is almost certainly guaranteed to cause lots more problems than it solves And using a vacuum cleaner to empty the toner holding tank can short out the commutator on the motor and start a fire Not to mention that all the toner dust goes right through most vacuum cleaner bags like they weren t there August 1987 A key reminder or two Copier toner and laser printer toner are different and must not be mixed up The toner used in those new laser SX engines is also different than the older CX stuff For more info on cartridge refilling check out my new An Introduction to PostScript video tape Tell me all About Binding Systems The big desktop publishing revolution has now created all sorts of needs to hold pieces of paper together Now the binding systems manufacturers want a product copyright 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal and non commercial use
85. offer for owners of any older versions of Applewriter They must have reasoned that a year was long enough I feel that this move was extreme ly stupid and that upgrade availability should go on for a minimum of at least one more year One reason for this is that people are just beginning to discover the remarkable hidden powers lurking within Applewriter The beauty of the WPL to Postscript linking is one newly discovered use Apple s steadfast refusal to sell any replacement manuals is equally short sighted If you agree then do rattle Apple s cage Or at least run a stick over the bars We have a winner in our latest contest Mark Bannis ter from Huntsville Alabama wins a free book as well as an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ for his winning entry in our great Applewriter contest As you may recall all you had to do to enter was show the best way that you could milk cows while using Applewriter To quote Mark It is com mon knowledge that the whirring sound of the Apple II disk drives can cause milk cows to lactate on their own Just put a bucket under the old gals and set your disks to spinning My neighbor tells me that it works on goats as well Since we ve only had a few entries so far ll open up the contest a bit more and award several more books To win just show me the most off the wall the oddest or the most creative current use of Applewriter Nuff nonsense
86. ola style pin multiplexing on the data low address lines At the very worst this can mean you will have to provide for a 74HC373 addressing latch in your final circuit It might even be possible to drop this dude and an adaptor directly into the 65C02 socket on an Apple Ic II or Tle and then run everything else out of a humongous new I O connector But you would have to be very sneaky to convert Ap ple s 1X system clock with its very precisely controlled and intentional jitter into the 8X clock as needed by this chip Switching around the page zero locations can get rather tricky and a few of the Apple signal lines would have to get faked somewhow But stay tuned The beauty of being more or less Apple compatible is that the full resources of the Apple become available for your design debugging and testing of what you want to do No costly ROM masks or emulation software is needed and the whole design process gets fast and fun by using standard assemblers debug gers printers disk drives and so on down the list An obvious thing to do is combine the VIP peripheral card we looked at last month with this exciting new chip You ll find lots of infor mation on the programming of 6502 style chips such as the M50734 in my two Micro Cookbooks SAMS 21828 and 21829 I do stock these two titles for you I ve got a contest going on this chip in my Hardware Hacker column in Modern Electronics so Pll let
87. on it Pour the contents of the blender over the twinkies Bake at 325 degrees for 55 60 minutes or until it looks about right Variation For Hostess Twinkies Enchilada style substitute 3 4 pound of stale Doritos Corn Chips for the fortune cookies Fig 1 The ultimate hacker food previously censored and ex purgated material You ll also find Radio Electronics much easier to find locally Pll skip the advetorial this month I won t even tell you about all my Ask the Guru reprints my Introduction to Postscript video now in both VHS and beta my Postscript Show and Tell or my Post script Technical Illustrations or any of the free goodies you can get if you call or write A reminder that there s a great Postscript BBS you can reach at 409 244 4704 A new newsletters and some on disk downloads are also now available We return you now to our program in progress What is the Ultimate Hacker Food The tinaja quest winners in our hacker foods contest are Chuck and Sherry Romberger of SoftROM Computers up in Flagstaff Who by the way run just about the best IBM clone shop in all of Northern Arizona Their winning recipe for Hostess Twinkies Szech waun Style appears right here in figure one There are several strengths of the El Fumarole Salsa De Mucho Caliente available Be sure to select the local blend one that has the picture of the broken thermometer on it The second place winner was Lorn
88. on these as of yet I think the toner is different perhaps a finer grind or whatever Chances are that same hole melting trick we used CS Feb 87 for the big cartridges will work here Please mail me an empty cartridge if you get a chance The new HP machines use this engine Sadly since HP refuses to speak Postscript their new machines are utterly and totally useless There is hope however for older Laserjet owners You can now get a new snap on Postscript lid that at long last actually lets you do useful laser printing with a Laserjet All at a combined cost that is a mere 1500 or so above the street price of having used a Laserwriter in the first place The product is called the PS Jet One source is Woody Baker at The Copier Store I will say this about HP though Their policy on laser replacement parts and man uals is light years ahead of Apple In fact just about all knowledgeable Laserwriter buyers run out and get a copy Using the BASIC protocol in slot 1 To INIT do a JSR C100 or a CALL 49408 To READ do a JSR C105 or a CALL 49413 To WRITE do a JSR C107 or CALL 49415 Note that READ will hang the machine until such time as a valid character is input Using the Pascal protocol in slot 1 To INIT read the routine offset value in C10D Then set X C1 Y 10 A anything and JSR to C100 PLUS the offset value On exit X will hold the error code with 0 no errors To find
89. or other graphics images are handled by putting markers into your text and then printing to disk You then read the disk a line at a time by using Applesloth When the marker comes up you stop the printing and start doing a graphics dump When the picture or graph is fin ished you pick up the proper printing in the proper position and continue with your text 9 A real proportionally spaced wall to wall microjust ification can be added to most modern printers by initially printing to disk Then the disk is read by a suitable routine that counts all the individual widths of each character in the line After that each and every space on that line is widened just enough to force the text between left and right margins When you do this be sure to not justify leading spaces or else all your para graphs will end up ratty 10 For printers that al ready have microjustification ready to go a trip to disk lets you insert those special com mands only at print time so they stay out of your files 11 Lists can be sorted and numbers can be totaled by grabbing them just before their final printing and rear ranging their order 12 Daisywheels having funny spokes might be re coded so they will print prop erly again by printing to disk and then doing a replace You might find Applesloth DENSEST GRAYS January 1986 post processing a tad on the slow side Even so this may be the quickest and simpliest w
90. over larger areas What can be done to both lower cartridge costs and im prove the output quality First note that you can NOT and must NOT use an ordinary copier toner cart ridge or ordinary copier toner Besides mechanical interlocks that prevent you from doing this copiers use a positive acting toner light white while laser printers use a negative acting toner light black Second that box means exactly what it says on that 104 degree Farenheit max temperature warning Should cartridges scunge around in a hot warehouse or in a sunny truck their quality will rap idly deteriorate So be sure to cool it with all your toner cartridges Third be sure to often do the routine maintenence The corona wire inside the toner cartridge must be wiped every so often with the little green wiper tool The corona wire inside the laser printer needs cleaning every now and then with a Q tip Be very careful to not stress the wire when you do this It is also a good idea to keep a solder sucker or childs rectal syringe on hand Every time you open the machine up for whatever reason be sure to dust things off thoroughly Fourth keep that fusion wiper pad clean It pays to lightly scape it with a knife every 500 copies or so And be sure to change it when you change the cartridge Fifth rock the cartridge every now and then to redis tribute the toner Sixth don t try fighting the drum s life cycle Fresh ca
91. people They stock just about everything on disk or paper that s available for just about everything Apple They should be your first and foremost resource Besides Computer Shopper far and away the greatest two Apple magazines are Tom Weishaar s Open Apple and Bob Sander Cedarlof s Apple Assembly Line The best Apple books are often published by Addison Weseley While carried by A P D A many of these are stocked in larger bookstores My own Apple books do include Enhancing your Apple IT and IIe volumes I and II the Apple Assembly Cook book the Micro Cookbooks both volumes I and II my Applewriter Cookbook and my Ask the Guru reprints I do stock autographed copies of these as a reader service Apple publishes a series of technical notes one set for the Ile IIc IIgs and another set for the Macintosh While anyone can subscribe to these free copies are usually down loadable from a BBS or else can be borrowed from your local user group Some other Apple Com puter corporate resources do include their Developer s Ex press and Outside Apple Electronic bulletin boards are an excellent source of info and technical help A good listing appears right here in Computer Shopper Since board listings go out of date very quickly the trick is to get on to any local board Chances are they will have a complete and current listing of all the other boards in your neighborhood Public domain software and s
92. permitted so long as this header remains present and intact curvetrace curvelist exch def tension 0 eq tension 000001 def if curvelist length 3 div 1 sub cvi triads exch def ptr 0 def firstpoint morepoint def tension 2 83 def default for best fit showtick false def don t show points ticklen 15 def tickhead ticklen 4 div def length of ticks prvx curvelist ptr 3 sub get def curx curvelist ptr get def prvy curvelist ptr 2 sub get def cury curvelist ptr 1 add get def prva curvelist ptr 1 sub get def cura curvelist ptr 2 add get 180 sub def showtic1 showtick true eq gsave currentpoint newpath translate cura 180 add rotate ticklen neg 2 div 0 moveto ticklen 0 rlineto tickhead neg dup rlineto tickhead dup rlineto tickhead dup neg exch rlineto 0 setlinewidth stroke 0 ticklen neg 2 div moveto 0 ticklen rlineto stroke grestore if def firstpoint curx cury moveto showtic1 ptr ptr 3 add def def morepoint triads curx prvx sub dup mul cury prvy sub dup mul add sqrt tension div zdist exch def prva cos zdist mul prvx add prva sin zdist mul prvy add cura cos zdist mul curx add cura sin zdist mul cury add curx cury curveto showtic1 ptr ptr 3 add def repeat def Fig 4 My Postscript curvetrace routine 30 4 ASK THE GURU requires curvetrace routine of figure four showtick false def tension 2 6 def 1 setlinecap 1 setlinejoin ct1 cur
93. please note that I have a Hardware Hacker sister column that ap pears in Modern Electronics magazine While there is some overlap between the two columns this one over here in Computer Shopper leans more towards software and Apples while the Modern Electronics one has much more hardware stuff in it which involves both computers and older stand alone electronics As usual we have some freebies available for your when you call or write First a no charge Synergetics tech nical helpline The answers are free but the call is your dime or whatever There s also a free book and product list bunches of free patches for Applewriter and a new laser printing demo package that makes Mac graphics look worse than a dull crayon on used notebook paper On to whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here If you ever figure it out please be sure to let me know How Do I Get More Room On a PRODOS Diskette I always try to cram all of my for sale diskette products as full as possible To me it seems kind of dumb not to use all of the available disk space when you are selling something An extra demo or two and a few more tutorials never hurt anything What can you do when you need just a little more room on a supposedly full ProDOS diskette First if you have lots and lots of files on your disk the chances are that one or more older versions or any other unnecessary stuff might be lurking somewhere in the mid
94. plied product it is almost certain to set the future de facto standard for any add on memory cards of any type There are several different levels at which you can use the card Let s look at the highest level first On first bootup the entire RAM card automat ically becomes a virtual disk The advantages of a virtual disk over a real one are that you can read and write to it extremely fast The big dis advantage of course is that Data R W Byte Address High Byte Address Mid Byte Address Low Byte Values shown are for slot FIVE Fig 1 Apple RAM card low level entry points 10 1 ASK THE GURU the contents of a RAM disk are volatile and will go bye bye on power down When using a virtual RAM disk you will want to back up your work to real disk files much more often than usual Nuff said on that Under ProDOS the entire megabyte can be used as a single virtual disk But with DOS 3 3 you are limited to slightly less than 500K max imum since this is the largest disk size DOS 3 3 is able to recognize Now for the unusual part The Apple RAM card is not bank switched While superb for storing just about anything you can not directly run a program while it is still sitting in the RAM card You first have to move that program to either main or auxiliary memory and only then can you run it Figure one shows us all four of the low level RAM card entry points Only four address space l
95. printer machinery and acces sory people have been grossly overcharging us for So far I have two simple projects of my own These are a 6 paper folder and a 9 replacement for the 500 Vellobinder binding machine Let me know if you want any details on these Pd like to make a contest out of all of this As usual an Incredible Secret money Ma chine to the twenty or so best entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two to the very best So just show me all the cheapest and simpliest substi tutes suitable for laser self printing that replace these products 1 A clamping paper cut ter that is cheap 2 A 39 95 machine for Kroy Kolor fusion 3 A perfect binding sys tem that allows many cover materials and uses glue only 4 A cheap jogger that can align sheets of paper 5 A corner rounder that is fairly priced 6 A way to die cut your own labels any way you like 7 An acurate way to fold brochures and such 8 Simple perforating and scoring systems 9 A handy padding press 10 A paper drill 11 A sanely priced saddle stapler or alternative 12 Any way to laser print envelopes that works 13 Cheap thermal binders 14 A system for varnish ing or laminating 15 A semi automatic way to collate pages 16 Ways of printing color T shirts and fabrics 17 Packaging staplers that are easy to use 18 Greatly improved color systems 19 S
96. some RAM Can t you just picture the third assistant cook for a Grosse Pointe MI housewife going down into the Detroit getto knocking on a door and asking Madame is a bit short this week Could she borrow a cup of sugar Is this any different from a super fast 2 5 megabyte 68000 Postscript computer knocking on the I O port of say a Commodore 64 and saying Uh I m feeling a little elitist today would you mind jus tifying a few characters for me Dumb Adobe s reasoning is that externally compiled code is much faster than internally interpreted Postscript Sadly the compiled code can get enough longer that any sav ings in the internal processing time is more than gobbled up by the much longer file trans mission times Take Meowwrrr our puddy cat ferinstance He is full of horrible trig calculations and irregular clipping intervals so he would appear to be a prime candidate for compil ing Since compiling Post script code is fairly trivial I tried it Sure enough the execution time got shorter On the other hand the transmission time got enough longer that the final printing actually took longer to do And no Appletalk is NOT any faster than 9600 baud In fact it is considerably slower and creates its own problems Full details on this cage rat tler right here next month Besides who says the host is going to be using compiled code Asking TI BASIC on say a 99 4 to calculate all of
97. steep minimum orders or any totally ridiculous setup charg es involved You can easily expand into virtually any step and repeat peel n stick use from disk labels business cards placards nasty signs impractical jokes pornogra phy political bull whatever All with Applewriter and Laserwriter of course Most importantly you can handle the small onsie twosie orders that the old line bum persticker people positively refuse to touch Lots and lots of people could think up do zens of uses for a few custom labels or bumperstickers of their own Very few want to shell out 80 or so for a min imum order to the traditional suppliers So step right up folks Tell ya what wer e gonna do The Abeja Laser Printing branch of the Synergetics fine family of scams is now in the custom bumpersticker busi ness in a big way And you are completely free to steal the plans on this one and go with it on your own To get in on the fun write or call Bee at Abeja for your free sample bumpersticker Next send or phone her a sketch and 5 95 We ll then send you your choice of A 6 custom bumperstickers B 36 custom shipping labels C 36 custom diskette labels or else D 40 custom business cards Why shucks yew caint beat that with a willow pole Should you want to get into this on your own one good source of small quantities of bumpersticker stock is Dick Blick Large volume suppliers advertise in Printing
98. that has been done on the IIc to pick up compatibility with the new Protocol Converter stuff If so this means a SCSI inter face for the Ile is just around the corner Apple has also announced student rebates of 150 on an Apple He To qualify you do have to be a full time student at a college trade school or university Just about any em ployee at these institutions can also qualify They are also opening up that internal Apple Link telecomm and bulletin board network This net was orig ionally intended mostly for dealers and developers but selected user groups can now qualify The first user group hour per month is free and then 25 per hour after that to tap all of Apple s inside sec rets and tech documentation There is a ten hour per month use limit to prevent outright ripoffs Speaking of opening up apparently tech information and tech literature is becom ing much more available For openers there s three Support Training Library manuals available Part numbers are 072 0187 for the Apple II 072 0186 for the Macintosh and 072 0188 for peripherals Technical note mailings are also now available The 1985 Apple II tech notes cost 45 for a complete set with a current bimonthly subscrip tion available for 25 Similar Macintosh tech notes are 25 for1985 and 25 for a bi monthly subscription So much for the upbeat stuff Now for the flip side The highly touted SANE or Standard Apple Nume
99. the II the I emulator the old Ie the new Ile the old IIc and the new Ilc If you pretest the machine your software is about to be run on you can selectively add or remove features letting you optimize your program for the target machine There are two ways you can identify these different machines The method that always works is to verify those four monitor bytes shown to you in figure one below Every byte combination is unique for that machine The second method works only under ProDOS and uses location BF98 in main mem ory Figure two shows you details This location will also tell you whether a compatible clock is installed how much memory is present and if any 80 column firmware exists UPDATE November 86 By the way there are two free Apple manuals that have lots of this sort of information in them These are the Apple IIc Programmers Guide to the 3 5 ROM A2L4037 and the About Your Enhanced Apple Ie A2L2072 You may want to pick both of these up I Need a RAM Card Snooper Routine Figure three is a listing of a short routine that will copy up to 56 pages or 27 ProDOS blocks from a slot 4 Apple one megabyte RAM card into main memory It will do so with or without an operating system and can be used after a cold reset This new routine has some outstanding diagnostic and or analysis possibilities You can set the number of pages read by the hex value poked into 0F01 Use 01 for a
100. the READ STATUS read the offset value in C110 Set X C1 Y 10 and A 01 JSR to C100 PLUS the offset value On exit a set carry means an input character is ready to be read To READ read the routine offset value in C10E Then set X C1 Y 10 A anything and JSR to C100 PLUS the offset value On exit A will hold the read input value while X holds the error code with 0 no errors To find the WRITE STATUS read the offset value in C110 Set X C1 Y 10 and A 00 JSR to C100 PLUS the offset value On exit a set carry means an output character can now be accepted To WRITE read the routine offset value in C10F Then set X C1 Y 10 A low ASCII character to be written JSR to C100 PLUS the offset value On exit A is trashed while X holds the error code with 00 no errors Fig 1 Ilgs intermediate level serial I O access ASK THE GURU of the HP service manual That s part 02686 90904 Which of course results in Apple paying to HP a 50 cash rebate for most every Laserwriter that s sold More on this in a future column Meanwhile and I m not sure you are supposed to know this yet Apple just might happen to be working on a new set of ROM chips for the Laserwriter These chips run some 33 percent faster and have gotten rid of the frame device blowups the bugs that had made copypage useless and have finally sped up the stringwidth comm
101. the next left margin every now and then To cure this print to disk reload the new image put a no under line command at the end of the problem line and then print to paper 3 To change your daisy wheel in mid line for italics or whatever print to disk Then read the disk image with Applesloth looking for some keying markers If no marker is found one line at a time is printed If a marker is found the appropriate wheel swap prompt is output 4 Sometimes you might want to print on two wildly different brands of printer or even on both a printer and a typesetter To do this do a print to disk using generic commands Then read your disk image and search replace the generic commands with the specific ones 5 To switch between two word processors that have wildly differing commands print to disk first This strips off all imbedded commands of the first word processor leaving you with a pure text image Then read that image with the second program 6 Headers and footers can be customized beyond the limits of the word processor by repeated trips to disk To do a triple header print to disk two lines shy including the bottom header line Then reprint to disk one line shy adding the middle header line Finally print to paper while adding the top header line 7 Even and odd pagin ation can be picked up by printing first to disk and then doing a search replace on every second header 8 HIRES dumps
102. the spent toner tank bottom 24 4 First you will need a reliable source of refill toner Three sources that I have found extremely useful are the EP 350 refills from most any Minolta copier dealer kits and pads from Laser Printer Products and bulk wholesale CX toner from the Repeat O Type folks Their CX toner sells in bulk for as little as 5 per refill Around 170 225 grams of toner 0 4 pound is needed for each reload One big gotcha here It is extremely important to use monocomponent and negative acting toner that is intended specifically for organic drum laser printers The ordinary copier toner refills most def initely will not work Two simple modifications must be made to the cartridge to allow refilling Note that you do not have to disas semble the cartridge What you have to do is add a filling hole to the top of the fresh toner tank and then add an emptying hole to the bottom of the spent toner holding tank First you pop off the large cardboard label by lifting an end with a pocket knife The toner tank will be under this label As figure six shows us you melt a 1 2 inch diameter C shaped hole in the end of the tank using a soldering iron Then while the plastic is still hot you snap this hole off and trim the bead with a pocket knife Be very careful to get no plastic chips into the hole and do not under any circum stances sand the hole or use steel wool on it The actual refilling
103. these inks Finally you can get fuzzy or felt like thermal transfer vinyl that might be cut with a knife or a special signmaking machine The main source of this new product seems to be Gerber Scientific Six colors are now available And that just about wraps my collection of T shirt stuff If you know of anything else or anything better please let me know so I can pass it on There ll be one of my usual Incredible Secret Money Ma chine books to the twenty best entries along with an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the best info of all What is this Month s Postscript Utility All of the usual Postscript transformations that involve scaling rotation translation and matrix manipulation can give you a very wide variety of ways to present both text and graphics Unfortunately these are all linear transfor mations that must be applied to an entire character or to an entire image For instance a square or a letter could be converted into another square a rectangle or a parallelogram of any size and orientation But you just cannot use a linear transfor mation to do a trapezoid as you would need for individual perspective lettering Instead there is a rather little known but astonishingly powerful Postscript technique that is known as Pixel Line Remapping What pixel line remapping does is let you map just about any character or any image onto pretty near any surface Import
104. through while doing a hand feed of a blank image You could instead buy the expensive custom fusion ma chine and this might be a good choice for high volume work Finally certain of those Minolta copiers are set up to directly handle the Omnicron material In fact any copier that will let you hand feed heavier stock should more or less work provided it has a sane paper path The many uses include Letterheads Business cards badges bumper stickers ad displays and point of pur chase signs Also obvious are multiple color presentation charts and graphs For those places where you absolutely must have a solid black just use some black Omnicrom on top of the black toner This gives you excel lent blacks for advertising copy and similar camera ready needs The Omnicrom process also will give you an instant negative of your image as well These are useful for such things as overhead pro jection sheets dialplates and printed circuit negatives But some fine detail may some times end up missing in the negative Sometimes a slight excess amount of ink will be trans ferred but not fused This may happen inside the e of very small text or between halftone dots To cure this just get some 3M Post It Cover Tape from your local office supply Apply the tape very lightly and then gently peel it off Presto a perfect image usually results Yes you can even handle December 1986 pastel colors by u
105. to make two of these active low pins 20 and 21 and one of them active high pin 18 This was done as a factory option at the time the mask was created for the 2316 On a 2716 EPROM pin 20 is also active low so there is no problem on this pin Pin 21 should be held at 5 at all times to prevent program ming Note that pins 20 and 21 are shorted together on the Apple motherboard Finally pin 18 is made active low or the exact opposite of what you really want Several plans have been published that involve only some jumpering of some 2716 EPROM pins But this ignores the INH inhibit line from the expansion slots If some slot based card tries to make use of that high ROM address space for its own use then you get memory contention a fight and possible damage And since just about every modern II has at least one RAM card in it such conten tion is inevitable Anyway to make a long story short to do an absolute reset on a II you have to add an adaptor socket that fits between your you program it 2716 EPROM and the mother board This adaptor socket has to be an active one that has a single inverter built in The lead to pin 18 goes through the inverter Pin 20 is held at 5 volts All other pins do go straight through The inverter needs 5 volts on pin 14 and ground on pin 7 and on all unused inputs Figure three shows details You can use a pair of 24 pin machined contact DIP sockets the premium
106. to continue ppr pcs Y A pgoaa pcs y A pgoaa pat aa pin Top Header pin Middle Header gt pin Bottom Header gt ppr pin Left Margin gt psx D pin Right Margin gt psy D psz D psz x P p NOTE z is RM LM P ppr pin OK to continue pes Y D pgobb pes y D pgobb ppr L pgoxx bb ppr Y N Y N ppr formatting may take several minutes Pp p print third header to width RM LM plmo prm z ppni ptm4 pbm4 ppl58 ppi63 plio pspo ppd8 pery put plj ptlsc pbl Fig 4A WPL Triple Header for Applewriter 4 5 more compact replacement for Softalk now exists edited by Tom Weishaar who was one of the better of Softalk s contributing editors The magazine is now called Open Apple and it is now up to its sixth issue By special arrangements a free sample copy is available to any Computer Shopper subscriber provided you use the secret password tinaja in your request Cost is 24 per year There are no vaporware ads no misleading ads no bait and switch ads no not in stock ads no ads for overpriced products and no pure puffery ads In fact as you might have guessed by now there are no ads at all Just be ginner to mid level Apple tech information in the most solid and concise form just as you d expect from Tom Show me an Applewriter Triple Header Figure four shows you a WPL routine that will auto matically handle a triple heade
107. to the 28 pin DIP socket as shown using superglue or epoxy Let sit overnight and then verify that the switch still works og coooooo ohja CODD DODO OOOOO0O DON T GET ANY GLUE INSIDE THE SWITCH Prepare a 3 4 inch length of bare 24 wire Connect this wire to pin 14 of the 28 pin socket and then to the nearest pin on the SPDT slide switch Solder both connections using a spare DIP strip as a safety backup heatsink Cut off any remaining wire Be very careful not to get any solder on the tip of pin 14 YOOOOOVDOOOO000 Take a 1 3 4 inch piece of green 24 solid insulated wire and strip 1 4 inch from each end Solder one end of this green wire to pin 26 and the other end to the center pin on the SPDT slide switch KOVOOODOOO9000 Take a two inch piece of red 24 solid insulated wire and strip 1 4 inch from each end Solder one end of this red wire to the far unused pin on the SPDT slide switch Solder the other end of this wire to pin 28 after looping it Make sure that no solder gets on the tip of pin 28 and that there is no short to adjacent pin 27 DOVOVODOOO0000 Turn the Apple lle power off and remove the line cord at both ends Carefully CD ROM EF ROM remove the original CD and EF monitor chips and store them in protective foam Plug one adaptor into the CD ROM slot at D8 and the other adaptor into the EF ROM at D
108. to use these new instructions automatically excludes the software from running on a II or II since many of these 65C02 instructions can hang an older 6502 While hand crafted code that uses these new instruc tions can end up 10 shorter and 10 faster no speed or length difference will auto matically happen with older or existing code By the way if you only want a 65C02 you can get one for free Which is 70 cheaper than the Apple up grade But please do not tell Rockwell who told you to write them on your business letterhead for a free 65C02 And don t let them catch on Keep all requests very profes sional and business like If they didn t want you to have a free 65C02 they would not have said so in so many of their full page ads Anyway most of the com patibility problems lie in the new character generator chip An area of the chip has been set aside to hold a mouse nest full of mouse screen symbols But this misses the point The real use of the mouse nest is that you can now use pull down or pop up menus on the stock text screen letting you pick up all sorts of Mac like features So for future use the up grade is a great idea What can you do here and now to live with it Use this key rule Make EPROM backup copies of all your firmware Do this before you make the upgrade Figure threee is an Apple sloth routine that is named SNATCHMON It will auto matically capture all of your existin
109. trying to swal low or barf characters to the left arrow right arrow buffer It turns out that this command used to have to go all the way through the glossary before it did anything With long glos saries especially self prompt ing ones this extra trip time royally fouled things up This patch operates by trapping out the swallow and barf commands before they have to go clear through the This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile The patch eliminates a complete trip through the glossary whenever an open apple lt or an open apple gt is done greatly clarifying repeat saves or restores of saved characters It works by trapping out these two open apple commands before they are processed as glossary commands Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 2A5A DO 01 60 Change 2A5A 4C 75 45 Verify 4575 AO FF C8 B9 Change 4575 FO 0B C9 4578 08 FO 07 C9 15 FO 03 4C 4580 5D 2A 60 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 4 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Swallowifier patch 22 4 glossary search process Figure four is the same SWALLOWFIER patch inten ded for ProDOS Applewriter version 2 0 Besides its slightly different location note that 2 0
110. type While extremely pow erful it is not too widely used nor well known Let s look at two examples of what you can do with this beauty Say you want to load a SYS type file as a binary image SImply do a BLOAD MYFILE A 2000 TSYS Or say you have a binary text image in your machine To capture this code as a text file just create and open a textfile and then do a BSAVE MYLIST A 3456 E 3A52 TTXT The TSYS is short for type system The TTXT is short for type text The other type com mands include TBIN for type binary TBAS for type Basic and so on Two gotchas Be sure to use different file names for each type of program even if they are otherwise the same Secondly you cannot do a TTXT unless the text file has been previously created and opened What are The Secrets to Selling Educational Software Here revealed for the first time are the two key secrets to successful marketing of educational software These two secrets involve passing the triple B test and obeying the masking criteria In order to get through the administrative selection pro cess the program abolutely must pass the triple B test For educational software to be bought at all it must be Banal It absolutely must be Boring And above all it has to be just plain Bad The triple B test is only the beginning In addition for a program to even be remotely considered for use as educa tional software all superficial design fla
111. under your direct program control Bunches of fancy bells and whistles available You can load and store images from disk or wherever Two or three photos fit on a disk side while 20 fit onto a 1 megabyte RAM card You can instantly reverse invert or rotate the image You can set to full or half brightness You can tuck a half quarter or even a one eighth image onto you screen There s some amazingly sophisticated image proces sing built in that is seldom found in personal computers For instance you can low or high pass filter Low pass filtering is used for anti aliasing and to remove any graininess or excessive scan lines from an image High pass filtering is used to find Fig 3 True anti aliased HIRES line May 1986 edges or to improve contrast Which lets you do things that photographers can do with variable contrast paper or dodging and burning A histogram adds up the values of all 65 536 gray shades and then plots how many of each gray shade you have The eq ualization process then will assign nearly the same num ber of pixels to each of the gray scale values This can let you eliminate camera nonlinearies improve contrast and do a number of other neat things Speaking of which there is a 98 piggyback compan ion subcard which directly digitizes input video to 64 gray levels The price is held down by requiring a station ary image for eight seconds Unlike expensive digitizers pl
112. unlocking or deleting lots of files at once Secondly that extra text space freed up by your shortening can now be used for those two heavy duty Stretchifier and Cursifier patches that we ll see in future columns Equivalent patches for the ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 do appear in my Applewriter Cookbook 21 5 ASK THE GURU Why Have You Been Hiding The Grand Piano You re right Not once in the entire history of our Ask the Guru column have we even once published a picture of a grand piano So to now correct this un speakable oversight figure three is a picture of Bee s Piano Applewriter on an Apple II of course Helped out by my six disk Apple writer Laserwriter Utilities This is done in the highly traditional art style of a printer s tradesman cut as you might use on a more conservative business card or letterhead Then again grand pianos tend to be a tad on the stuffy and conservative side anyway Figure four gives you a complete Postscript listing of the grand piano To use this code you ll also need a free listing of my curvetrace rou tine You can get this one by calling or writing By the way this particular Postscript listing is just long enough that you could get a stack overflow if you tried defining it all as one pro ceedure That is why this routine is broken up into several pieces And This Month s Get Rich Quick Scheme is Business cards How did you guess
113. up a totally different set of gothic vibes bordering almost on a Cop perplate or Steelplate image Once again your own custom Postscript routines make this utterly trivial Pll be happy to lay some free samples on you What About Envelopes Funny you should ask that I have yet to find any way to print decent or even accept able envelopes with any laser printer at all It may have to do with the double paper layer in an envelope giving you charge transfer hassles or with the lack of any uniform spacing between the top envelope surface and the image drum But every once in a long while a beautiful envelope shows up in the mail that has obviously been laser printed Others assure me that there is no problem at all reliably printing laser envelopes And lots of people are trying to sell horrendously overpriced envelope feeder mechanisms So perhaps I don t know something about this or else I am doing something obv iously wrong My own approach right now is to do the return ad dress prepress artwork using the Laserwriter and then have a local printer crash print the envelopes Cost is well under a nickel an envelope if you buy your own quality envelopes and then use jiffy printing But what about the main address I have tried quite a few methods The one that works the best so far is to go back to my noisy old Diablo 630 Netterhead save snap exch def 100 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch s
114. was a filename or disk access error ppr Now returning you to the snoopervisor pgoxxx xp psri ppr Computer is now free ppr xxx pin Press return gt xx oh d1 p p pdosnoop v1 w p pat 1 pnd ppr L ppr Don Lancaster s Laserwriter Label Manager p pin OK to continue Y N return gt A ppr 2a psx2 pes A Y pgoy pes A y pgoy pces A N prt pes A n prt pgoxx y psx1 prt Fig 5 Shipping label WPL supervisory controller ASK THE GURU title page in gold foil You never need print more than you are about to reasonably sell in the next few weeks And ten years from now you can still print and sell one single copy at a profit Wait There s even more Some very ugly things have been happening over in the traditional book publishing business that have been and continue to be a living hell on authors Let s look at a few of the highly negative factors involved with traditional pub lishing today First and ugliest the IRS now pays publishers to shred books much the same way the feds pay farmers not to grow crops In fact the IRS has caused more books to be shredded in the last few weeks than were destroyed in all of the dark ages This means that back lists no longer exist and that all existing copies of your book will summarily be shred ded the instant it drops a notch or two on any of the best sellers list Second those failing mom and pop book stores normally
115. way if you ever do want to keep something a secret be sure and stay out of their review responses column My demo pack letter there on November 5th has pulled thousands of requests so far There are also lots of new fonts in the works These are available from quite a few different sources As I will show you someday it is a simple matter to build your own custom fonts Many of the stock printshop packages are also quickly picking up a full Laserwriter compatibility There are also rumors of a new ROM set for the Laser writer that will give you 42 standard fonts in a stock for mat that can be accessed from any word processor on just about any computer More on this when I get full details Some disk based fonts are also newly available directly from Adobe but unfortunately these are not viable products as they now stand Why Because of three nearly fatal flaws First these new fonts are priced at 175 for a related set of four This is twenty times what compar able fonts are worth today and ten times what the market will bear The perceived value of a font in a personal computer environment is 99 cents as set by any number of popular printshop packages that can offer you fifty or more fonts for 49 95 Besides that most any idiot with a cheat book can rip off Laserwriter fonts quickly and simply With only slightly greater smarts he can also dramatically compact those same fonts at the same time B
116. will fight you tooth and nail over any innovative and low cost e g Postscript way of doing things for all those computer illeterate managers pasteup and layout people are not about to admit they re ornery obsolete and obstructionist Finally any book returns charged against an author s royalties were virtually un heard of several years ago Today an author is extremely lucky if half his royalties are not recalled at a later date On one side we have some unique new opportunities On the other we have everything literally going to hell in a handbasket Kiddies we are looking at a new total revolution in self publishing Let us start up some new networking on this Your modem or my tinaja How can I Speed Up Postscript A lot of the criticisms about Postscript speed has nothing whatsoever to do with the Postscript language Instead user misinformation system constraints very bad software and communications stupidities all gang up on poor old Postscript If you are creating your own Postscript code figure two lists many of the things you can do to substantially speed up your printing times What is this month s Postscript Utility It is an automatic multiple label printer with quite a few unique advantages A sample label is shown in figure three while the Post script code appears in figure four What this does is take any group of labels of any shape and size It then puts a permanant
117. writer images that I have put together for you A reminder that I have arranged with Synergetics to now stock autographed copies of practically all of my books SAMS and otherwise This should ease greatly any has sles you have been having with your local bookshop or computer store Send for a complete and free list My latest new book is the Applewriter Cookbook 1 do have some autographed cop ies on hand for you here Pm told there are still a few copies of Enhancing your Apple II amp Ile left By the way this dude is also for the IIc It s just that you don t like to change titles right in the middle of a multi volume series And as usual this is your Fig 1 This Roman O is trivial with cubic splines column that handles all your questions and your problems Just call or write per the end box And now Can I Edit BASIC Programs by Using A Word Processor As some of you found out the hard way you cannot do this by using that ProDOS TYPE command Instead a simple and quick process exists that lets you do all of your BASIC editing with your favorite word processor Applewriter of course is a top choice since you can enter all BASIC commands directly from the glossary and since you can handle macro sequences by using the WPL supervisor That same process will convert a BASIC program to a textfile in either Dos 3 3e or ProDOS Add a small code module into your program either at the en
118. 0 227 408 90 227 408 180 222 408 180 222 408 90 222 415 90 ctfd 211 394 20 226 406 75 226 406 0 230 406 0 230 406 95 211 394 180 ctfd def keyboardwhite 219 385 177 298 378 177 298 378 90 298 386 90 298 386 3 219 392 3 219 392 90 219 385 90 cifd 280 378 3 295 377 3 ctc 375 4155 307 4175 307 417 120 304 412 120 304 412 4 375 415 4 ctfd 310 440 15 315 431 120 303 413 120 ctc grestore clear def piano 1 setlinecap 1 setlinejoin tension 2 8 def ctf curvetrace gsave 0 setgray fill grestore 1 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ctfd curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 1 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ct curvetrace stroke def cta curvetrace 7 setlinewidth stroke def ctb curvetrace 2 setlinewidth stroke def ctc curvetrace 1 setgray stroke def ctd curvetrace 4 setlinewidth stroke def showtick false def pedals legs lidandbody keyboard support keyboardwhite def 60 150 translate piano showpage Fig 4 Postscript Listing for Bee s Piano 21 4 together so they appear to create a contiguous text file or whatever While the pieces may vary all over the real lot they are tightly connected together in a vm linked list Should a file get longer it simply tacks a new piece of free vm to the end of its list Thus you never have to move existing files around in RAM The linked lists of the virtual memory will automatically do this for you You can even insert or delete stuff from the
119. 0 mul 72 div cvi scanlinenumber exch def gsave mappingproc newpath scanlinenumber 72 mul 300 div 0 moveto 0 pixelprocheight rlineto 0 Orlineto 0 pixelprocheight neg rlineto closepath clip newpath pixelproc grestore for def demo remove before use This first demo simply moves the pixelproc to the center of the page Times B old findfont 40 0 0 40 0 0 makefont setfont pixelproc newpath 5 5 moveto 0 45 rlineto 60 O rlineto 0 45 rlineto closepath 6 setlinewidth stroke 10 5 moveto 0 45 rlineto stroke 60 5 moveto 0 45 rlineto stroke 25 14 moveto S show def pixelprocwidth 100 def pixelprocheight 50 def mappingproc clear 265 300 translate def pixellineremap this second demo stretches the pixelproc so you can see the individual mapping lines mappingproc clear 125 300 mul 72 div scanlinenumber 4 mul add cvi 72 mul 300 div 400 translate def pixellineremap showpage Fig 4 Postscript pixel line remapper 32 4 ASK THE GURU Can I print my Own T Shirts Sure thing But it s usually a lot easier if you take the T shirt off first While I know of no instant full color and high resolution super quality single quantity ultra low cost way of printing T Shirts there are at least half a dozen methods that are pretty nigh but not plumb One of these might be just right for you The traditional way to print a T Shirt is to start with some oversize black on white art work
120. 1 4 ASK THE GURU pm0 tm0 bm0 rm240 pi66 pl66 lj and a blank for ut Remember that you want no further formatting added to your disk image What is on the disk is what you want to actually print Well by now you get the general idea If you want to get some special effect out of your word processor just ask if a print to disk and some sneaky post processing cannot resolve things for you Tellyawhat A free SAMS book to the best five uses of post processing you send me Any old word processor at all Fair enough How can I Print Black And White Photographs Or Other Video Images Naturally we ll start out with our stock answer You do this with Applewriter on an Apple Ile How else could you possibly process video images or print good grays It looks like acceptable quality photographs and video images can be easily handled by Applewriter By accept able I mean something 75 to 100 gray dots per inch with nine to sixteen possible gray levels Just like most of the halftone screens you see right here in Computer Shopper This all started when I first got my Laserwriter I was extremely dissapointed with how crude the grays looked The standard grays were so putrid they looked like they came out of a Macintosh Worse yet any thin gray lines would disappear entirely every now and then unless you used the painfully slow setdash operator Such lines are essential for overprinting layout grids onto artw
121. 10 as shown Plug your already programmed 27128 EPROMs into these adaptors o o p E Be sure that the CD EPROM goes in the CD C66 C67 slot and that the notch and dot on both EPROMs point forwards towards the keyboard Fig 2B Ile dual monitor continued 9 3 ASK THE GURU two years with no reported serious problems But all of a sudden this week I got two calls from two wildly different people having problems using the vaporlock on a IIc or Ile The problem always seems to be related to some exotic plug in card notably the Ultraterm the Niceprint and the SCRG Switch cards I don t have any of these cards and I am at a total loss as to why they should cause any problems on either the old or the new Ile The He has a fully buffered data bus so there should be no loading that would swamp out those fumes needed by the vapor lock And indeed the fumes appear to be still readable from the monitor even when the vaporlock seems to be unable to find them Even if these cards did access some of those invisible HIRES screen hole memory locations needed by the vap orlock they should not do it during the time the vaporlock is actually in use Are special connections to unusual points in the Ile in volved with these cards Are wierd interrupts or any NMI games in use Are special chips used to alter timing Is the memory area needed by the vaporlock sub somethow protected or overwritten Are
122. 19 A or GOSUB 980 VTAB 21 HTAB 13 A lt ESCAPE gt to ABORT GOSUB 980 VTAB 23 HTAB 19 PRINT lt gt VTAB 23 HTAB 21 GET Z IF Z2 lt gt THEN 970 more Fig 3A Applewriter Ile Stretchifier patch 2 3 An alike but different somehow STRETCHIFIER is needed for the new ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Listings of both appear in my Apple writer Cookbook and ready to run versions are on their respective companion disks How Can I Start My Own technical venture Funny you should ask that For a mere 7 50 you can find out how I make money It s an underground classic I wrote a while back called The Incredible Secret Money Machine and it is still going strong It s been in the Whole Earth top ten for a long time Here you can learn all about the dangers of two crossed Granfallons the black widow routine the DOT technique the CAP effect the steam cal liope fund all of those super important honchee guidelines plus much more Hey this stuff works I ve used it and thoroughly tested everything in it over and over again Forever it seems like Over and over again If you want to get in ahead of the hoarders just use the help line We ve been known to take an order or two over the phone Where do I Get Those Secret Apple manuals They weren t supposed to be secret Only a monumental communications foulup made them that way You see there is a
123. 2 a powerful and up wardly mobile and standard typesetting language 3 Font machinery with no sane size limits and without plug in cartridge scams 4 the ab ility to anamorphically rotate translate scale or transform any image 5 powerful and useful internal justification machinery 6 an immediate compatibility with the unmod ified word processor and the stock personal computer of your choice and 7 Cubic splines for free form curves and efficient font handling Figure two shows you a standard test paragraph with the sorts of things in it that are absolutely essential for decent laser printing Have the dealer demo this para graph for you Make certain nothing is needed except a routine loading followed by a stock paragraph or two on your favorite word processor running on your favorite un modified personal computer The actual paragraph used does have a few imbedded escape commands in it and is about as complicated as what you need when switching an Epson to bold print and back Yes that initial H is def initely an internal part of the test paragraph The argument that the Laserwriter is expensive just does not wash Compared to what Most of the competive products are really empty boxes masquerading as laser printers giving you substant ially less than one percent of the performance for fifty or more percent of the cost No way Jose Any Vaporlock Solutions As you may recall from last
124. 2 to n Then take the object in bin 3 and exchange it with the object in a random bin 3 to n Repeat this process until all objects have been exchanged either with themselves or with an object in a higher numbered bin Fig 1 How to shuffle n objects hancing your Apple IT vol II 22415 left It severely hurts an author s credibility and reputation if a book does not sell out its first printing with in ten days of its release Now I hate to get nasty but if certain of you do not shape up by next month I will be forced to publish the names of the remaining 17 Computer Shopper readers who have not yet seen the way the truth and the light This of course will ex clude you from ever getting invited on a tinaja quest Oh well As usual be sure to keep the post office hacked off and the phone lines jammed up Use the number and address in that end box to get in on all the fun On to Release 5 0 Where do I get Apple Gonzo Insider Information Getting the real insider in formation on all those Apple goodies can be a real hassle There is so much garbage out there masquerading as useful or needed info and lots of gaps in what is really needed And it is often hard to get a straight story about the warts on a product Or the interface between two competing third party products Or the bugs and their fixes And partic ularly the buggy fixes that do not apply to you That s no bug its a
125. 306 264 0 0 false 50 true false def Ailbumpstick 1 1 5 610 150 0 20 false 60 true false def octopus 1 2 4 306 198 0 0 false 50 true false def quadsplit 1 2 2 396 306 0 0 true 50 true false def seqbuscard 1 3 4 256 143 12 20 true 20 true true def shiplabel 1 1 4 290 180 314 75 false 0 false false def stdplabel 1 1 11 254 74 320 5 false 20 true false def readerservice 1 12 25 25 15 120 450 false 0 false true def vhsvideospline 1 1 13 424 56 80 35 false 0 false false def 3 5disklabel 1 2 3 216 226 100 60 false 20 false false def 5 25disklabel 1 1 7 316 110 275 35 false 0 false false def end setrepeatparams cvn stepnrptparams exch get aload pop seqnumber exch def ticktrue exch def ticklen exch def portrait exch def vertstart exch def horstart exch def incvert exch def inchoriz exch def numvert exch def numhoriz exch def numpages exch def portrait 90 rotate 792 0 translate if def onetick 0 ticklen 2 div rmoveto 0 ticklen neg rlineto ticklen 2 div neg dup neg rmoveto ticklen 0 rlineto 0 setlinewidth stroke def drawticks gsave ticktrue 0 0 moveto onetick inchoriz 0 moveto onetick 0 incvert moveto onetick inchoriz incvert moveto onetick if grestore def stepandrepeat setrepeatparams numpages gsave horstart vertstart translate gsave numhoriz gsave numvert drawticks save rptsave1 exch def repeatproc rptsave1 restore seqnumber runningnumber run
126. 6 Apple lle old 06 Apple lle new 06 Apple lic old 06 Apple lic new is ideal What you do is melt out a 1 2 inch circle and then stop 9 10ths of the distance around Then you snap the disk off with a pair of small pliers As before you seal the hole with Scotch tape after refilling UPDATE January 87 I heard a rumor that some sort of a modification can be made to laser printers that allows foil hot stamping and embossing Ill believe this one when I see it but my oh my the potential Let me know if you have any details on this UPDATE December 86 Oh yes Some of you seem to be having trouble picking up both of Adobe s two Postscript books locally so we are now stocking them as a special service for all of you Computer Shopper read ers These two books are ab solutely essential to wring the maximum performance out of your Laserwriter As always this is your column and you can get tech nical help per the end box I also have bunches of free stuff available for you when you call or write Let s move on to whatever it is that we re up to here If you ever find out please let FBiE FBCO FBBF AD 8A EA E0 FF 00 00 00 Fig 1 Monitor i d bytes for various flavor Apples 20 1 me know Which Apple is Which This is a favorite question on the help line and it has been a while so here goes There are obvious dif ferences between the Apple I
127. 6 4 It sure is refreshing to see a scholarly journal that always remains simple practical and yet easily understood by lay people It looks like the technology to watch is the quark muon dissociation and regeneration process So I guess I was not too overly suprised when Marcia Swampfelder shipped me her latest peripheral cards for the Apple II Plus her MTT T1 mass transferrence transmitter and her MTT R1 mass trans ferrence receiver Marcia is a tad on the conservative side so she insisted on using illegal monitor entry points that precludes the use of these cards on newer Apples The pricing is rather attractive at 68 50 for the MTT T1 and a mere 43 50 for the seperate MTT R1 You can order direct from Marcia Anyway you first plug the transmitter card into one Apple II Plus and as many as four receiver cards into four receiving Apple II Plus com puters Any object placed in the transmitter s dissociation chamber then will appear reconstructed in the receiver s regeneration chamber The effective range does depend on the telephone line in use but for your average quality voice grade line you can teleport objects up to 500 miles with a single receiver 200 miles with two receivers 100 with three and 50 miles with four receivers The little understood methodology of conjugate phase decongru ence does prevent you from reliably using more than four receivers regardless of the distance The Apple p
128. 77 POKE 1781 IF PEEK REM REC PRINT D PRINT D PRINT D PRINT D POKE 1471 POKE 1472 POKE 147 POKE 147 POKE 1472 POKE 147 POKE 147 POKE 1473 POKE 147 POKE 147 POKE 1474 POKE 147 POKE 147 POKE 1475 IF PEEK REM REC POKE 1739 POKE 1743 PRINT D PRINT D PRINT D BLOAD OBJ APWRT E A 2300 14720 lt gt 235 THEN 950 17396 lt gt 153 THEN 950 17436 lt gt 252 THEN 950 BLOAD OBJ APWRT F A 2300 15063 lt gt 100 THEN 950 17771 lt gt 153 THEN 950 17811 lt gt 117 THEN 950 2 96 POKE 15063 153 4 00 POKE 15065 22 67 155 POKE 15068 208 70 230 POKE 15071 211 POKE 15066 201 POKE 15069 04 2 230 75 196 POKE 15073 211 POKE 15076 220 78 14 POKE 15079 185 0 00 POKE 15081 22 POKE 15082 201 83 155 POKE 15084 208 POKE 15085 04 86 198 POKE 15087 211 8 198 POKE 15089 211 91 208 POKE 15092 238 94 117 POKE 15095 71 1 32 POKE 17772 215 POKE 17773 58 0 76 POKE 17811 227 POKE 17812 58 20365 176 THEN POKE 20365 182 ONNECT HELP SCREENS UNLOCK OBJ APWRT F BSAVE OBJ APWRT F A 2300 L 30D3 LOCK OBJ APWRT F BLOAD OBJ APWRT E A 2300 9 96 0 153 23 201 26 04 8 211 31 96 34 240 6 185 39 201 42 04 4 211 47 136 50 76 2 69 9988 176 THEN POKE 19988 ONNECT HELP SCREENS 6 32 POKE 17397 128 5 76 POKE 17436 140 UNLOCK OBJ APWRT E BSAVE OBJ APWRT E A 2300 LS2F5A LOCK OBJ APWRT
129. Boring Machine side of the fence Our helpline bears out the unbelievable impact of the Laserwriter and the newer Laserwriter Plus Today the new people that are screaming for Postscript routines out number the Hey who could ever afford one of those calls by nearly ten to one Er I told you so And speaking of the Laser writer Plus Apple has finally cleaned up their act on the defective plus ROM upgrade kits All kits are now factory installed and factory burned in Some of these machines will even work Reasonable dealers are now charging as little as 80 to 100 extra for the Laserwriter Plus which strangely exactly happens to I f you at all like to keep match the price of the bootleg plus ROM sets I suspect that the unplus version might be dropped entirely when these new ma chines arrive this spring Incredibly the new low end personal laser printer is ru mored to not be able to speak Postscript and to be strictly a Quickdraw machine This is so stupid that it could not possibly happen Particularly since everybody and their brother are now offering new snap on Postscript interpreters for just about every low end laser printer I sure get a lot of calls from people who ve had serious problems with the older plus ROMs One major sign of trouble is broken truncated or misspelled error messages caused by the frame device blowup Some machines have taken as long as ten months to correct H
130. Diablo proportional space and micro justification sets both your margins for you dejustifies all last paragraph lines and automatically handles offset stretched and bold centered titles for you The routine also runs as many copies as you request automatically taking care of margin hassles on all repeat multi page copies Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU September 1985 II reset hassles IIc IIe absolute reset Laserwriter prefeeding Aliasing contest winners Commodore integrated circuits nd our big winner is Harold Melanson from Minneapolis MN who took first place honors in the great aliasing contest Besides a SAMS book Harold also wins that all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two compliments of the Gila Valley Apple Grow ers Association Runner ups included Steve Harris of Alhambra CA Step hen Bach of Scottsville VA Paul Santa Maria of Monroe MI and Douglas Roth from Huntsville AL who all have each received a SAMS book Many thanks to the many hundreds of correct entries that came in too late to win The correct solution The listing in the great aliasing contest consists of one typo graphical error that had been cleverly buried deep inside a list of standard baud rates Several entrants questioned just how and why such a list would be used reasoning that standard serial interface chips use special internal codings to set their baud rates Well any time a progra
131. Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU Selected reprints Copyright c 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 520 428 4073 Electronically self published using the Apple Ie computer and the Laserwriter Plus All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 ASK THE GURU Introduction In early 1985 Stan Veit of the Computer Shopper magazine asked me to put together a series of columns for him While the Ask the Guru columns were all purportedly supposed to have at least something to do with Apple computing Stan assured me he would use a hands off editorial policy with minimum editing combined with the fastest possible turnaround time Apparently I would be given the opportunity to say what I felt like whenever I felt like it and have it rapidly and reliably appear in print To tightly close the reader feedback loop I would maintain a free user helpline to be followed up later with some reader contests and a no charge BBS system What you have here is a compilation of quite a few of my columns re edited updated and corrected All of the individual Names and Numbers have also been gathered together in one place and newly revised for you So what are these columns about If you ever do find out please be sure and let me know I ve always gone along on the assumption that if I am interested in something or if it catches my attention then there s others of you out there that
132. FF To the VIP it self this 2K sits from F800 FFFF just where you would expect your monitor control program and reset vectors to reside The all CMOS design VIP draws very little current and is easily battery powered It is not however a micropower controller that will run for ever on a tiny battery CMOS controller computers have long been available from outfits like John Bell and Onset At 129 the VIP does compare favorably with these older devices besides offer ing the big convenience of immediate Apple compatib ility and immmediate use of Apple development tools There s also rumors of a new 65C02 family single chip that includes multi channel D A converters internal step per driver logic serial ports lots of parallel lines real time clocks and a soft ice cream dispenser Combine this dude with the VIP and you will really have something Who Could Use The VIP Computer Just about anybody that wants to play with computer Fa control of just about anything Let us use our own Gila Valley Apple Growers for some examples I m extreme ly proud of each of these people for they are doing some really amazing hands on computer type stuff They re also doing it in a low tech part of the country that is so remote that over night delivery services take a week and where driving to the nearest decent library takes six hours While the VIP computer does not immediately solve all of their pr
133. Figure Five Ho Next slide the wiring under the symbols Note the breaks 14 4 ASK THE GURU TRAINER Test Points 10 17O INTERFACE Surface mount components on foil side Use sockets for both integrated circuits 1Y 2Y 3Y 4Y SY 6Y 7Y 8Y 5V ULN 2803 top view el 2A 3A 4A 5A 6A 7A 8A GND Figure Six stretch or squash the drawing to the size you desire Nor mally one unit of the grid is defined as the space between adjacent pins on an integrated circuit package You can turn the grid on and off as needed Unlike the screen graphics grids you can easily use any fractional grid positions No matter how fine the grid or how nervous the programmer horizontal and vertical lines always will stay that way Next as figure four shows us we put down some opaque symbols A symbol can be something like a resistor or an integrated circuit or perhaps a logic gate Whenever these symbols AANAANANAQNANANALAOANQL 44 Pin 0 153 Edge Connector are put down they erase and then overwrite whatever hap pens to be under them Thus you could put down one continuous wire first and then drop a resistor on top of it This is far faster and far easier than worrying about exactly where each connec tion to each part of each of the symbols has to go Sym bols can later be slid along a wire for best appearance The symbols all use action points Rather than define the po
134. IIc IIle absolute reset Laserwriter prefeeding Aliasing contest winners Commodore integrated circuits The cubic splines Using Bezier curves Postscript curve tracing Applewriter boot tricks Editing BASIC programs 9 10 IL 12 12 14 15 16 Vaporlock bugs Dual Ile monitor Isometric drawing ProDOS diskspace Customer complaints HIRES entry points New Apple ramcard Vaporlock interrupts Getting barcode info Laserwriter vs Laserjet Laserwriter rumors Electronic halftones Printing a video image Post processing techniques Translating computer programs Postscript typesetting ProDOSApplewriter 2 1 ASCII control commands The IIc 3 5 monitor upgrade A copy protected monitor ROM Curve tracing The VIP computer VIP user applications Apple s Laserwriter plus Accessing USGS data bases WPL and Q C Laserwriter Plus bugs New Apple RAM card A new control computer Postscript schematic drawing Anti aliasing Laserwriter gossip The Imageworks card Ripping off a type font Digital image processing A keyword indexer Laser printed badges Postscript circular text Apple rumors mongered Applewriter WPL versions ASK THE GURU Table of Contents continued 1 7 1S 19 20 21 22 2S 2A Dual Ile monitor A great mouse surface HIRES Applewriter dump Desktop publishing secrets Postscript Puss De Resistance Tech consultants list Toner cartridge secrets Flushing copy protection Postscri
135. IS PROGRAM CAPTURES THE APPLE IIE MONITOR INTO FOUR 4K WORKFILES FOR USE WITH AN EPROM BURNER WHOSE WORK FILES REM GET TUTORIAL PRINT PLEASE WAIT NORMAL POKE 32765 76 REM CLEAR Y REGISTER POKE 61 128 POKE 67 128 POKE 62 254 CALL 32763 POKE 49163 0 REM READ INTERNAL C3 AND CX ROM POKE 62 255 CALL 32763 POKE 63 207 POKE 49162 0 REM READ USUAL C3 AND CX SLOTS PRINT D BSAVE IIEMON C A 8000 L 1000 REM SAVE C100 SCFFF TO DISK POKE 62 255 POKE 67 128 CO more Fig 3A Applesloth SNATCHMON monitor grabber 4 3 There are other and more subtle reasons why some of the oddball older programs may not work with the Ile up grade even when using the old character generator For instance a few pro grams use illegal monitor entry points Many of these locations have been moved somewhere else in the new monitor ROMs Some wacky protection schemes used a bug in the old 6502 jump indirect command as a silly attempt to confuse any Apple user under six years old No bug no access Interrupts can now cause royal foulups in programs that neither expect nor allow them Some very oddball 65C02 instructions have different timing than they would on a 6502 This can ruin any extremely time critical code such as might be used for disk access a copy protection scheme or as an exact video screen lock So by all means make the Ile upgrade But be sure to backup all firmware f
136. Ic ROM At any rate there is a new free manual titled Apple IIc Programmer s Guide to the 3 5 ROM It is publication number A2L4037 and should be available directly from Apple A complete monitor listing is included As far as my products are concerned this new ROM will now let you run all of my Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities on a IIc as easily as you can on a Ile I also have an improved absolute reset patch for the IIc that can be used with either the older or newer IIc ROM Write or call if you need more information Tell me About the ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Update The original release of ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 had a very serious bug in it This bug affected many users of so called intelligent Ile par allel printer cards including the Grappler and the Pkaso The usual syptoms included bizarre printing such as a burst of 23 spaces every 237 characters or else the com plete ignoring of imbedded printer codes Part of the fault lies in older versions of the ProDOS operating system while an other part is caused by Ap plewriter 2 0 outputting its characters in low ASCII form MSB 0 instead of a high ASCII MSB 1 format as is done under DOS 3 3 The patches to upgrade to ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 are available free from your local Apple dealer These patches are very minimal None of the stuff that really needed fixed got done All that was re paired was a few of the user problems involving a few
137. Impres sions and also in Paper Film and Foil Converter trade journals These include Avery Fasson and Mac Tac Only certain papers and vinyls will properly accept heat fused toner Those that do give outstanding results Those that do not will turn out really awful Naturally you never want to have only a one product venture going Around here the bumper stickers are added to certificates awards artists announcements and business cards discount software sales full color diskettes writing books and articles technical consulting monitoring tele phone voice helplines hand crafting specialized software toolkits and companion disks real estate scams typesetting services etc Plus of course growing pecans and questing tinajas While I may have men tioned this a time or two I do have a few copies left of this here book that is called The Incredible Secret Money Ma chine and it does tell you all about doing stuff like this for your own fun and profit Hey it works Does it ever On to the goodies What s the word on Apple s new RAM Card Actually there are two words Very nice You can now plug up to six megabytes of RAM into an Apple IIe that has a beefed up power supply or only one extra megabyte or two wit hout Memory is added in 256K chunks The card is set up wildly different from all those third party RAM cards you may already be familiar with Since this is an Apple sup
138. LE II Tom Weishaar APPLE III Val Golding ASSEMBLY Bob Sander Cedarlof CABLE TV Phil Nelson PC CLONES August 1986 602 428 1133 801 359 2790 913 649 0567 818 708 2382 214 324 2050 602 428 1850 Sherry Romberger 602 526 8512 C PROGRAMMING Henry Schneiker DISASSEMBLY Bob Kovacs EPROMS Bob Gardner IMAGE PROCESSING Charlie Springer INTERFACE John Bell MECHANISMS Claude Martin OPTICS Forrest Mims POSTSCRIPT Liz Bond PROGRAMMING Gary Crockett SIGNAL PROCESSING Roger Cox SOLAR ENERGY Jim Allen SPEECH SYNTHESIS Bruce Fette WPL and APPLEWRITER Don Thompson 65808 and 65816 Will Troxel 602 325 5884 201 325 1885 206 337 2370 415 322 7373 415 592 8411 602 428 4830 512 372 0548 415 961 4400 602 428 3256 303 641 4240 602 428 6993 602 834 3370 714 855 3838 619 672 0670 Fig 1 My super secret technical consultants list 18 2 ASK THE GURU greatest advantage is that everything is sent as ordinary numbers or letters There is thus no possibility of confus ing a hex 0C for a formfeed or interpreting a hex 0D as a carriage return Illegal characters cannot be sent since there aren t any As a further bonus an ordinary word processor can also be used to process hex charac ters in their ASCII form The penalties of hex to ASCII conversion do involve both speed and storage size Y
139. On to the good stuff What is the Apple IIc Monitor Upgrade You will find a newer and now double sized monitor ROM available for the IIc It is called the Zc 3 5 ROM and has quite a few new features This new chip provides the firmware protocol converter required by the new 3 5 inch disk drives In fact you must upgrade to this new monitor if you are going to add these new smaller drives to your IIc system The new monitor also has a built in AppleTalk driver You now can connect your IIc on to the AppleTalk bus More importantly the new monitor includes a 65C02 mini assembler along with trace and debug features Not nearly as good as Bugbyter of course but still rather handy The min assembler is ROM resident so no extra room is needed while asssem bling or debugging The new monitor also adds many of those Super Serial Card commands that were left out of the original IIc mon itor This means you can now run the Laserwriter off a IIc almost as easily and conven iently as you can a Ile The 3 5 ROM is now a 32K device arranged as two banks of 16K words Each word is eight bits long That bank switching is done through the use of machine language loc ation C028 in what used to be the cassette recorder out put area of the address space ProDOS has been updated to version 1 1 1 The length is some thirty bytes longer with the code now running from 2000 to 6009 AWB SYS AWC SYS and AWD SY
140. Please insert SAVE disk into Drive 1 PRINT PRINT PRINT Then press lt space gt to CONTINUE PRINT 2022 HTAB 15 PRINT or PRINT 2024 HTAB 13 PRINT lt escape gt to ABORT PRINT PRINT 2026 HTAB 13 PRINT lt gt CHRS 08 CHRS 08 CHRS 08 CHRS 08 CHRS 08 2028 GET Z 2030 IF Z gt lt THEN TEXT HOME 2040 TEXT HOME 2050 POKE 49166 0 REM PRIMARY CHARACTER SET 2100 RETURN SNATCHMON CLEAR END Gotchas D means lt control D gt Fig 3B SNATCHMON concluded ASK THE GURU And while you are in the neighborhood drop in and help me quest a tinaja or two The VLA is only half a day s drive away Is There a Replacement for SOFTALK Before their untimely de xx p pnd ppr L mise Softalk was far and away the best Apple maga zine when measured in terms of user interest enthuasiasm commitment and on their no nonsense no bullshit cover age of beginner to mid level technical and programming information A much leaner and much ppr Don Lancaster s TRIPLE HEADER WPL Utility ppr ppr ppr This module will print a document with a three ppr line single spaced header using print constants ppr built into the WPL code itself ppr ppr To continue you must have the document to be ppr printed inside your Apple and a disk having ppr this program AND lots of space left must be ppr placed in the active drive ppr pin OK
141. R 1060 1021 Print string to printer JSR 1063 1D0F Open new screen JSR 1066 1D35 Get keystroke JSR 1069 1E80 Restore saved cursor position JSR 106C 1E8A Save current cursor position JSR 106F 1EB4 Force character to upper case JSR 1072 1EBF Force text string to upper case JSR 1075 1ED9 Compare text strings JSR 1078 1EF8 Copy text strings JSR 107B 1F3E Justified string to screen JSR 107E 2029 String to screen with number JSR 1081 1FD1 Stall Y 8 seconds JSR 1084 1FE0 Reset key buffer to empty JSR 1087 2093 Message to screen at cursor JSR 108A 1FE9 Print one character JSR 108D 20AE Print character full screen JSR 1090 20BE Print n identical characters JSR 1093 1FF5 Message to bottom screen line JSR 1096 20D6 Verification prompt Fig 1 Appleworks Low Core Utility entry points 23 1 et s see Just where did we leave off last time There are bunches of news and rumors this month so let s have at it Congratulations to Lynette Schnebly of Tucson who has newly broken the all time Macintosh high score by man aging to get the bomb icon to appear 4 671 times in a single marathon Mac work session Using the knockout combo of Macdraft Appletalk and the various Laserwriter drivers all together Even if you can t enter such world class competition there is a new and top secret Mac program that you prob
142. R TXD RXD DCD SG Figure two is the IIgs printer cable This one gets used to go from a IIgs over to a RS232 DB25 serial printer or for any other RS232 use printer Or modem RS232 DB25 male DTR DSR TXD RXD DCD SG Fig 3 MODEM to PRINTER converter for RS232 24 2 where you do want to cross the data paths and the hand shaking paths Figure three shows you a very simple DB25 modem eliminator that lets you auto matically convert a modem cable back into a printer cable or vice versa This eliminator is handy to have around for there are almost always times when the cable you have will not be the one you want A most interesting RS232 adaptor box kit is available for 10 from L COM You can configure this jewel as the modem eliminator of figure three or else solve just about any other RS232 interface problem with it The kit is just a pair of male and female connectors and an attractive case You can do the internal wiring any way you like Crome plating costs two bucks extra for those of you that are into Perrier filled birdbaths Finally figure four is the IIgs machine cable This one lets a IIgs talk directly to a newer Macintosh to another IIgs or to anything else that uses the same mini DIN con nectors and needs the crossed data and handshake paths Can More Than one Monitor be Connected to a Personal Computer Yes provided you are careful enough about it If y
143. S are now 0C file types instead of SYS files The modem screen prompts are now carats instead of brackets Characters are output in high ASCII during printing and in low ASCII on PDO or PD8 The DOS Options menu has been converted to forced subroutine return option picking The modem REFQ commands are compared against file values rather than immediate code values Figure One Changes made in the upgrade to ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 12 1 ASK THE GURU On reset the main 3 5 bank is first selected Each succes sive addressing of C028 will toggle first going to the aux iliary bank and then back to the main monitor bank To install the new ROM a change in the motherboard must be made cutting one line and jumpering the un used cassette line over to the additional address pin on the 3 5 ROM I have heard of two dif ferent ways the upgrade is being made Developers can buy a kit and do the cutting and jumpering themselves This kit may be available at a dealer but it is equally likely that they will want to swap out the entire IIc motherboard instead ASCII NUL SOH HEX 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E OF oe mb oe akhwn_ co00 Noo hon o 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 N m i d SoOOND NNN QN 18 19 1A 1B 1C 1D 1E 1F 7F DEC KEY SSeS See See See There would be two big advantages to Apple f
144. Sci drive the speed adjustment trimpot is at the lower right rear and is not the big and obvious ad justment smack in the center of the top board p puts Proclock date and time into A qj f SA y pat Glossary entry d P dodate n time Fig 2 Single key Applewriter to Proclock access 19 2 A disk cleaning diskette should be used at most every three months or so More fre quent use probably does more harm than good Every now and then it pays to reseat all of those cards and cables Use of a very modest amount of Radio Shack tv tuner cleaner at the card fingers and the expan sion sockets is also a very good idea Note that this product has a dry film lubricant in it It should never be sprayed all over the place and should never be sprayed directly onto or near a disk What appear to be disk problems are often caused by some other card in some other slot Keep only your often used cards slotted and remove the others If you have lots of cards in use keep things cool with a fan or by removing the lid Using oddball orphan or unusual drives and cards is generally never a good idea Stick with mainstream drives or else with second sources that have been around for a while How Can I repair A Blown Diskette Naturally nobody pays any attention to preventing disk blowups until well after the blowup occurs What can be done Firstoff the more you know about your disk system th
145. THE GURU and by using the absolute minimum spray needed to get the job done And that should get you started in the wonderful world of blown disk recovery Nothing elevates you to a hero status any faster than saving someone else from their own stupidity While you are at it how about sharing your diskette recovery horror stories and experiences with our other Computer Shopper readers Write or call and we will put together the best stories and recovery secrets together in a later column How Can I Access a Clock Card with Applewriter Don Thompson of Thom pson and Thompson has just put together a remarkable Applewriter WPL Expansion Kit This jewel provides three major enhancements to Pro DOS Applewriter The first one is automatic support for many major clock cylindrical text demo Postscript circradius 150 def pstring def alpha 0 5 def arg oldrunningpos pstring stringwidth pop 2 div add circradius div 57 926 mul def positioncalc arg sin circradius mul circposn exch def def forshortencalc arg cos fs exch def def slopecalc oldrunningpos circradius div 57 296 mul sin circradius mul circradius div alpha mul slope exch def def wraponly intcharvalue exch def pstring 0 intcharvalue put pstring stringwidth pop oldrunningpos add kernstuff add newrunningpos exch def positioncalc forshortencalc pstring gsave circposn fs circradius mul alpha mul neg moveto slopecalc curr
146. There are sure enough of them to go around this month That Apple IIx is probably a reality and probably is in the hands of some very secretive developers It probably uses a pnd ppr L ppr pin Name of textfile to be scanned gt A ppr pin Name of file to save key words gt B ppr pin New N or Append A index file gt C ppr ppr L ppr Place your work disk into drive 2 ppr pin Press any key when ready gt ppr L oh d2 busy please wait pes A C pgo ap pes a C pgo ap pas C pgo nw ap pas C nw pas esc A pas esc D b a f A esc pgo b pgo c bu u s B D C y p p pas C pgoa cny I B pat Fig 1 A ProDOS Applewriter WPL indexer ASK THE GURU 65C816 CPU that is capable of emulating both the 6502 and the 68000 meaning it may run both Apple II and Macintosh software or at least some of it The memory will probably use 256K x 8 plug in cards similar to the Macintosh Plus There will probably be some use of sur face mounting Apple has also quietly introduced a new Apple Ile It is different enough to have a changed part number of A2S2100 instead of the old A2P2104 None of my spies know anything about this yet My best guess is that it is only a minor modification to the main board that either lets or will let the Ile have a double wide monitor toggled by a C028 bit test This is the same thing
147. Two methods do include the Postscript Cookbook and the Postscript Reference Manual If you can t find these locally I have a few extra copies on hand here No I didn t write them but I sure wish I had My own Postscript books are still in the works You ll also want to subscribe to Colo phon which is Adobe s free Postscript newsletter I have lots of free printed Postscript goodies listings demos and routines that you can run if you call or write I have also got a fancy Post script Show and Tell that now will run under just about any word processor editor or comm program and do so on just about any computer You can also use the Ask the Guru phone number for free Postscript help And if you want to tackle a really advanced hacker pro ject just write and then debug your own Postscript intrep eter for the Imagewriter I must get around thirty help line calls a day requesting this The language itself has been placed in the public domain so there s nothing stopping you except for some personal time and effort Tell me About the Secret Laserwriter Grays Have you ever wondered why the Macintosh grays look so putrid when printed on a Laserwriter Or why any fine gray grids on the Mac nearly always have hideous dropouts in them Well its all because much of that Mac software absolutely insists on using the seventeenth lousiest gray that is available from the Laser writer instead of selecting som
148. W and the XDRAW com mands work only with a single shape at a time You have to manage accessing that shape from a shape table by yourself when doing machine language access To do a DRAW you put the low byte of the shape start address into the X register place the high byte of the shape start into the Y register and then JSR F601 The XDRAW works just like DRAW except that it exclusive OR s the new shape against the screen If used properly this can erase a shape without hurting most backgrounds The color is set by putting the color number 00 07 into the X register and then doing a JSR F6EC Note that only half of your dots will plot on original HIRES when using any color other than white Thus cer tain green vertical lines may be completely invisible unless you move them over a dot Many beginners start with black and white only They also may shorten their HIRES screens to 256 dots wide so they can get started with min imum hassles Anyway yes you can sub stantially speed up graphics and animation by directly using the Applesloth internal HIRES routines directly from machine language And it s lots of fun to do so But most all Applesloth internal routines were not designed for speed No way These routines were instead designed for minimum space and were done as compactly as possible In a day when 16K ROM s were extremely expensive this was the only way to go Perhaps the worst examp
149. Y CERTAIN you make some EPROM firmware backup copies of the CD monitor ROM 2764 the EF Montitor ROM 2764 and above all the F4 video ROM 2732 before you even remotely consider an upgrade Fig 1 You read it here first will end up trashed after you do the upgrade While most of the older and existing software can be repaired with some simple patches doing so on a locked and protected program from a non cooperative or bankrupt software vendor ceases to be a joy real quick like Espec ially if you are in the middle of something when you try the upgrade Things get really nasty if you have several hundred pro grams on hand that will not run properly Now from Apple s point of view and from the desires of a brand new Apple owner the upgrade is a very good thing The upgrade makes the Ile and the IIc much more simi lar so that identical or nearly identical new software can be run on both machines The new monitor chips accept lower case Applesloth and monitor commands can scroll much better includes a mini assembler do provide some new search and ASCII mon itor commands and support full management of interrupts The mini assembler is not all that great Bugbyter is better The upgrade does include a new 65C02 microprocessor This dude runs cooler and provides a handful of new instructions All of which are interesting and useful addit ions but none of which are earth shattering Any attempt
150. a Greenway for her Apples and Salsa recipe How can I beat the Applewriter 47K Length Limit Quite a few of you helpline callers have wanted to be able to handle much longer files in ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 My own problem along these lines is that I had to be able to download Adobe fonts that at 146K were even too long for one side of a 5 1 4 disk let alone for the 47K file limit of Applewriter But rest assured Apple writer can easily handle files of most any length whatso ever There is no 47K limit We ll first note that if you are still stuck with a 22K file length limit this means you have an old He without any October 1987 expansion memory Add an 80 column expansion card to bring yourself up to 47K The 47K of textfile area is located in auxiluary memory from 0800 BEFF If you are p p WPL optima oblique downloader p p preface all lines with a space p pnd p p use control L below p ppr L ny p ppr downloading optima oblique ppr ppr WARNING disk flip will be required p p p loptima obl 1 p p pnp p p ny p loptima obl 2 p p pep p p ny loptima obl 3 p p use control g below p ppr G G G G G G G G ppr ppr PLEASE FLIP THE DISK NOW pep p p ny p oh d2 p p loptima obl 4 p p pep p p pat Fig 2 Managing a 146K Applewriter file 32 2 ASK THE GURU using a third party RAM card be sur
151. ag papers Giant black areas aren t quite solid either but they are certainly usable You aren t supposed to use thermal raised print letterheads but I suspect you can get away with it Yet another problem is that their Diablo emulation mode like everyone else s just flat out does not emulate a real Diablo I have found out how to fix this so that you can easily do a true wall to wall microjustification and propor tional space in this mode One thing that is absolutely infuriating The toner cartridges are NOT the same as the stock Canon photocopier cartridges In fact through the use of special Torx tamperproof screws missing notches the brackets which are slightly different etc they went to an awful lot of trouble to make darn sure you would not cas ually interchange the two Thus printer cartridges will cost you more and will be harder to get particularly in colors The toner cartridges also look like they will be more than a little bit tricky to refill on your own Be sure and stay tuned UPDATE Feb 87 The way to get started on this fantastic trip is with a copy of Inside Laserwriter from Apple It gives you all the complete details on the Postscript language and has all you need to get in on the ground floor Note that this 50 notebook must be ordered directly it is normally not available through dealers The next thing of course is to get some hands on ex perience A very few of the
152. ain old Apple software does all the work Full RGB color options will be shortly available as will other versions Only two or at the most three pictures will fit on a floppy disk side So this card is best used with hard disks or an Apple RAM card The card s organization is unusual in that there is zero resident firmware The entire 256 bits of slot I O space are used to pass a video line to and from the Apple The sixteen scratchpad I O slots are used to send the various flag commands to the card Redshift is to be highly commended for their totally open and unlocked software Fig 4 Anti Aliasing by lowpass filtering 15 3 ASK THE GURU and wonder of wonders a complete schematic diagram included in their user manual The easily modified software uses machine language mod ules that can be ampersand linked directly to Applesloth How good is the quality That all depends upon your perspective From a personal computer standpoint this is far and away the finest image you have ever seen on a microcomputer screen Anyway ever On the other hand a 256 x 256 image is by no means photographic quality It is not even Polaroid quality It is not broadcast television qual ity Let s call it near the high end of premium home video quality I ve been linking this card to the Laserwriter of course One thing that becomes very obvious very fast is that peo ple s expectations of image qualit
153. al new commands that better suit personal computers or software routines Some of the Apple keys are really hidden control keys Figure three shows us a few of these Ferinstance the tab key is really a I HT for a horizontal tab command I recently had a big flap with a none too bright editor who reasoned that since there were no carriages on personal computers there could not be any catriage returns Now stop laughing This was serious Heavy even Well even if we ignore the fact that most all personal computers are used with im pact type printers that most assuredly do have carriages the standard ASCII 0D CR is defined as a carriage return Thus any time that 0D is placed in a textfile we most definitely have and are using carriage returns It is interesting to note that the original ASCII carriage return did just that It moved the carriage back to the left of the page without doing a line feed Should you want to go to the next line down two commands were needed a carriage return to get back to the left side and a line feed to move down a line So it would seem that type writers do not have carriage returns but that all personal computers do Today of course most all carriage returns are really combined carriage returns and line feeds Most word pro cessors and printer drivers usually give you a choice of how many line feeds to use This often can eliminate any line skipping or line overwr
154. also might find that something of value And that s regardless of whether you are an Apple person or not AS on ongoing experiment these reprints are self published using the Applewriter word processor the great PostScript page description language and are printed on the Laserwriter Plus Yes all of the text and all of the graphics you see was done solely with Applewriter Yes the economics of this are quite outstanding No there was no pastup or camera work involved Zero And no this is not a copy you are holding It is an original that has been custom printed just for you If you like what you see here you can get further involved by subscribing to Computer Shopper magazine at 305 269 3211 calling me on my voice helpline at 602 428 4073 during any weekday 8 5 mountain standard time or checking into our great PostScript BBS at 409 244 4704 ASK THE GURU About the Author As he said in his classic Incredible Secret Money Machine Don Lancaster writes books And quests tinajas Microcomputer pioneer and guru Don Lancaster is the author of 21 books and countless articles He is considered by some to be the father of the personal computer for his early ground breaking work with hacker digital electronics and low cost video terminal displays Some of his other titles include his CMOS and million seller TTL Cookbooks Micro Cookbooks volumes I and II Enhancing your Apple II volumes J and IJ the Applewriter Cookbook All
155. ame dialect of BASIC is in use at both ends Should each machine use a different dialect of BASIC the chances are that most of the commands might carry over The usual way to debug things is to run the program until it blows up and then find the specific command that is causing the problem Fix the commands one at a time until your new program works properly Any PEEK and POKE com mands must be rearranged to suit the new machine In many cases you will have totally different ways of using PEEKs and POKEs In par ticular those graphics and sound mechanics will differ widly from the one machine to the other In general the more sop histicated and the more ele gant the program is the more hassles you will have when you translate To get around these problems you may have 60 DPI 13S D Figure Three How the two grays compare 11 3 to become a very knowledge able machine language hacker in both the old and the new machines What is Post Processing A magic technique called post processing lets you add custom features to your word processor literally letting you leap tall buildings in a single bound Such things as user friendly interaction a wall to wall microjustify HIRES or other graphics dumps and just about any special feature that you can dream up can be easily accomodated Best of all use of post pro cessing does not normally require any machine languag
156. amorphically letting you change the hori zontal size seperately from the vertical size The Laserjet does not Anamorphic size adjust ments are very useful if you are trying to run a similar display ad in several different magazines Often the exact size and shape of each quarter page ad will vary all over the lot and then some The Laserwriter also lets you twist or rotate any image almost any which way but December 1985 loose besides allowing very fancy matrix transformations on both text and graphics The Laserjet does not The Laserwriter has real internal font machinery that will automatically give you any font size from two points to well beyond 20 000 points There are 72 points in one inch There is a nearly in finite variety of font styles and sizes available inside the stock Laserwriter For letters larger than a sheet of paper there is even an automatic process available that uses as many sheets as you need to get up to size The Laserjet does not You can independently set your choice of the Laserwriter font height the font width the amount of lean and even the kerning or the individual spacing between characters Besides the dozen stock fonts you can easily download any number of those custom fonts of your own Instead the Laserjet forces you to buy outrageously ex pensive font cartridges that can only provide a very few type styles typically limited to plain old twelve point In t
157. an esc esc null to bank one character Such banking is rarely needed bladder Fig 2 Actuators with non moving seals ASK THE GURU KKK KKK KKK KKK KKK KKK KK KKK STRETCHIFIER FOR APPLEWRITER IIe DOS 3 3 COPYRIGHT 1984 BY DON LANCASTER AND SYNERGETICS BOX 809 THATCHER AZ 85552 602 428 4073 ALL COMMERCIAL RIGHTS RESERVED ie F FF F FF F HF FF HH HF HF OH KKK KKK KKK KKK KKK KKK KKK This mod changes a backup copy of AWIIe so imbedded escape commands pass through the justify routines This eliminates the shortline problem and lets you fully use a fancy printer TEXT HOME CLEAR HIMEM 8000 VTAB 1 HTAB 7 A Applewriter IIe STRETCHifier GOSUB 980 PRINT GOSUB 1030 PRINT FOR N 1 TO 39 PRINT CHRS 127 GOSUB 1020 NEXT N GOSUB 1030 VTAB 5 HTAB 1 A This program will patch Applewriter IIe GOSUB 980 PRINT VTAB 6 HTAB 1 A to eliminate the short lines created by GOSUB 980 VTAB 7 HTAB 1 A imbedded printer escape sequences GOSUB 980 GOSUB 1030 VTAB 10 HTAB 4 A Patch ONLY your THIRD BACKUP copy GOSUB 980 GOSUB 1030 GOSUB 1030 VTAB 14 HTAB 4 A Please put your THIRD BACKUP copy GOSUB 980 VTAB 15 HTAB 4 AS of AWIIe into Drive 1 Then push GOSUB 980 GOSUB 1030 VTAB 17 HTAB 12 A lt SPACE gt to CONTINUE GOSUB 980 VTAB 19 HTAB
158. and to the point where it is now just plain slow instead of being an outright joke On the other hand the font protection has been tightened up This is so stupid and so shortsighted as to be beneath comment The version number may or may not be 47 1 and earlier machines probably should be upgradable by one means or another Logically Apple should also upgrade to the new SX engine and should throw in more fonts and a double sized bitmap so the next sheet can be processing while the current one is busy printing I have no idea when or whether they will do so Be sure to get a free copy of the April Ist issue of Outside Apple Among other gems they advise you that any strange hissing and low frequency thumping noises in a IIgs on turn on can often be cured by carefully opening the lid and letting the cat out A quick reminder about our a hot new independent Post script BBS at 409 244 4704 Hundreds of new Postscript tips and routines are now downloadable including most of the stuff you read here While the board is free sponsors and advertisers are most definitely welcome and needed And the usual word from our sponsor Bound sets of Ask the Guru reprints remain available as do my He lIc Absolute Resets Incredible Secret Money Machines Post script Show and Tells for all major computers and an Introduction to Postscript VHS videotape starring yours truely Write or call for info on these and some great
159. ands we looked at a few columns ago Figure one gives you the names of these utilities and shows you their entry points Where can I Get Help on Apple Clones I guess I am personally down on Apple clones Over on the Incredibly Boring Machine side of the fence clones are clearly the price and performance leaders and only an epsilon minus would buy JBM rather than a clone In fact big blue s onager is in a sling because their sales have dropped dramatically the bottom has fallen out of their stock price and key scapegoats have been given lateral arabesques All this because of a blatant failure to either innovate or to be a price or performance leader On the Apple side you have an odd mix of clones ranging from serious and use ful machines through Hong Kong alley sweepings sold by refugees from a carnival midway down to junior high school kids in a garage that claim compatibility without so much as checking out their bus noise or clock phasing Our helpline has been full of horror stories One person had their 100 percent com patible clone for six months before discovering that it had no HIRES graphics Another has a thermal intermittent that seems almost impossible to service Yet another has a clone with bus lines so noisy as to be use less Countless others have had really major problems with software compatibility I guess the worst problem is that the wrong people buy clones for the wrong reaso
160. ant uses of pixel line remapping include perspec tive lettering labels wrapped around an isometric cylinder and for anywhere else you are after a stunning or gee whiz graphics result Figure three shows you a simple example of what you can do when using pixel line remapping A single flat film clip is first created This clip is then scanned ver tically five times Each time the image is broken down into individual scan lines that are exactly one pixel wide As the scan lines are mapped the scale and position of each line is changed to create the twisting The basic remapping code is shown you in figure four You first will create a flat film image that starts at 0 0 You then name this image as pixelproc Then you specify its height as pixelprocheight and seperately spec its width as pixelprocwidth After that you next create a mappingproc code that can decide what to do with each one of the individually gen erated scan lines Usually you will translate rotate or scale each of the scan lines differently to get the specific effect you are after The poison ivy can in my Postscript Show and Tell uses pixel line remapping for the larger letters This one ac tually wraps all the individual letters around the can rather than pasting any flat letters around the surface This image appears back on page 19 3 Write or call for the latest code on this Figure four shows you the basic pixel line remapping cod
161. any other point where you want total control Very few points are needed and in general the fewer the better Then tape the artwork onto a light box or a window and punch the magic numbers into your Ile entering an X Y and direction for each point Figure two is a listing of the Postscript code involved Thanks to all of my newly revised curve tracing routines an astonishingly low number of points is needed to do this stunning graphics quality For instance only four points are needed for a circle ellipse or oval Thus you often end up working with an extremely sparse data set Reviewing the curvetrace routine works by inputing an X location a Y location and a slope for the ends and tangents of each curved path desired Those numbers are then converted into a form that is useful by the cubic spline routines already inside the Laserwriter The paths can then be stroked filled or even used as a clipping win dow for future paths The curve tracing speed is normally quite fast but since I intentionally used several irregular clipping masks on this particular character this particular image does take over a minute to print If you want to view the location and direction of each point just change showtick from false to true This is a powerful debugging tool You will also need a listing of my curve tracing routine You can get one that is all ready to go on my various Applewriter Laserwriter Utilit
162. any me chanical or system problems from actual disk damage Should you be unable to read the disk on another ma chine the chances are there really is something wrong with it At this point you will want to decide how many hours of recovery effort you are willing to spend com pared against the value of the lost data The next thing to do is to copy protect the diskette and then make a second bit copy preferably using the latest version of Copy II Any at tempt to repair a diskette can possibly do permanant dam age so work only with this backup copy More often than not the disk damage will happen to either the catalog or directory tracks since these are the ones most often referenced and the ones that are easiest to foul up Init or format a new disk Then use the INIT feature of Bag of Tricks II to copy the old files onto new and clean tracks while preserving data With my particular blowup this was all that was needed Should there be more pro blems try using FIXCAT to correct the catalog If that fails use ZAP to inspect and study each track to find out what problems are where If all else fails you can use a block or sector reading utility to strip off the files 256 or 512 bytes at a time saving them to disk and then recombining them into the proper file type Note that the little known and little used ProDOS TYPE command is extremely handy for this sort of thing As a general rule most
163. aph will louse up if you try anything funny in it One sledge hammer cure is to print your entire document right to left only This slows up your printing time con siderably What I usually do is suppress all of the right to left printing only on the prob lem paragraphs The normal way I can handle this is to print any paragraph that has any underlining at all in it right to left only Should a funny spoke get called on line two I will try to find any old excuse for underlining something somewhere in the TITAN 10 same paragraph I have more specific details on this under WPL Call or write if you are interested Beware of the words Dia blo Compatible This usual ly means that the prongs on the power cord of the printer have the same spacing and shape as that on a Diablo 630 and will sometimes fit into the same AC wall outlet with a minimum of excessive force Most toy daisywheel manufacturers are flat out lying through their teeth when they claim they are Diablo compable Kiddies if it doesn t have a ready to use built in wall to wall proportional space and a full firmware microjustify can not do any HYPLOT vect or graphics won t accept a metal or plastic daisywheel with 88 92 or 96 petals does not have near perfect print quality has no bidirectional tractor feed or will not run BOLD PS esc Y esc Z Fig 1 Differences in daisywhe
164. ary Which does list all of the magazines in the US or in the world depending on the vol ume you pick Those marked controlled circulation are March 1985 most often free and are certainly worth checking into Or in a larger technical library ask to see their public serials list This is a pile of computer printout a video disk or a stack of microfilche that tells you everything the library has in stock They may call this listing by a different name Get recent issues of target magazines liberate the qualification card and you are home free Incidentally there is one sure fire way to get at least one free copy of any mag azine no matter how high the subscription price or issue cost Just write the adver tising department and request a sample issue and a rate card On your letterhead of course Sometimes you will get several issues or even a free subscription out of one single request How can I improve cassette tape reliability Cassette tapes are still used on many smaller microcom puters particularly orphans like the Timex Sinclair or the TI 99 The cassette routines on Apple computers while seldom used remain the save of last resort either to try and recover from a blown DOS operating system or to save any part of any program at any time for any reason Continued on page 2 5 New 330 Ohm Resistor orange orange brown Speaker Jack on Cassette Recorder Amplifier Speaker
165. ase or protective sleeve Setting a disk on the table and then being very careful never to touch it is incredibly stupid You see it is the bottom side of the disk that plays so all that cat hair and Make a backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Get into BASICS SYSTEM Then CALL 151 BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6030 TSYS Verify 2C97 2C98 2CAO 2CA8 2CBO Change 2C97 2C98 2CAO 2CA8 2CBO Verify 5DE1 5DE8 5DFO Change SDE1 44 61 5DE8 6D 65 SDFO 20 20 8 UNLOCK AWD SYS 9 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6030 TSYS 10 LOCK AWD SYS Fig 1 A ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Proclock patch ASK THE GURU furniture polish is merrily do ing its thing I personally never put a disk drive within 18 inches of any computer monitor or tv set People who smoke of course must never be allowed in the same building as your diskettes let alone in the same room Everybody knows they are supposed to back up their disks and do so very often But it never ceases to amaze me how many people stupidly store the backup right beside the original If the backups must stay in the same build ing hide them as far away from the originals you pos sibly can The backup disk is supposed to be just that Besides blowups there is theft fire flood stupidity and mischief to contend with I do use a notcher some times but I would never use a double sided disk inside a sin
166. asting and returns complete control back to you You can find details in Modern Electronics February and March of 1985 or in enhancement ten of my Enhancing your Apple II vol ume II SAMS 22425 or in my Absolute Ie Reset soft ware package A listing of the SNATCH MON one of the key pieces of the software involved did appear a few columns back right here in the Computer Shopper What is involved here is a new EPROM chip swap After burning and installing the new chip a control open apple reset does the usual cold reboot unless you hold down the open apple key for an extra three seconds If you do that you will automatically drop down into the original old monitor just as if you could do a CALL 151 from any point in any program at any time for any reason The monitor changes overwrite that obscene hole blaster code while preserving the overall checksums With the preserved check sum the patch is invisible and transparent to virtually all software At any rate this particular patch works only on an old He It will not work on a new IIe or on a IIc So here for the first time in print are alike but different some how patches that let you do an absolute reset for either the new IIe figure one or for the IIc figure two Let s get one point clear right off the top The new Ile monitor firm ware and that IIc monitor firmware are NOT identical In fact they are not even vaguel
167. at you are interested in the real world There is a quick simple and devastatingly effective ran domness test that Applesloth and several other so called random functions fail mis erably This pseudorandom sequencer passes the same test with flying colors All you do is plot the dots on a graphics screen such as Apple s HIRES page one If the screen sticks as it will with Applesloth you have a short and useless random sequence If there is ever any shading lines unexpected patterns etc then you have blatently preferential num bers This test applies your eyeball as an optical corelator that will pull subtle random ness failures right out of the woodwork Which should tell us that using groups of bits as a random word will be useful and effective for most real world needs Note that this method is very fast and very simple to do Beware of playing games to make things more ran dom Believe it or not just about any attempt to make something more random will almost certainly do the exact opposite If you really want to get into some gory details of why this generator works check into Knuth s Seminumerical Algorithms on pages 1 160 Addison Wesley Or if you want to go completely off the deep end do check into E J Watson s listing in Math ematical Computing 16 for 1962 368 369 Many more details on all of this appear in my Assembly Cookbook for the Apple IIe SAMS 22331 includi
168. ata values to a non existant 6551 port chip It works by trashing the i d bytes for the super serial card and by aborting any O J Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 4DC7 AO Change 4DC7 60 Verify 4F7E 01 Change 4F7E 10 Verify 4F85 31 Change 4F85 13 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 3 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Ilgsifier patch 25 3 ASK THE GURU it is fun to use In fact the language is downright ad dictive Postscript generally lets you build much higher quality images much more flexibly and with incredibly more power Another major advantage is its device independence This means that the very same textfile that is sent to a laser printer can later be sent to a a i o a o 2 e gt D f i o c D O 0 5 typesetting machine for much higher print resolution Text and graphics can be mixed up in any manner any where on the sheet to the full available printer resolution You can very easily translate move scale to magnify or reduce or rotate twist any image any way you want to You can even arbitrarily map any text and graphics image 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Screen angle in degrees Fig 4 A
169. ay to get the effect you are after Once you have what you want things can almost always be made to run faster Let us briefly review those various ways we can speed up post processing once you have exactly what you want The entire Applesloth routine or else just the time critical parts of it can be rewritten in machine language A less drastic solution is to eliminate the very slow line by line disk access One way to do this is to use the files as they sit in the word proces sor s workspace Since Apple writer text files reside over in auxiliary memory and are unaffected by a switch over to Applesloth this dual access can be easily done Several other methods to eliminate those line by line disk reads exist and may be suitable for other brands of word processors as well For instance you can load your entire file at once into your machine and then do an in ternal search Or you can use a memory expansion card or a RAM disk to load the post processed image From RAM the files can be rapidly read Here s an Applewriter post processing tip Do your final printing of the disk image by using wide open print con stants These do include Im0 133 28 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen BEST OVERALL GRAY 100 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen DEFAULT 60 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen Figure Four Postscript halftone screen commands 1
170. bably the cheapest local way of getting an EPROM burned is to check your near est hacker club or leave a message on a regional elec tronic bulletin board Fairly complete lists of most clubs and bulletin boards appear right here in the Computer Shopper Most clubs and bulletin boards do have an up to date listing of all the others in your neighborhood so find one and you have found them all I know of only one hacker EPROM burning service It s called E Tech Services out of Everett Washington and they do good work For input they want a hex image stored on a binary file on an Apple disk Presumably they will eventually have a direct modem burn process as well as a way to convert what s their name diskettes Cost is unbelievably low Your EPROM or theirs Yes they can handle anything up to the big 27128 16K x 8 EPROM you need for Apple IIc monitor rework Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU May 1985 Option picking Laser printer info A tough I O circuit Motors for robotic use Diablo daisywheel stuff ere we go with cut 3 0 of our brand new Computer Shopper feature column As usual Ill do what I can here to find any answers to reader hardware software or supply problems Just give me a call or write per the address in the end box Best calling times are 8 5 weekdays That s mount ain standard time ll send a free booklist and a special goodies list to you when you respond And even mor
171. best graphics are done by using the direct Postscript commands which are infinitely more stunning more flexible and more pow erful than anything that Mac s Quickdraw routines can even dream about The Appletalk network stuff is also not needed In fact this can severely limit what you can do with the Laserwriter Among other things it excludes you from using the so called Diablo emulation mode And yes I will put my money where my mouth is In front of me are five Laserwriter images created with Applewriter on a Ie P1 be glad to send you some free August 1985 Requires Don Lancaster justify routines for cj amp pj Free printed copies of these on request outline black box bl 137 def bw 330 def br bl bw add def bt 750 def bh 576 def bb bt bh sub def rad 20 def newpath strt br bl add 2 div def strt bt moveto br bt br bb rad arcto br bb bl bb rad arcto bl bb bl bt rad arcto bl bt strt bt rad arcto closepath 0 setgray fill white inset box xcen bw 2 div bl add def ytop bt def ybot bb def sidewidth 8 def bl bl sidewidth add def bw bw sidewidth 2 mul sub def br bl bw add def bt bt 56 sub def bh bh 152 sub def bb bt bh sub def rad rad 5 sub def newpath strt br bl add 2 div def strt bt moveto br bt br bb rad arcto br bb bl bb rad arcto bl bb bl bt rad arcto bl bt strt bt rad arcto closepath 1 setgray fill 0 setgray reverse stuff Helvetica Bold findfont 20 0 0 16 0 0 makefont setfont yp
172. bootup title so the IIc absolute reset now prompts Hello rather than Apple IIc Sorry about that Let me know if you find a better way As before I ve found that E Tech Services does a great job of burning EPROM s at very reasonable costs And time once again for the usual reminder A legal EPROM burning service can burn and ship you an EPROM only after you send them the exact image of the EPROM you want burned The code to be burned must originate with you even if the service gets a thousand iden tical orders per day Rumor has it that there are some top secret and magic EPROM s available directly from Apple that include an absolute reset total memory management access and do bunches of other analysis and debugging goodies I have no further information right now as to when or where or to whom or for how much these will be made available Chances are they will cost much more than doing your own burn for a simple absol ute reset What About Resetting The Old Apple II It amazes me how many people are still desperately clinging onto their older H machines Yes there are a lot of them still in use And yes there are bunches of people still trying to use them far beyond their original capabil ities But the simple fact is that most genuinely useful current Apple software will not run at all on a II or at least not without major compromises And future software releases are even less l
173. but you can write me for a seperate free patch on this Many people still grossly utterly and completely under estimate Applewriter It is the ONLY word processor I use and once you really get into it there is virtually nothing it cannot do in a fast and very friendly manner Its greatest abilities lie in its being totally programmable through a com panion programming language called WPL Thus word pro cessing tasks can very easily be customized or else auto mated hands off in any way you like I ve been able to personally add a full microjustify and proportional space author s keyword indexing multiple columns HIRES dumpings unique self prompting glos saries code extensions and many other goodies to it Cost of the lastest ProDOS 2 0 version is 150 from your local Apple dealer There is a 50 upgrade service if you send in any older Applewriter first factory disk and a man ual cover to Apple s Apple writer Product Manager Uh apparently this upgrade even applies to old mangy Apple writer 1 0 or 1 1 Thus the upgrade is a fantastic bargain Where can I Get Free Tech Magazines It never ceases to amaze me how many people have never heard of the controlled circulation magazines These are publications which are totally and absolutey free to a select group of insiders who allow the magazine to qualify for a special postage rate And they are usually chock full of the latest and most nee
174. by hand watching the prompts and the results of each command Then modify your sentences so they work under ProDOS Applewriter Finally rewrite your original program to pick up any of the needed changes Show me a WPL Keyword Indexer Keyword indexing is very useful whenever you want to generate an index for a book chapter or any other time you want to save a list of certain key words or phrases into a seperate textfile I finally did get around to translating my old keyword indexer for DOS 3 3e over to ProDOS All that really need ed done was a change to disk searching delimiters and some answer lines needed in serted for the Destroy Old prompts Figure 1 reveals all What you do is carefully chose a phrase start marker initgraphics June 1986 and a phrase end marker that will only appear on the screen This means that the markers must not change the length of any line comput ations and that they must not be either recognized nor used by the printer or I O card For many printers a good starting marker is an esc form seperator You can use outsideclover 135 45 82 23 119 62 154 100 180 130 189 150 170 156 130 160 88 176 29 5 189 29 176 70 160 111 156 130 150 121 130 95 100 60 62 23 23 curvetrace closepath def insideclover 135 45 71 35 106 75 134 108 155 134 155 134 110 140 70 155 29 5 162 11155 51 140 96 134 96 134 75 108 47 75 8 35 curvetrace closepath
175. c 512K Disk Upgrade Manual 030 1327 Macintosh Manual 030 0687 Macintosh Plus Internal Drive Manual 030 1245 Macintosh Plus Manual 030 1246 Multilingual 9 Monitor Manual 030 0943 Parallel Card Manual 030 0371 ProDOS Technical Reference Manual 17728 5 ProFile Owners Manual 030 0993 SCSI Card Manual 030 3118 SOS Driver Manual 030 0143 SOS Reference Manual Vol 1 030 0441 SOS Reference Manual Vol 2 030 0442 Unidisk 3 5 Manual 030 1151 Unidisk Owners Manual 030 0416 Universal Parallel Card Manual 030 0255 80 Column Text Card Manual 030 0408 Fig 2B Apple books continued 26 3 ASK THE GURU Countless early Apple drive cards have been destroyed by plugging in a drive connector offset by one pin or by an entire pin row Do make sure your adaptor prevents this Unfortunately that DB 19 connector has been a bear to find One good source is JDR These are usually available in solder tail only so a short cable may be needed between your pe card and the DB19 What Apple Books and Manuals are Available As I promised last month figure two is a listing of most of the current non IIgs Apple and Macintosh books and manuals Some of these are stocked by your Apple dealer and others are distributed through Addison Wesley The Addison Wesley titles are shown with asterisks Just about all of these should be directly available from the APDA people as well who are a first rate so
176. ches are an absolute joy to use In fact I am temporarily back on my Ile and it feels like I m work ing in a tank of molasses The speed and the smoothness is almost unbelievable par ticularly on searches WPL routines long deletions and on A screen formatting The immediate availability of time and date and a humongous RAM disk are even better But the best of all is the built in print buffer that lets you almost immediately re turn to processing your words while your printer goes mer rily on its way This can be particularly im portant for Laserwriter error messages Except for Apple writer on a IIgs very few word processors anywhere have a ready to use and built in telecommunications cap ability despite the great need for this feature in desktop publishing You also now have the Appletalk driver resident and on line so you can network Applewriter with other com puters and other printers Apple s new IIgs memory expansion card seems to have some interesting thoughts be hind it This is a very con servative and very low cost design created by removing parts from the older slot 1 7 based Ile RAM card It uses older 256K individual chips rather than going the cheaper smaller more reliable and more obvious route of using plug in SIMM modules At 129 the pricing is very aggressive The most likely reason for the older memory technology is so that any Ile owners will not be totally hacked off
177. count 1 add def indexcount numlabelspersheet gt indexcount 1 def if def eraseoldname gsave nameleftstart 20 sub vertlabeloffset indexcount 1 sub mul nametopstart add 15 add moveto erasewidth 0 rlineto 0 eraseheight neg rlineto erasewidth neg 0 rlineto closepath 0 8 setgray fill grestore def placenewname xpos namelefistart def ypos nametopstart vertlabeloffset indexcount 1 sub mul add def currentname pj indexcount numlabelspersheet eq copypage if def cleanuplastpage indexcount 1 add 1 numlabelspersheet indexcount exch def eraseoldname for showpage def nameproc save snap exch def namelist exch def namelist currentname exch def poscalc eraseoldname placenewname forall cleanuplastpage clear snap restore def list format stuff stuff stuff nameproc Don Lancaster SYNERGETICS Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 Stan Veit Editor COMPUTER SHOPPER 407 South Washington Avenue Titusville FL 32761 nameproc Fig 4 Shipping label Postscript listing to seven refillings of his bulk purchased toner to get toner cost way down to 0 65 cents a page So let s assume a one cent per page average toner cost Finally even a doctor or dentist ought to be swift enough to buy paper in case lots from his local price club at 1 80 a ream or 0 36 cents per page Better quality paper from an intelligent supplier will be higher so we might assume a one cent per page average pap
178. crets Binding systems survey IIgs Applewriter modem Toner cartridge reloading IIgs cables and connectors Far Eastern typefaces Postscript lockwashers Paper folding machinery IIgs linear RGB monitors IBM and IIc file exchanges T shirt printing Pixel line remapping Printusing and firends Applewriter s 47K limit The ultimate hacker food Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU Cassette tape reliability ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Free technical magazines March 1985 Programming an EPROM Random number generator elcome to a brand new Computer Shopper feature column I will do what I can here to find answers to reader hardware software or supply problems Just give me a call or write per the address in the end box Best calling times are 8 5 on weekdays mountain standard time Other times are catch as catch can I will send a product and freebie list to you when you respond While I will try to fairly cover all of the bases don t expect any unbiased miracles from someone who is over whelmingly pro Apple PH call things as I see them We will gather all of the names and numbers together in a box at the end I am very much into ferreting out ob scure and unique sources Thus some of these sources might be very hard to pin down elsewhere Be sure to save these listings Here goes Alpha 1 0 PSR4 Show me a Simple Random Number Generator First note that there are two types of random num be
179. d using my author s keyword indexing routine One interesting trick is to use text markers Any line that begins with two periods will be completely ignored by Applewriter For instance a L myfile partl part2 n will load only part of your file on a single glossary key stroke That n at the end says to not load the markers Let us look at a specific example of how you print or transmit a long file direct ly under Applewriter Figure two shows you a WPL routine that will take the 146K long Optima Oblique font from Adobe and send it to a Laserwriter and do it all from within Applewriter Four files were previously created and named OPTIMA OBL 1 thru OPTIMA OBL 4 I did these by using Apple writer s internal modem to receive the entire Optima Oblique file beginning 0 6 12 and 18 minutes into the transmission All these time values are for Freeterm at 1200 baud at the Mac source The files are then cropped and adjusted for continuity Very conveniently there are notches in the hex paired encrypted file values that do make this very easy Be sure to use the only Adobe font output In this example you are also allowed to add as many extra carriage returns and or spaces as you care to since text Fig 3 A trivial example of pixel line remapping 32 3 the eexec command in Post script only accepts the valid values and will nicely ignore everything else Downloading a font could not
180. d Pll be happy to lay some free win dow decal samples on you Plus of course the usual free laser demo pack and the framable picture of Meowwrrr from last month s column By the way Meowwrrr has now been traded to those Tigers You simply will not believe his new uniform Yipes Stripes Fig 5 view it this way continued from page 16 4 are written by Adobe and are published by Addison Wes eley I do try to keep extra copies of both in stock at all times Second there is a ptsize command that is included in Adobe s insidecircletext and outsidecircletext routines that can cause all sorts of con fusion if you do not exactly understand what it is and what it does The actual horizontal and vertical point size of your circular text is set by the font definition you create ahead of time Thus 21 point type will always appear on the circle as 21 point type What ptsize does is set the Spacing of the chosen sized characters around the circle Figure 4 shows you details The troublesome part is as follows On the insidecirc letext routine that would go on the bottom of the badge the ptsize command works exactly as you would expect it to The bigger ptsize the further apart the letters A good starting point is to use a ptsize somewhat larger than your actual point size The puzzlement comes in when you try to use ptsize on the outsidecircletext as you would use at the top of a badge The larger
181. d any way to improve the reliability and convenience for direct Laserwriter use A free Incredible Secret Money Machine to the best ten entries As usual we will provide an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner UPDATE Kroy Kolor has largely replaced Omnicrom There is also a superb new laminating material that is now available See column 25 and later for more info Write or call and I ll be most happy to send you some Omnicrom samples to play with We can also do custom printing for you using this positively mind blowing new material Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU February 1987 Serial cables for the IIgs Multiple video monitors 5 toner cartridge reloads Applewriter 2 1 creepifier Finishing materials contest he helpline has been rife with several heavy duty problems on the new 2 0 release of Apple works Apparently several internal pointers can get badly fouled up dropping parts of older 1 3 files as well as messing up fast cursor mo tions It is not yet at all clear whether this is caused by the early 768K memory access bug in the IIgs or whether there are actual program bugs There are also some helpline complaints over how the new mail merge feature works The dust has by no means settled on this so go slow for now Do not upgrade to 2 0 just yet If you have already upgraded drop back to ver sion 1 3 for a while The best and most current inf
182. d or the begin ning per your programming style and the utilities you are using This module should name a textfile and open that textfile list all of the lines of the BASIC program except the module lines and then close the file The module can then optionally delete itself One example routine does appear in the Dos 3 3e man uals All you do is open a text file write the original BASIC listing to the file and then close the textfile Then you load the textfile to any word processor that can accept standard textfiles You will now have free form entry full program editing unbroken comments single key entry of all the BASIC key words powerful copy and append routines search and replace and bunches of other neat features that make things fast fun and simple You do of course still have to obey all the BASIC listing rules terminating each line with a carrage return and so on Getting back to BASIC is easy enough You just add a NEW command before the first line of your text file listing Get into BASIC with DOS up and running and EXEC your file The EXEC process will then type the textfile into your machine as a BASIC listing just as if you keyed it from the keyboard Extra spaces and such used for pretty printing will get ignored When you do want printed listings just use the textfile instead since you can easily edit it further with page breaks boxes and lines more pretty printing or whatev
183. de in the host and not in the printer Dumb One bright side to all this though There is nothing that anyone anywhere could have conceivably done that would more positively and more ab solutely guarantee Postscript gaining its well earned place as the industry standard page description language Thanks HP But this month s ultimate laser printing sick joke is that January 1987 someone introduced a new high end laser printer with an internal 48 megabyte hard disk The only little problem is that the operating system was written in UNIX and it was so bloated that there was absolutely no room at all left in the 48 megabytes for a user program or application Rumor has it that the next generation Laserwriters just may appear sometime this spring Expect an under 2000 four page per minute Post script speaking personal laser printer using the new Richoh Savin engine and a super This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile It eliminates the shortlines caused by counting embedded printer commands as real characters For every escape character found and actually used in the line two extra counts are added to the line length This exactly compensates an embedded escape command followed by a single character The 2 1 Scrunchifier patch MUST be previously installed 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 usi
184. ded information you are likely to see anywhere Better still most of them have bingo cards for immediate advertiser and product info requests I would guess there s over 20 000 titles of controlled circulation magazines avail able and most of them are absolutely free Let s start with several electronic examples Electronic News EE Times Electronic Design EDN and Electronic Products are all first rate technical electronics maga zines And there are dozens more A pair of mechanical trade journals essential for robotics include Machine Design and Design News Similarly there are dozens of old line mini computer journals and lots of magazines for the computer retail trade Let me know if you want a more complete listing You qualify for any and all of these by requesting a qualification card and telling them exactly what they want to hear on the card Sometimes you can find qualification cards ready to use If not a business letter head is a must Note that custom letterheads are free these days if you have any access at all to a laser printer To date nobody has ever been tarred and feathered for willfully and maliciously say ing that which is not so on a qualification card Creativity counts I personally subscribe to hundreds of these in wildly different fields How do you find out what s available Go to any library and they will have a Bowker book called Uhrlichts Periodicals Diction
185. dle of the list You will obviously want to flush these Second if you have several disks see if rearranging the contents cannot more nearly fill up each individual disk Dropping the ProDOS oper ating system the formatter and BASIC SYSTEM from the successive disks in a multi disk package can also help if this does not overly inconven ience your users Third if you have lots of disk files you may be getting a DIRECTORY FULL error message instead of the ex pected DISK FULL message The magic number is 51 files If the files are all short you could still have lots of usable sectors left The cure here is to logic ally group the files and create one or more subdirectories Each new subdirectory adds up to 51 additional files Fourth note that a file or program of 511 or less char acters requires only a single ProDOS sector A file of 512 characters needs three sectors This extra sector is needed to hold the track and sector listing for subsequent blocks Thus a few characters above 511 can cost you dearly on overall diskette space The trick is to go through the directory and note each entry that needs three sec tors Then find the ones that have less than 600 characters in them Finally see if you cannot lightly edit the file to get it down to that magic 511 character length Fifth any file of any length that has only several more characters than a multiple of 512 would also be a prime candidate f
186. dobe has now placed Postscript in the public domain I per sonally feel that Postscript is far and away the best page makeup language avialable today Making the language more accessable should dra matically increase its use and acceptance The one thing that Post script really has going for it is that this is far and away the most fun computer language anywhere ever Postscript is absolutely totally and utterly addictive both psychologic ally and physically No other language gives 5B7D 3400 15FD 0001 0000 you such a total feeling of absolute control Or of such awesome graphics power A brief reminder that we have a new free stuff list and we are now stocking Adobe s two new Postscript books as a service for all of you Com puter Shopper readers With Haloween not that far off let s start out kinda real scary like Tell me a Horror Story Do passwords serve any useful purpose on a network The sad answer is probably yes You may not want just anyone changing what the system function and setup is going to be Next question If the pass word is forgotten or misused should it result in the sudden and total destruction of the entire system Before you give a sensible and logical answer to the last Auxiliary Memory 44 kK 8702 Fig 1 Appleworks virtual memory mapping 21 1 ASK THE GURU This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS
187. e Note that we not only have isometric lettering but that lettering is also wrapped around an isometric cylinder at the same time Applewriter on a Ile of course Helped along with my Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities To let you in on all the secrets at no charge just check out the listing in figure four This is intermediate level Postscript code Each letter is seperately compressed to the proper width slanted the right amount and raised as needed to map into its proper place As you can see sines and cosines do most of the work Variations on the same code will run all the way around the cylinder showing the rear lettering in gray rather than black You can also do helix or spiral effects of either constant or ever diminishing character heights Besides gee whiz uses this will very nicely handle perspective lettering for an upcoming perspective draw ing add on to my utilities Scanning conversion will be rather slow perhaps taking an hour or more for a full page of perspective lettering The obvious reply to any criticism of this speed would be Uh compared to what A demo or two should be available by the time you read this so write or call for a much improved self portrait of Marcia s latest continued from page 17 5 Next overprint a gray grid onto the big image using the gray grid routines in my utilities Then punch a hole at each end of each line and at each tangent point or
188. e I use PC Talk At the IIc end I prefer the ProDOS Applewriter v2 0 or v2 1 This program lets you send receive or edit text all within a single program To receive you can use the Q I command To transmit you use P NP A plain old printer cable as might be used between the IIc and an Imagewriter I is used between the IIc and the adaptor It is quite important that both ends are speaking the same data rate and format A good starting point is 1200 baud with seven data bits no parity and two stop bits You can speed things up later after you do get the basic comm process working Note particularly the treat ment of pins 4 and 5 The COMI port uses these CTS and RTS auxiliary handshake signals while their use and support on the Apple side is very rare It is thus super important that your adaptor go on the IBM end of your cable since many printer cables do not have any connections on pins 4 and 5 Watch this detail Should you elect to use a comm program on your IIc end you should also cross over pins 2 to 3 3 to 2 6 to 20 and 20 to 6 inside your adaptor What Monitors are now Available for the IIgs Several help line callers seem to be after alternates to the stock Apple linear RGB monitor that is used with the IIgs for color output The stock Apple monitor is exceptionally sharp and works very well On the other hand it does list at 500 is strictly strictly limited to linear RGB syste
189. e along with two simple demos that move the image to the center of the sheet and stretch it out so you can see all the individual scan lines The actual code used to twist the filmstrip in figure three is shown to you in figure five Note that the scissors are re ally a character in the Zapf Dingbats font Picture line remapping is fairly slow for graphics and can be excruciatingly slow for text particularly for very long messages or large fonts But once again there s that good old Uh compared to What factor since you can now do things with pixel line remap ping that would seem nearly impossible otherwise There are various ways to compile remapped code that can substantially speed things up after you have the exact image you really want More on this some other time There are quite a few other techniques you can put to use to minimize all the processing time involved in pixel line remapping You may want to avoid ever using remapped lettering When any lettering must be used keep it as small and as compact as possible Use of the very latest version firmware on the fastest pos sible machine also can help significantly It might also be possible to scan the final output image and then convert it back into a bipmapped image This is a whole new world to explore One of Postscript s gravest shortcomings is its inability to output or return portions of its final bitmap page image As with most Postscri
190. e smarts nor any specialized patches to the word processor of your choice This solves a crucial dilema I have had on the helpline when I get a request for a patch that does a very special task for an odd ball printer or an off brand printer card Post processing works on any word processor that lets you print a fully formatted text image directly to disk While Applewriter is ideal for this sort of thing any pro cessor that lets you print to disk can be used for these post processing ideas What you do with post processing is first print to disk Then you later use the disk image and further modify it depending on what you are trying to do In some cases you run the disk image back through the same word processor In ot hers you can use Applesloth or some other high level lan guage to make any changes before your final printing Let s look at a dozen good examples of post processing This will give you an idea of how general and how pow erful this very little known yet extremely powerful tech nique can become 1 To improve the final appearance of a daisywheel printer you might double whap each character thus printing everything bold Just print to disk and then get the disk image back Now search and replace every carriage re turn with a new carriage return followed by a print everything bold command 2 Some of the dot matrix printers will continue their underlining of the right mar gin or
191. e II and lIe Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU October 1985 The cubic splines Using Bezier curves Applewriter boot tricks Postscript curve tracing Editing BASIC programs s you know we have this contest going A free SAMS book to anyone who can show me any way at all to get graphics out of a Mac that even remotely approaches the quality speed and convenience of the Las erwriter graphics you can get out of Applewriter running on an Apple Ile As the dearth of entries to date shows there is no catch I am still waiting I did award one book so far but only because I felt sorry for the entrant It was just like taking candy from a baby He was a knowledgeable MacPaint power user and had spent nearly four hours work ing up an image of a covered wagon Admittedly he did have some hecklers and there was some divine intervention in the form of believe it or not a conveyor belt fire Anyway to make a long story short it took 20 minutes to redraw the wagon in Ap plewriter and there was an immediate and obvious 29 3 decibel improvement in print image quality Take a peek ahead to figure five to see the results With those multiple wheel spokes on odd angles the fine panel work and the sweeping and graceful bil lowing cover curves it was not even close To find what this is all about and to get in on the fun write or call me per the end box for your free demo pack of Applewriter Laser
192. e better off you will be when disaster inevitably strikes Some must have books include Beneath Apple DOS and the Beneath Apple ProDOS from Quality Soft ware All About DOS from A P P L E and the ProDOS Technical Reference Manual directly from Apple Two major utilities that are almost indispensible for disk repairs are Copy II from Central Point Software and the Bag of Tricks II from Quality Software OK That nasty old I O ERROR appears Now what Let s first assume that you did not just init or format the disk permanantly destroying everything previous We will assume that there is no ob vious diskette damage We will also assume a stock and unprotected disk format Your first attempt is to simply try again Open and close the drive door the in stant the light comes on This should recenter the diskette Should a file sometimes be readable and sometimes not you have something flakey going on Init a new diskette and move all of the files over Do this one file at a time Try again any time you get a read error If the error continues try rebooting Sometimes the DOS or the ProDOS operating system in memory might get trashed for one reason or an other Note that it is usually not a good idea to adjust drive speed at this particular time A change in speed could only add to your present pro blems If that fails try rebooting on someone else s system using a different disk drive This will seperate
193. e by using the SETDASH operator Compound curves are hand led with cubic splines Neatest of all are the pr pl and pt commands that print right print left and print top automatically slanting and ar ranging the letters so they seem to belong on any face The actual isometric trans formations are not really all that bad They are vertical Z 0 5 X Y horizontal 0 86 X Y Here X Y and Z are the original three dimensions while vertical and horizontal are the final directions on the final two dimensional page Circles are done as ellipses with a magic angle of 35 degrees and 16 minutes either flat for the top or rotated plus or minus 60 degrees for the sides Trig freaks will note that 0 86 are the respective sine and cosine of 30 degrees while 35 degrees and 16 minutes is the angle whose tangent is 0 5 The lettering is nothing but a stock font that gets slanted and rotated You either lean the letters forward or back wards by 30 degrees The other nine lettering orien tations not shown in figure three are also easily done continued on page 10 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU December 1985 HIRES entry points New Apple ramcard Vaporlock interrupts Bar code info sources Laserwriter vs Laserjet y oh my did I ever find a way to pay for a laser printer in a big hurry The key secret is bumperstickers These are trivially easy and quick to do and there are no
194. e full secrets of how the card is initialized for all of the DOS ProDOS Pas cal and Protocol Converter operating systems Included also are details on how to safely and selectively reserve memory areas for your own personal use Figure one gives you a preview of some of the legal and not so legal entry points to this card Write or call if you are interested in a fresh copy of this new script Why Does Q C Foul up A WPL Program In Applewriter when you are running a WPL program an attempt to load new print constants with that Q C op tion will of course load new print constants Included in the print constants are new values for the WPL variables x y and z Should any current use be presently made of these numeric variables by the WPL program bizarre and unpredictable things will almost certainly happen One cure is to save crucial x y or z values to the A D string variables and then to restore them after the new constants are loaded A second cure is to hand load each of the print constants from within WPL I ve got a few new Apple writer patches almost ready some mine some by others These do include various 2 1 patches more WPL variables and real time clock access We ll have much more on these next time I hope Figure Three To draw an Applewriter schematic start with a gray rubber grid 14 3 What are the bugs in the Laserwriter Plus As with any major up
195. e has some very interesting things to say Apple might also end up a victim of the Toshiba flap as their Imagewriter II the best selling printer in the world to day in terms of units sold is made by Toshiba Apple has been penalized five yards for delay of game in their contined refusal to release nearly all of their new Laserwriter goodies But it ought to be real soon now Hopefully even by the time you read this At the same time AST has entered another laser printer that matches the Laserwriter Plus specs into the fray While all the PR and hype people are now proclaiming this new beast an incredibly spectacular major price break through I do not see how an identically performing printer that is priced some 450 above the current 3500 low street price of the Laser writer is that revolutionary Adobe Systems now has two interesting new type fonts available One called Sonata is used for printing of musical scores while the Carta font is intended both for maps and cartography They also have a new and freebie typography poster available besides their usual free subscriptions to Colophon and their older set of the Postscript Developer Guidelines Contact Liz Bond at Adobe for details Turning to shoptalk I have moved my Hardware Hacker column on over to the Radio Electronics magazine One of the first orders of business will be restoring most of the Grease a large baking pan and arrange the twinkies
196. e on a Diablo 630 daisywheel Needless to say if you unplug the RS232 cable from your 630 and plug it into the Laserwriter the chances are very good that nothing at all will happen But unlike everyone else who lies about their Diablo compatibility with a little chainsaw and sledgehammer work the Laserwriter is able to beat the 630 at its own game Including of course a full wall to wall microjustification and proportional space using a fully professional typefont The beauty of the Diablo emulation mode in that you simply feed in plain old text files and out come profes sionally typeset results And better yet you can add bells and whistles with a simple WPL post processing routine applied to your already writ ten text files There is only one severe present restriction to the Di ablo emulation mode in that everything does in fact have to be 12 point text without any fancy graphics or dif ferent font sizes But that is most of what most word pro cessing is all about anyway You do have the ability to mix and match normal bold italic shadowed and under lined text in many different combinations You can also stretch titles out any amount you like Let s outline the process of getting your Laserwriter s Diablo emulation mode work ing on an Apple Ile par ticularly one running under the ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 We will be rather brief here to cram everything in I have much more information a
197. e reliable job than the Laserwriter or Laserjet Well I finally got the Ask The Guru reprint act together You can now get corrected edited updated and bound ligs RS423 mini DIN 8 male reprints of this entire series back to day one Thanks to a new custom thermal binding process the reprints are always up to date and have a current index You can write or call for details Our biggie this month re veals the key secrets behind those new 5 toner cartridge refills But first Tell me About the IIgs Serial Cables There are four types of cables you will need when you use your IIgs in various printer modem and mach ine to machine configurations Your Apple dealer does stock these for around 30 each Let s see if we can not beat this price Figure one shows you the IIgs modem cable This is used to go from a IIgs over to modem RS232 DB25 male or Q TR DSR TXD RXD DCD SG RXD TXD DSR TXD RXD DCD SG Fig 1 A llgs serial cable for MODEM use 24 1 ASK THE GURU Hgs RS423 mini DIN 8 male pTR 1 printer RS232 DB25 male DTR DSR Om 6 DSR TXD RXD DCD SG TXD RXD DCD SG Fig 2 A llgs serial cable for PRINTER use a RS232 DB25 modem or for any other RS232 usage where you do not want to cross the data paths and the handshaking printer Or modem RS232 DB25 female DTR DS
198. e stuff if you are an Apple hacker While I will try to fairly cover all of the bases don t expect any unbiased miracles from someone whose vehicle license plate number is 6502 Pl call things as I see them Again as usual I ll gather all of the names and numbers together in a master list at the end Note that many of these sources are very hard to pin down elsewhere Thanks to your response so far ve had to buy a power letter opener While the twin Allison diesel engines on it sure are impressive the noise and fumes get kind of exces sive at times Looks like a skip loader will be needed to fill the hopper since snow shovels take far too long At any rate keep writing Well here s the warm boot on V3 0 What is the Diablo 630 Second Line problem The WP enhanced Diablo 630 daisywheel printer is the de facto standard in daisy wheel printers Sadly there is a bizarre bug in it called the second line problem that can royally foul up the works The bug appears to be caused by sloppy or wrong initializing of certain varia bles in the on board firmware What happens is this On the first right to left pass after going into fill justify any thing fancy like an underline or a funny spoke access will garble the line and foul up the left margin as well Since you nearly always want to kill the justify on the last line in a paragraph what happens is that any second line in the next justified para gr
199. e to check yours Further since they are an escape command followed by a single char acter the stretchifier patch in my Applewriter Cookbook will automatically ignore all of them in justification line character counts To use your new keyword indexer mark the start of each word or phase you want to keep with your starting marker and the end with the ending marker You can mark multiple words but the length limit on any single phrase is 64 characters These markers remain in your textfile and will appear on screen only Then you run the WPL KEYWD INDEX routine This will automatically scan your text file and create a list of all the keywords You have the option of starting a new list or appending an older one Note that this is a middle weight routine that will put the words into a list for you It does not search for any duplicates nor put the results in alphabetical order You can easily extend the routine for fancier features A gotcha or two on this listing Where you see a L this means to insert a con trol L into the WPL program Where you see the phrase marker definitions you insert an escape and the control backslash for an esc and an escape and a control closing bracket for esc What is this month s Laserwriter Scam Badges The Laserwriter is absolutely ideal for custom badge printing at fairs shows conventions sporting events and wherever Its ability to quickly and
200. e to reserve bank 1 the usual auxiliary memory area for exclusive Applewriter use At any rate if you do look into some of the more unique and more powerful features of Applewriter you will find all sorts of ways to beat the 47K limit All that this limit says is that the piece of the textfile you are currently working on in active RAM has to be 47K or less But that should not even slow you down For instance you can load any part of any file of any length by use of the powerful searching delimiters in the various L load options The only little trick is that the piece loaded has to be 47K or less The usual command to load one part of an arbitrarily long file is L myfile start string endstring You might also string as many of the Applewriter files together as you want to into a final save file of any arbitrary length Just use the append feature of S ave As a good example a S myfile will append your current file to the material already on disk under the same filename A WPL routine might also be created to instantly grab all of your individual 47K or shorter files and string them together WPL can similarly be used to handle a global search or replace over any number of files or to print any number of files into one continuous document A self prompting glossary might easily be built up to rapidly transfer the seg ments of a long file into or out of the RAM disk space Global indexes can be create
201. e under all lighting conditions I m not convinced there is any market at all for fully and truely portable computers until such time as the display legibility system perform ance and battery life hassles can be fixed The IIc now has a new circuit board that does include plug in memory expansion up to one megabyte of RAM Check your Apple dealer for more details on upgrades and such Let us see My free stuff list has just been updated so write or call for your personal copy We are now shipping the pre release of our brand new Appleworks Disassembly Script as well as stocking Adobe s Postscript books as a reader service for all of you Computer Shopper readers But now What is the Latest Word on the IIgs Lots of new info on this exciting new machine Yes there is an internal game pad dle connector This is handy for really old paddles and joysticks and also gives you the annunciator outputs that are superb for ultra cheap local networks or to interface to an ultrasonic BSR power controller or whatever No there is no provision for a RF modulator The old four pin internal connector is gone and the IIc external RF modulator will not fit Not that a RF modulator would do you very much good Direct antenna entry to a stock color tv set would hopelessly smear 80 column color text besides trashing the new super HIRES color modes Speaking of which that new Apple color monitor is absolutely s
202. e up much less memory and can be scaled rotated or stretched over an incredible range while being routed along an arbitray path Apparently Apple s utterly ridiculous font protection is a contractural licensing oblig ation from the original source of their typography One of the more absurd features of this incredibly stupid protection scheme is that the crucial stringwidth command becomes either 100 times slower or else 100 times more inconvenient Any New Laserwriter Gossip Let us see My spies report today s street price of the Laserwriter at 4100 in many parts of the country That s the price a hungry dealer will ultimately accept on a quick and no hassle cash sale The asking price quoted over the phone is some 800 higher Many of theos initial bugs are now out of the Laser writer Plus I showed you a work around to the copypage problem last month Apple has just released upgrades of two new Mac disks The February 10 1986 Version 1 0 releases of Laser Writer Fonts and Printer Installation should now be available timer p stopwatch module Postscript timerstart usertime starttime exch def def timerstop usertime starttime sub duration exch def time duration is print duration 20 string cvs print microseconds print 500 37 sin pop repeat flush def demo An empty repeat loop print timerstart 1000 1 pop repeat timerstop A single character stringwidth co
203. e us ing packed BCD you must first unpack the bytes before ASCII conversion and then later repack them after being converted from ASCII To unpack a low BCD byte logically AND it with hex 0F To unpack a high BCD byte shift or rotate the word to the right four times and then AND it with hex 0F To pack a BCD word just shift the high BCD byte to the left four times and then OR it with the low BCD byte Several add on provisions might be needed for your software if you want to right justify the number or suppress leading zeros Zero suppres sion is done by replacing a 30 zero with a 20 space The 6502 microprocesor has a special decimal mode that works directly in packed BCD Other micros usually do have ways of faking some thing similiar These days though you usually do not pack the BCD decades How can I Convert Hexadecimal to ASCII Things do get a tad more complicated when you try to convert between hexadecimal and ASCII You might want to do this when you are displaying a hex dump of a computer s monitor program on a screen Some stand alone EPROM burners also require their hex bytes be passed back and forth as ASCII characters as does any bit image informat ion for laser printing There are both advantages and a penalties to converting hexadecimal to pairs of ASCII characters before sending it somewhere else The single ACADEMIC COMPUTING Ed Hunter ANIMATION David Meyer Sr APP
204. ease on the front and back covers While cooling be sure to check the spline for both squareness and overall uniformity And before shipping give a tug to the first and last pages to make sure they all got properly set A final edge trim using a clamping paper cutter greatly improves the out the door appearance Leonard s Distributing will lend you the Unibind toaster if you buy enough covers over a one year period An alternate source of these covers with lower published prices is Vulcan Cost is in the 60 cents to a dollar range Taking a sudden jump in price the standard medium quality binding system is apparently the 750 II binding system by Xerox Cheshire This one just applies a strip of tape and hot glue to the edge of your document using the individual covers of your choice Cost is around 900 for the machine and around 22 cents per each document for the binding tape Fancy covers are also stocked From there the costs on binding systems get totally out of hand for small quantity uses But do check into the Standard Bind Fast 5 or the imported Planax Thermomatic 380 and the Rosback Bind O Mat 200 These machines will allow most any cover material and cost in the 2000 4000 range Just about any of these could be duplicated for around 80 in junkyard parts so be sure to get all of their catalogs and then steal the plans The final machine in our binding survey is the Kolbus Ratiobinder which wil
205. easily and instantly lets you change the type of any file to or from a textfile This is done using of all things the Figure Two Custom 100 line Laserwriter screen only has 10 gray levels but gives solid grays and video images 11 2 ASK THE GURU TYPE command For instance to change a machine language binary file or program to a text file first load that pro gram into your IIc or Ile Then do a CREATE TXT MINE TTXT followed by a BSAVE TXT MINE A 2000 E 39F6 TTXT The starting and ending address may both change with the position and length of your program To convert your BASIC pro gram to a textfile on a disk just write a short header to your program that opens a textfile lists that program to the textfile and then closes the file To return from a textfile listing of a BASIC program just EXEC the textfile Unless the program is up to some thing strange the program will first run and then will leave you with a listing in the machine This listing can then be saved as an Applesloth pro gram file So moving either text pro gram images or text program files between one machine and another is more or less trivial once you get all the details worked out Getting the code to work in its new home is a different matter entirely Some lan guages particularly PASCAL may end up more or less machine independent Other languages such as BASIC will be pretty much compat ible so long as the s
206. easily set circular Fig 4 Using ptsize can get very tricky 16 4 text is a big advantage when doing many badge styles The automatic step and repeat routines in my Apple writer Laserwriter Utilities let you do lots of badges on a single sheet of paper You can also do such things as automatic sequential number ing or real time insertion of the badgees name even in calligraphy By now you have surely seen those Badge a Minit kits available from many mail order suppliers This is bas ically a hand held press that will convert a message on a flat sheet of paper into an attractive badge In quantity the badges themselves cost around 13 cents each You can get away from black and white by using a colored paper such as Astro brite or something similar by using Kroy Kolor or else by using denser grays Figure two shows a badge we did for a local convention Figure three shows much of the Postscript used for this badge Also needed are the insidecircletext and the out sidecircletext routines from Adobe and my own curve trace routine I ll be happy to send you a free copy of the later on request Most badges will use a far simpler and far shorter rou tine This one is long because of the fancy quad curvetrace used for the background and the detail in the star and the sunburst Once you get a library of stock shapes and formats built up it only takes two or three minutes to create the badge f
207. ecause of their current perceived value the days of licensable type fonts are over Sorry about that but that s the way things are today Secondly there are some half assed and totally inane protection schemes that were added to both the disks and to the fonts themselves These severely penalize the honest user while strongly reward ing the dishonest ones Such useless protection schemes and the thinking behind them have no place whatsover in personal computing let alone in personal publishing Thirdly these fonts are intended for Macintosh use Right now the Apple Ile or IIc is a far better choice as a Laserwriter driver This is mostly because of the crip pling limitations of much of today s Macintosh software There is also that present forced Macintosh use of that slow and highly restrictive AppleTalk access mode These disk based fonts will become a major product only when and if they are dropped to the 19 95 retail level are totally deprotected and are offered for computers that are genuinely useful as Laser writer drivers As a reminder even after the Infoword onslaught I still have a few Laserwriter demo packs remaining Call me for a free copy How can I Translate Programs or Text Between Computers The task of moving things between different brands of computers can range from trivially easy to just about totally imposssible There are two main steps involved in translating a pro gram
208. een 0 9 setgray gs 1 def Iw 1 def drawlines gs 5 def Iw 3 def drawlines gs 10 def Iw 5 def drawlines grestore def drawlines 72 300 div Iw mul size div setlinewidth hpos 0 def hlines gs div 1 add cvi hpos 0 moveto 0 vlines rlineto stroke hpos hpos gs add def repeat vpos 0 def vlines gs div 1 add cvi 0 vpos moveto hlines 0 rlineto stroke vpos vpos gs add def repeat def llil demo remove before use xaxis 100 def yaxis 200 def size 16 def xaxis yaxis size setgrid hlines 20 def vlines 10 def hlines vlines showgrid showpage Fig 6 Dropout free Postscript gray rubber grid 25 5 ASK THE GURU screen density and the screen angle that will result The stock grays use what is called a 60 line screen but it really only gives a Sunday funnies density of 53 dots per inch An excellent set of grays for most reducing rep roduction use an 85 line 35 degree screen while an all purpose final copy gray is done using the 105 line 45 degree screen For 300 DPI photos you may want to experiment with the 75 DPI 15 degree screen or else the 65 DPI 30 degree screens These will give you 18 and 21 gray shades Photos good enough for say a realator s listing a car shopper or a catalog cut can be gotten at 300 DPI with enough care and attention to detail You will of course get far better photos if you either reduce your final image or else set the final copy on a Linotron 100 or o
209. el petals ASK THE GURU continuously for 2000 hours before any adjustment then it just flat ain t Diablo compat ible at all While on the subject of Meleagris Gallaprovos be ware of those epsilon minus yahoos who use words per minute instead of the indus try standard characters per second when specifying the daisywheel printer speeds Thus a toy daisywheel rated at 120 is much slower than a real one rated at 40 Gobble gobble Why Does a BOLD PS Daisywheel Foul up Some Punctuation Not all snap in daisywheel elements have the same petals in the same positions De pending on whether it is a business computer or custom wheel certain symbols may end up on the wrong petal or may be missing entirely One very popular business wheel is the BOLD PS one Fifteen spokes are either in the wrong place or are totally different from a standard computer wheel such as the TITAN 10 Figure one shows us the differences between the LOAD LOAD 6 5 Loads may be lamps relays air valves low power steppers Coils etc Up to 500 milliamperes each maximum Apple keyboard symbols and these two wheels As you can see the TITAN 10 closely follows a standard computer keyboard On the BOLD PS wheel eight spokes are in the wrong position and seven are wildly different The usual method to rear range daisywheel spokes is to do a search and replace with your word processor just before printing I
210. ench marks and most especially bench cats and finally 3 Do avoid AppleTalk like the plague unless you are into snail geriatrics glaciers or congressional reform At least until Apple cleans up their act While a speed advantage of 25 1 is possible let us at least shoot for a breakeven before year end What Causes that IIgs Disappearing Drive Syndrome The IIgs disappearing drive syndrome goes like this You start out with two 3 1 2 drives and everything works fine You add a memory expansion card and configure it as a RAM disk and the second real drive vanishes in a whiff of purple smoke All you can now access are your first drive and the RAM card And of course much of your older IIc Ile software is now useless since the second drive is nowhere to be found The problem is caused by the order in which the drives are selected by the IIgs The first drive is usually Slot 5 Drive 1 The RAM card is often Slot 5 Drive 2 The second drive is usually Slot 2 Drive 1 when the RAM card is in use The solution ranges from trivial to impossible depen ding on the protection scheme used on the original software It turns out that ProDOS 1 1 1 or earlier operating systems can only recognize two drives per slot All you have to do is upgrade the operating system on each disk to ProDOS 1 2 or ProDOS 8 or something that s newer If you are using unlocked software just make a backup copy and replace ProDOS w
211. energy breakthrough Omnichrom and Omnicolor ell I bet you thought Wi month s column would be a very hard act to follow Not so This month behind the mauve curtain we have our biggest blockbuster ever How about real ink in stunning full color out of your stock and un modified Laserwriter Using Applewriter on an Apple Ile of course helped along by my utilities And all this sanely priced to boot But first let s fire up the rumor mill We ll set it to a medium fine grind There is now a major new source for Apple developer insider information And it is open to anyone anywhere Check into the new Apple Programmers and Developers Association Membership is 20 per year and it gives you instant access to all of the technical manuals third party new programs some beta test goodies and much more The APDA is run by the CALL A P P L E people who publish one of the top three Apple magazines The other two are Open Apple and Ap ple Assembly Line of course Nothing else is even within shouting distance Available are development tools system software tech nical notes some operation manuals languages and even the entire Addison Weseley library of Apple books Apparently the IIc liquid crystal display flat screen option has been flushed Mostly because it was totally illegible I guess But that does not seem to slow down the competition whose flat panel displays are all completely unreadabl
212. enter I am also hoping to speak on the Apple Ile and laser printing but I may have already missed their paper deadline Stop in and say hi I now have a new Apple writer Cookbook out from SAMS 22460 If you can t find one locally I do have a few autographed copies on hand here that I could be persuaded to part with And our usual reminder that this is your column and that you can get in on the fun by writing or calling per the end box I also have lots of neat freebies available for you if you call or write T try and be around What s the Word on The New Laserwriter Plus The only real differences between the old Laserwriter and the brand new Laser writer Plus is that eight pre viously empty ROM sockets have been newly filled and a program block got moved Inside all those new ROM chips are 22 brand new fonts that are most exciting and quite useful Now included are two new san seriff style fonts named Avant Garde and Helvetica Narrow There are also three new Roman style fonts called Bookman Century School book and fancy Palatino Each of these fonts are available in normal in bold in italic and in bold italic variations Rounding out this new super font collection is a calligraphic font named Zapf Chancery and a collection of printer s icons and dingbat symbols All the old fonts are still there including Symbol Hel vetica Times and Courier The total number of resident fonts
213. entpoint translate fs slope 0 1 0 0 concat pstring stringwidth pop 2 div neg 0 moveto fs 0 le 99 setgray 0 setgray ifelse show grestore oldrunningpos newrunningpos def def 300 300 translate NewCenturySchibk Bold findfont 60 0 0 70 0 0 makefont setfont gsave oldrunningpos 140 def 0 103 translate kernstuff 3 def POISON wraponly forall grestore gsave oldrunningpos 65 def 0 36 translate kernstuff 5 def IVY wraponly forall grestore showpage Fig 4 A Postscript cylindrical text demo 19 4 cards These do include the Timemaster Thunderclock and Proclock Next is an expansion up to eight WPL string variables from the usual four And the final enhancement does a two way expansion of those num eric variables giving you six variables each with a 24 bit resolution The normal price is 39 50 but Don has offered to pro vide Computer Shopper sub scribers with a special one time price of 34 50 Be sure to use the secret password tinaja to receive this special offer If you pronounce tinaja correctly then Don will even throw in a bonus program of some sort As a compacted sample of Don s work figure one shows you the listing for the patches needed to read the Proclock card These mods overwrite the useless Q J quit option After patching a Q J will automatically put the time and date into the WPL A string Figure two shows you a brief WPL routine and a gl
214. er Editing a BASIC program is so much faster so much fun and so less error prone when you use a word proces sor that you will never go back to the old way What are Cubic Splines Cubic Splines are a major breakthrough in the computer graphics field that let you create smooth and accurate freehand or freeform curves as easily as you would draw a plain old box Cubic Splines are also a superb way to let you handle typographic fonts since the fonts can be stored in an extremely compact form More importantly the fonts can be easily scaled to any size and any shape desired with both the resolution and smoothness increasing as the font size increases Compare this to scaling a bit mapped font that gets chunkier as the size increases The Laserwriter uses cubic splines for many of its font characters and for its curveto and rcurveto operators This ability places the Laserwriter head and shoulders above its one size font in an outrage ously costly cartridge shoddy imitators Although easily accessable from Applewriter on a Ile the cubic splines are conspicu ously absent from all of the Mac Quickdraw routines Pll try to give you some fundamental background here and show you where to go for enough info that you can with lots of personal effort add cubic spline ability to most any graphics program on most any microcomputer of your choice A plain old spline is just a plastic coated lead ruler that t
215. er cost Add these up and a nickel per page turns out to be a reasonable operating cost of a Laserwriter neglecting labor and the time value of money For a number of reasons I decided to self publish the Ask the Guru reprints When I added up all the costs of the traditional jiffy printing route I found that we are talking 7000 all of it up front and none of it guaranteed What if we print each copy on the Laserwriter We are now talking 100 double sided pages at six cents a page you do use toner on both sides of the page and throw in a buck for the cover Wonder of wonders laser printing also costs 7000 per thousand and is thus about the same as jiffy printing But whoa How about the risk here With laser printing you never need print more than 20 books at a time You are talking a short term 140 versus a long term 7000 risk Even more important if the book bombs you may have to eat most of those thousand jiffy printed copies and thus will lose your shirt And what happens if your ultimate mar ket is around 1326 copies or so Nothing good There s some more subtle advantages to laser self pub lishing Any additions and revisions can be made at any time Review copies of the final bound book can be sent out ninety minutes after the author makes his final copy submission Each customer can have his own name on the a p Shiplabel w p psr1 ppr This module will address and print custom 4 up p
216. ese at once and they do not look half bad You can also get classic laid labels that are exactly the same color and finish as your envelopes Direct mail people tend to be superstitious and I am no exception I do feel that an envelope that has the address directly on it might have slightly higher odds of getting opened than mail with an obvious stick on label Which may or may not be true Or reflect reality Obviously there is a big problem here I suspect that future laser printers will have some sort of a flip down en velope pressure roller that will solve these hassles once and for all Meanwhile how about clueing me in on what I am doing wrong Let me know if you want a free listing for the Diablo auto feeder As usual Ill be happy to give you some free letterhead and other demos when you call or write Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU November 1986 Password horror stories The hidden grand piano Applewriter Scrunchifier Dissassembly on the Mac Appleworks virtual memory ssuming that all of the A insists stuff got signed and if they ever got that pesky alligator out of editorial you ought to find a story of interest elsewhere in this month s issue I apparently missed telling you about the i d bytes in the main story These new Hgs machines have the same i d bytes as the Apple He As we saw last month you ll find these i d bytes at FBB3 06 FBCO EA and FBBF 00 To tell the new
217. estore gsave 0 74 dup scale 0 145 translate 355 372 90 355 367 90 355 367 180 328 296 90 328 296 0 330 296 0 330 296 92 328 285 92 328 285 180 320 285 180 320 285 92 318 296 92 318 296 0 320 296 0 321 296 90 296 367 180 296 367 90 296 372 90 296 3720 355 372 0 ctf newpath 324 280 2 8 2 8 360 arc closepath 0 setgray 1 setlinewidth stroke grestore clear def Nidandbody 290 442 45 367 522 45 367 522 2 410 520 2 410 520 135 385 494 135 385 494 55 387 490 23 472 465 130 405 419 155 ctf 405 419 0 467 420 0 467 420 90 467 385 90 467 385 175 300 372 175 300 372 90 300 447 90 ctf def keyboard 300 372 177 207 379 177 207 379 90 207 393 90 207 393 20 225 407 75 225 407 180 221 407 180 221 407 90 221 417 90 221 417 1 256 418 2 256 418 70 268 440 5 314 430 120 303 412 120 ctf 1 setgray 1 setlinewidth 292 442 45 365 519 45 365 519 7 391 512 75 392 512 90 391 510 110 368 515 178 368 515 135 298 442 135 298 442 180 292 442 180 ctfd 389 514 75 385 495 70 ctc def support 355 497 45 360 503 45 360 503 75 385 420 75 385 420 180 379 420 180 379 420 106 355 497 106 ctfd 387 421 0 395 421 0 395 421 95 394 392 105 383 380 150 383 380 88 387 397 90 387 420 90 ctfd 312 405 110 308 390 130 302 386 170 303 385 5 312 388 50 318 405 71 318 405 180 312 405 180 ctfd 304 373 90 304 384 90 ctc 308 412 0 313 412 0 313 412 90 313 405 90 313 405 180 308 405 180 308 405 90 308 412 90 ctfd 222 415 0 227 415 0 227 415 9
218. et yourself a few long balsa strips that are a quarter inch square Now cut the strips so the first is one inch long the next an eighth inch longer and so on until you have 25 strips Next glue these strips to gether so they form a 5 x 5 array with one end flat and the other end tallest in the middle and forming a spiral to the edges Finally find a ring that can loosely fits the array As you raise and lower that ring note how more and more dots are added to or removed from your spot function Things do get a tad more complicated when you rotate the halftone screen out to 45 degrees It actually turns out that the stock 60 DPI 45 degree screen has much less than 60 DPI resolution The oblong array used has 32 dots and gives 33 gray levels This only averages out to a 53 DPI screen equivalent There are restrictions on the size and rotation of the screen since everything has to exactly work out in integer continued on page 12 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU The IIc 3 5 monitor upgrade A copy protected monitor ROM February 1986 Postscript typesetting ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 ASCII control commands e will start out with our usual reminder that this is your col umn and you can pick up technical help by using that phone number shown below Your best calling times are 8 AM to 5 PM Mountain Standard Time Apple has apparently just dropped their 50 bargain ProDOS Applewriter trade in
219. eters that are needed by a subroutine immediately fol lowing that subroutine call The subroutine messes with the stack so that after grab bing all of its parameters it returns to the valid code just beyond the passed values In figure five we have a very common instance of an embedded file pair that causes aliasing This aliasing is often caused by those ProDOS MLI machine language interface calls Typically access of a disk command involves a JSR BF00 followed by a three byte file The first byte gives the command The second byte pair points to a longer file in which more informa tion will appear Usually this second infor mation file will follow the MLI call Most MLI calls will end with a branch to an error processor followed by an RTS The correct and aliased listings are both shown Disassembly aliasing can be both a confusing nusiance and an essential tool at the same time Let s have a contest Figure six is a mystery aliased dis assembly that could only be one possible thing Pll send a free SAMS book to the first five Computer Shopper read ers that tell me exactly what that thing is Yes its a toughie But you will know for sure when you have it By the way the same code is likely to appear in any machine so it is pretty much microprocessor independent Much more information on disassembly techniques does appear in the tearing method of Enhance I and also in my Assembly Cookbook for the Appl
220. ething decent looking Grays for the Laserwriter are specified by picking both a screen density and a screen angle These can be changed with the setscreen command Because of the odd integer arithmetic involved not every combination of screen density and screen angle is possible Figure four shows you a map of many denser Laserwriter grays while figure five shows you how simple it is to mod ify your Postscript code to pick up grays so good that they will even look like they were done by using Apple writer on a IIgs The numbers show you the total number of gray shades including black and white you will get for any selection inside any region That num ber is centered on the exact March 1987 BEST FOR 1 1 COPIES AND GRIDS 105 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen BEST FOR REDUCED PREPRESS 85 35 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen INDIA INK WASH EFFECT 135 25 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen DEFAULT urp 53 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen Fig 5 Some of the best Laserwriter grays rubbergrid Postscript enter first with xaxis yaxis size setgrid setgrid gsave 300 72 div mul 4 div round 288 mul 300 div size exch def translate size dup scale def enter later with hlines vlines showgrid showgrid gsave vlines exch def hlines exch def 100 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscr
221. ew Postscript procedure that will automatically chop up the sign or poster into as many 8 1 2 x 11 pieces as are required Later you tape the pages back together to get up to whatever size you need It is trivially easy to move spin repeat or stretch your image every which way but loose Any shade of gray you want And even four colors with repeated passes Variable size and slant text along a circular or even an arbitrary path is easily done Actually Apple so far has refused to state the maximum type size on the Laserwriter I ve used it at 16 000 point to create letters that are eighteen feet high While this is fine for putting names on water towers Apple is leaving us up in the air as to the maximum size of airport hangar roof that can easily be labeled One thing not well known guess why is that Apple writer on an Apple Ile does as good if not a better job than the MacIntosh does in driving the Laserwriter And yes that includes graphics Graphics so fancy that they are simply not available out of any of the common Mac programs We ll note in passing that MacPaint has no way to han dle all those high resolution alphabets MacWrite is not good at larger or integrated graphics and MacDraw is a cruel joke at best HIRES dumps or any other bit mapped graphics are done by converting them to hex ASCII character pairs that are easily handled by Applewriter and its WPL supervisory lan guage But the
222. ewidth stroke tension 2 6 def inside book 301 473 moveto 330 468 lineto 287 360 lineto gsave 270 365 lineto closepath 0 9 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke book pages 306 470 55 322 464 0 curvetrace 282 362 lineto gsave 250 370 lineto closepath 1 setgray fill grestore stroke book 156 509 moveto 310 480 lineto 270 380 lineto 124 410 lineto closepath gsave 0 99 setgray fill grestore stroke pages 318 463 moveto 303 425 lineto 0 25 setlinewidth stroke 315 463 moveto 309 448 lineto stroke 313 465 moveto 293 416 lineto stroke 311 466 moveto 306 5 455 lineto stroke right arm 180 454 15 208 448 30 208 448 70 240 498 40 230 516 100 230 516 150 180 454 90 curvetrace fill book spine 124 406 12 270 376 12 270 376 75 286 3590 286 359 170 134 391 170 134 391 150 124 406 90 curvetrace gsave 0 9 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke right sleeve 172 438 100 177 455 30 210 445 50 210 432 140 curvetrace gsave closepath 1 setgray fill grestore stroke left foot main 317 319 10 388 280 90 333 241 180 251 270 145 ct3 244 318 15 260 320 5 ct3 294 288 60 330 312 20 ct2 right foot main 246 304 55 252 285 90 174 236 180 120 280 90 192 320 10 ct3 172 308 15 215 285 50 ct2 left cuff 300 335 10 316 322 90 290 305 170 ct2 282 306 170 261 326 90 281 340 10 ct2 273 331 65 288 320 15 308 324 35 ct1 right cuff 240 320 40 246 305 90 220 296 169 ct2 211
223. ewriter 2 0 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column llc or the 128K Ile The patch allows printing on a Ilgs by defeating any attempts at setting serial data values to a non existant 6551 port chip It works by trashing the i d bytes for the super serial card and by aborting any O J Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 using the filer utilities Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS D2 Verify 4DB0 AO Change 4DB0 60 Verify 4F67 01 Change 4F67 10 Verify 4F6E 31 Change 4F6E 13 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS Fig 2 ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Ilgsifier patch 25 2 What IIgs Publications Are Available Figure one lists all of the major Apple IIgs technical books and reference manuals that either are now available or else shortly will be While many of these should be in stock at your local bookstore the best source is the APDA people You can even arrange with them to automatically receive all of the IIgs ma terials the instant they become available More on Apple s non IIgs publications next month What s the Latest On Omnicrom Color So much is happening so fast in the printing of funny stuff on copier machines and laser printers that it is safe to start ridiculing those poor un fortunates who still insist on black tone
224. f course But with a crucial difference Start with a bare bones 65C02 style mic roprocessor and your usual 6522 sixteen line parallel port No ROM No dynamic RAM Instead 8K of non volatile static RAM The static RAM Figure Two March 1986 is faked by an 8K x 8 CMOS memory that plugs into an intelligent socket that has a backup battery in it Just the sort of thing you would want for a bare bones controller for most any dedicated or experi mental use And very easily expanded to boot Now for the neat part This computer is also a plug in card for an Apple Ile To initally develop your application you plug the VIP into the Apple The Apple takes over letting you write to or read from the VIP and turning loose all of the pow erful Apple development tools including EDASM the disk drives BUGBYTER modems a printer and whatever else After your VIP is first pro grammed you haul it off to the shirtsleeves world where it belongs and use it as a ded icated stand alone computer or controller Should your application be doing some data acquisition once your data is acquired you can plug your card back into your Apple and upload whatever it is you just have measured From a memory mapping standpoint the VIP memory is split into a low 6K and a high 2K The high 2K maps and then use my curvetrace routine to connect the dots 13 2 ASK THE GURU into the Apple I O space from C800 CF
225. f which raises two big questions The first is What will happen to DDL the page description languge that H P was highly touting until very recently Well it turns out that DDL should remain as a specialty language of par ticular interest to vintners and oenophiles because DDL is vastly superior to Postscript when it comes to the creation of images of sour grapes The other obvious question is What will Apple do now A major announcement is almost certainly imminent at this writing But right now the situation goes something like this The new QMS laser printers now have Postscript firmware that is 33 percent faster The new H P machine uses a greatly improved and second generation engine that is blacker now feeds heavier stock handles most envelopes well plus other advantages There is absolutely no way that anybody else s first gen eration engine will be able to hold a candle to the Canon SX engine at least in the for seeable future Canon is also moving their laser engine production to Tennessee And IBM as usual is threatening to do all sorts of incredibly stupid things Apple has bunches of new goodies available Check out their six tape video series that includes Alan Kay Woz and bunches more The tapes do go for 10 each or 50 for the set They must be ordered through your local user group Some free tapes on the IIgs and on the new Macs are also available again through your user group T
226. faster a twelve year old 8 bit micro processor or a brand new and state of the art 16 bit one us ing a high speed clock The answer of course is that the old 8 bitter is very significantly faster because the programmers of any new chips always insist on using software and firmware that is hopelessly bloated beyond be lief As a general rule any time you give a programmer a three times faster machine they will write code that runs nine times slower than it did on the original machine Case in point It takes an Apple II six microseconds to find out whether a character is available to be received on a serial port But it takes an Apple IIgs one hundred and twenty microseconds to do the same thing That s in its fast mode of course If you want to count clock cycles it is 6 cycles on the II versus 314 on the IIgs Arrgh Which of course will give Applewriter fits when it is trying to run at 9600 baud let alone at 19200 At any rate I now do have some interim patches avail able for Applewriter that does restore the modem operation and even lets you talk to your Laserwriter at a 19200 baud rate Figure one shows you the patch needed to get any modem operation at all out of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 and Figure two shows you the scrolling speedups needed to allow XON XOFF commun ications at 19200 baud Uhm the code in figure two is not quite optimum yet but I thought you would like an advance look at i
227. files are SYS type files while 2 1 files are 0D type files Many thanks on this to Don Thompson Who by the way he has several brand new Applewriter patches and util ities ready for your use I am working on several patches for fast IIgs operation of Applewriter while Don is working on the automatic clock link More on this as it happens So Where s the Big Blockbuster Patience Patience I told you I would believe it when I saw it I have seen it I use it daily and I still do not believe it I don t think I was ever more amazed when Woody Baker of The Copier Store mailed me back one of my very own laser printed bus iness cards redone in real ink in an almost embossed gold Turns out Woody had found an older Omnicrom machine scunging around unsold in the back of his warehouse and fired it up Lo and behold the instant con version of any toner image to real ink in stunning colors The Omnicrom stuff has been a loser to date because the manufacturer was laboring under the delusion that you needed one of his 1300 heat fusion roller machines to use the Omnicrom process I got to thinking about just what their machine did and concluded that it was no different whatsoever from the existing fusion rollers in the Laserwriter Just for kicks I ran some Omnicrom sheets back through the Laserwriter and it fused acceptably well So what is Omnicrom and how does it work Figure five shows you all T
228. files can be recovered Nat urally the one file you need the most will be the one that is damaged beyond repair If the disk is physically damaged then surgery may be called for Do not attempt what follows until after you have tried everything else and have talked it over with a gonzo hacker September 1986 To perform surgery you will need a new diskette of the same brand and series as the damaged one You will also need a pair of cotton gloves from the photo store a sharp knife and some tape If a diskette got run over by an office chair eaten by the post office or tricycled by a three year old it is possible that the creases in the cover are slowing down the drive enough to create errors Cut the extreme top off both diskettes so that you can remove the magnetic media itself Inspect the media and see if it is nice and round and shiny without any creases Then put the blown media into the new cover and see if it works If the blown media was smeared with peanut butter and jelly or something sim ilar get a can of freon cleaner from Radio Shack and care fully spray the gunk off Be sure to use the type of freon cleaner that does not have a dry film lubricant in it TV tuner cleaner is a no no Do try and minimize the thermal shock to the media by spraying from a distance and Swampfelde i INDUSTRIAL ngISOM IVY INSta spRAY Fig 3 Just what you have been waiting for 19 3 ASK
229. full color gimmick Say you want the HOURS to be red and the rest of the decal blue Mask all but the HOURS and spray it with red paint from the hobby store Then spray everything blue Next add a second protective acetate overlay Finally apply the decal to the inside of the window by the usual peeling and sticking UPDATE Mar 87 When viewed through the Fig 4 You print a window decal this way to 18 5 glass you will see frontwards reading black 8 6 and DAILY on a blue background a black border with HOURS in red All quickly and at an ut terly negligible cost when compared to traditional sign shop methods And in vir tually unlimited colors You can also create vinyl letters and most any com mercial sign most any way you like It should also be possible to get the toner to interact with Scotchcal photo sensitive vinyl but this is one exciting area I simply haven t gotten around to yet One hint If the chosen material will not accept toner well then print backwards on the backing strip instead and then cut things to size with scissors Practically any larger paper distributor can get you bulk materials but the best source I have found for any small or experimental quantities of all the self stick acetate mylar vinyl or fluorescent bumper sticker material is Dick Blick They have several catalogs The one that you want is for signmaking and silk screen printing Call or write an
230. g monitor ROMs onto disk under the filenames of HEMON C IIEMON D IIE MON E and ITEMON F I ve purposely left these in four pieces so that an older style EPROM burner can be used if you know what you are up to Normally the C and D code goes into one 2764 EPROM while the E and F code goes into a second 2764 One prompt and low cost source of EPROM program ming are the E TECH Services people More details appear in my absolute reset package from Synergetics Capturing that character generator ROM code is a little trickier The easiest way is to borrow an EPROM program ming card and another Apple put the character generator into the EPROM burn socket and read the ROM code back to disk A 2732 EPROM can later be used to clone this ROM Note that an EPROM pro gramming service isn t able to legally sell you ready to run EPROMS unless you first send them your disk based copy of your own code to be burned You must send them the code and not vice versa This is the way it is Figure two shows us a way to have the best of both worlds With a simple adaptor and a hand burned double sized 2764 character gener ator EPROM you can now use either the old or the new character generator at the flip of a switch This gives you an enhanced generator for new stuff and an old one for your existing software Burn a new ROM clone for the bottom 32K and the old clone on the top 32K of a 2764 To use if anything ever looks
231. gle sided drive if the sum total of all files on both sides get spun more than ten min utes per month That same pad that picks up dirt on the one side ends up grinding that same dirt back into the other side when you flip over The casualness with which some people INIT their disks is unbelievable INIT kills You can take a diskette and run over it with a truck and then boil it in peanut butter WPL Routine p date n time and jelly and the chances are that you can recover most if not all of your data But it is all over once you start an init or a format Never press the carriage return following an init or format command Instead very carefully open all doors on all drives Then remove the disk that is to be for matted Put your finger on the write protect notch Then carefully and out loud spell the label backwards one letter at a time You did write on the label before you put the disk in the drive didn t you If you are copying a disk always be absolutely certain to write protect the original before continuing Never turn power off or hit reset when the red drive light is on Wait till the light goes off If the light insists on staying on for more than a minute open the drive door and then wait some more You should check your drive speeds at least once a month Note that many speed checking utilities may destroy a track on whatever disk is in the drive On an older stock 5 1 4 inch Apple or u
232. gone to extremes to maintain very strict upward compatibility Fourth and finally some definite upgrade paths will be provided These might take the form of a board swap for the Ile or else a very sub stantial trade in allowance for a II or H And that is for everybody not just for the schools as is their current policy Beyond that I will let you know what I find out just as soon as I am legally allowed to With Computer Shopper s tight publishing schedules you will hear all about it right here first So stay tuned As per always this is your column and you can write or call per the end box Besides lots of freebies the latest two products are an upgraded Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities and my new Apple RAM Card Disassembly Script Let s start off with a great find What is the Ultimate Mouse Surface Some Tucson cave divers have put me onto the ultimate mouse working surface Besides being cheap and easy to get it beats just about all the commercial products whiskers down So run on down to your friendly neighborhood divers supply or scuba shop and get yourself some 1 8 inch or 1 4 inch nylon wetsuit material The cost is around a dollar per square foot and you use it fuzzy side up It comes in decorator colors You can cut it with plain old scissors There are lots of styles available The best one I have found so far is a 1 4 inch thick material with a bright blue working surface
233. grade in any computer system or peripheral the Laserwriter Plus Version 38 ROM s have several bugs in them that did not come out of the wood work until many users started exercising their machines in ways unexpected by the pro grammers The good news is that the worst two bugs can be easily repaired with a single work around paragraph that you can add to the start of your files The bad news is that one of the bugs affects the most used command and the other one simulates a major paper path failure After per forming a two day complete printer overhaul it sure had me fooled That s no bug its a feature The first bug involves the copypage command There are lots of times when you want to print a copy and then go on and create several changes and then reprint some of the old image mixed in with the new For instance the fast way to do a form letter is to put the entire letter into the Laserwriter and then erase and change only the name and address for each successive letter Yet another major use of copypage is as a debugging tool when it is used as a breakpoint Sadly a broken copypage routine can introduce more bugs than it can find The second bug involves prefeeding To speed things up the new Laserwriter plus looks ahead of where it is processing and starts feeding paper before it is actually needed For 95 percent of the time the processing finishes before the paper motion is complete For anot
234. gray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke 2 setlinewidth grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke left foot 322 111 110 330 75 45 385 53 0 406 65 90 368 90 185 ct 406 65 45 424 75 90 400 98 165 ct 424 72 25 440 8590 420 110 150 380 115 170 360 122 135 ct right leg 216 130 25 298 175 25 298 175 160 223 166 150 186 208 120 186 208 115 168 145 90 196 107 30 230 97 0 250 113 90 233 139 125 ctf right foot 180 87 160 160 60 90 185 460 200 50 40 248 82 40 256 100 100 250 112 120 ct 164 51 160 142 6090 163 93 30 ct 141 60 180 130 75 90 160 104 0 197 106 10 ct left bod 270 213 90 310 140 60 326 110 15 365 120 70 330 250 135 250 325 135 200 310 80 220 245 60 272 197 10 ctf upper bat 60 480 30 90 480 78 130 700 78 109 725 170 73 700 93 60 480 93 ctfd 85 696 25 121 695 35 ct lower bat 40 348 90 60 3600 80 345 90 65 334 180 40 348 90 ctfd 50 350 40 72 348 40 72 348 80 78 377 80 50 387 90 50 350 90 ctfd right arm 140 487 0 199 435 70 173 410120 140 445 180 100 430 150 108 465 55 140 487 0 ctf right fingers 56 482 170 50 448 45 65 442 0 83 461 85 ct 47 453 120 50 430 40 65 428 0 84 450 105 ct 61 497 80 70 482 45 84 470 90 62 459 150 54 474 115 61 497 35 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke 95 436 30 112 465 90 92 492 180 77 465 90 83 450 0 98 467 80 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke left fingers 80 386 150 50 388 135 40 406 60 curvetrace g
235. gressional re form but is nowhere near real time at all Instead there is a simple fast and easy way to shuffle n objects Its even got the stamp of approval from the traditional dino people Even Knuth What amazes me is how little the method is used or even known and the ut terly attrocious substitutions that people dream up for it Figure one shows us the details Assume you have ten objects in ten bins you want to shuffle You pick a random integer number from 1 to 10 Now interchange what is in bin 1 with whatever bin the random integer points to If the random integer is also 1 then interchange the contents of bin 1 with itself Put another way you do nothing when and if this happens Now grab a second ran dom integer number this time wrong 7E AD 64 79 OA 20 10 A9 85 ROR 2 ADC JSR LDA STA right AD 64 79 DO OA 20 7B 10 A9 00 85 21 Fig 4 Wrong start disassembly aliasing LDA BNE JSR LDA STA wrong 20 BF CA FF 6E 03 60 JSR DEX 2 ROR RTS right 20 BF CA FF DO 60 Fig 5 Embedded values disassembly aliasing JSR DFB DFW BNE RTS AD6A X 0A0D 107B 00 21 7964 7863 107B 00 21 SBFOO SCA S6EFF S6ED4 from 2 to 10 and interchange what is in bin 2 with what ever bin the random integer points to Repeat the process ten times On pass three interchange bin 3 with a bin picked at random from 3
236. h influence points are on extensions of the straight line between START and END then you will get a straight line that overshoots either at START at END or at both of them If one influence point is above and one is below then you will get a somewhat sine looking curve that crosses the main axis between START and END You get symmetrical curves if the influence points are related to START and END in the same or mirrored ways You get asymmetrical curves if one influence point has different bias or tension than the other Now for the neat part If the first influence point is to the far right of the second influence point then the new curve may cross creating a sharp cusp or a loop The size and sharpness depends on how far away the influence points are from the START and END points as well as how far apart they are from each other You can get an open loop if only one of the two influ ence points are far left or far right of normal Thus it seems that you can use one cubic spline to do a smooth symmetric or asym metric curve a curve with one change in its curvature direction a curve with one cusp or a curve with a loop in it Anything fancier can be built up with repeated cubic splines Sometimes one of those influence points gets placed directly over START or END This can be used to either sharpen a corner or smooth out a result depending on the need Reviewing to do a cubic spline on a microc
237. hareware is another resource that should not be ignored We will have some more on this in a future column Compuserve is a very use ful BBS but they do charge for their many services Two outstanding resources here are Apple s very own AppleLink network and the MAUG Apple user group Your nearby community college can often be a very good source of Apple infor mation and study courses Check out both the data processing and the electronic technology departments Last and by all means least there is always your local Apple dealer How do the IIgs Serial Ports Work That serial communications firmware inside your Apple IIgs trys to emulate and improve on the features of the Super Serial Cards used in the older I and Ile Unfortunately a new 8535 comm chip is now used instead of the 6551 that was used on the SSC Any earlier software that made direct access to the 6551 for max imum speed e g most of the serious and useful Apple software will hang up a IIgs unless patches are made So the first way to use the IIgs serial software is to ignore it and use a Super Serial Card instead This will be needed for the vast major ity of unmodified earlier Apple commercial software that requires serial inputs or outputs There are several different levels at which you can use your IIgs serial firmware At the lowest level you can make direct peeks and pokes to the 8535 While this is ridiculously faster than t
238. have lots of your favorite software the upgrade is really a deadly trap that may cause you no end of grief For you see when you haul your Ile and 70 off to your friendly local Apple dealer he will steal your existing monitor and character gen erator ROMs and refuse to give them back to you This will prevent you from ever again running stock copies of most of your favorite existing software including Visicalc and Applewriter Ile among countless others Figure one sums up this warning Apple s claim of 95 per cent compatibility includes some carefully chosen weasel words If you read between the lines on the fine print this 95 compatibility only exists if you buy all new software and then use only the newest and latest version of each and every software package The 95 compatibilty fig ure is what the Houyhnhnms would very politely term that which is not so In reality if you have lots of older software around the compatibility is something under 15 and is falling fast Particularly if you measure your software compatibility in terms of actual use hours In general if the software uses inverse text or uses a software flashing cursor the display WARNING The Apple Ile upgrade is really a lateral arabesque Your dealer will steal your old ROM s preventing you from ever again running stock and favorite older programs such as Visicalc or Applewriter lle among countless others Be ABSOLUTEL
239. he enhanced Ile monitor is Peo OOO OOO SS NOTE In any soldering steps snap an extra DIP strip onto the cool end of the pins being soldered This keeps the pins aligned should the plastic soften Solder pin to socket at pins 14 27 and 28 DON T GET ANY SOLDER ON THE PIN TIPS Push a 13 pin machined contact DIP strip onto pins 1 13 as shown Push an 11 pin machined contact DIP strip onto pins 15 25 as shown Fig 2A Building your Ile dual monitor adaptor 9 2 pretty much useless when it comes to running older Apple software And more than a few epsilon minues did get sucked into letting an Apple dealer steal their old monitor ROMs when they attempted doing the upgrade Sadly this upgrade is needed for future releases of software even if it utterly demolishes the value of most of the older software that you already own Both the old and new mon itor chips are compatible with industry standard 28 pin 2764 EPROM chips by Intel or Hitachi The usual dual monitor sol ution is to take a physically similar but electrically double sized 27128 EPROM and put two monitors on it another on the top half and one on the bottom One quick and dirty way to switch btween the two is to lift pin 2 from the soc ket and jumper clip pin 2 to ground for the low monitor and to 5 volts for the high monitor Figures one and two show us a cleaner and safer way to handle dual monitors at a cost of o
240. he other methods Apple strongly does NOT want you doing this Yet because the other methods are so much slower you may be left with no choice in the matter Note that you usually lose all control panel access this way Some intermediate level access is done by making jumps to the Cn00 address space As figure one shows us you can do this in two different ways Apple calls one the BASIC access proto col and the other the Pascal access protocol These names have nothing to do with what language you are using in fact both proto cols are most often accessed from machine language The BASIC protocol is very simple You just call or JSR to a routine in the I O space and you are home free But only three I O routines are available namely init read and write There are two major dis advantages to the BASIC protocol The first is that you lose control on read until a character is in fact input There is no way to check to see if a character is available before you go and grab it Secondly there are some fancier extended access tricks that are not available The Pascal protocol cures these problems at somewhat more complexity What you lt I 7 lt I 2 lt I 2 lt I 92 July 1987 do is go to a standard entry point to find the offset to reach the real starting point Then you call or JSR to the real entry point Four routines are avilable including init read write and status With sta
241. he country to any detail level you care to Maps are a nearly ideal sub ject for videodisk or CD ROM storage and delivery What is Curve Tracing Some black magic invol ving curve tracing is one of March 1986 the secrets that lets good old Applewriter on an Apple Ile produce umatchably superb graphic images directly from the Laserwriter As we ve seen before these images are vastly better than those that are available from any screen oriented graphics program on any other per sonal computer Curve tracing easily draws straight lines square corners sharp vees and very complex Z NS Figure Four Pipes or wires are done by using a triple stroking technique Figure Five Cusps or sharp corners are done by re using the same data point twice 13 4 ASK THE GURU smoothly flowing curves It does so with an astonishingly small number of input data points As examples a large circle needs only four data points and a full page gray shaded cartoon character ends up with a file length shorter than a typical business memo Let us travel step by step through a curvetrace and see just how it works You start out by picking some data points as we have done in figure one The points will obey two crucial rules 1 Each point must be on the curve you want to draw 2 The slope or tangent of the curve at any point will be parallel to a line drawn be tween the previous point and the next poi
242. he drafting engineering or architectural people use to draw a curve that won t fit the usual compass or French Curve contours First you carefully bend the spline to the desired shape Then you use this shape to draw or ink your line Cubic splines use the same general idea By picking the right data points you can force a line to go from its start to its finish by way of a route that is both smooth and controllable Change the data points and the shape of the curve changes These are known as cubic splines because all of the hairy math behind them in volve a pair of polynomials of order three that use a con stant term a linear term a square term and a cubic term Should the curve end up too complicated for a single cubic spline to handle you use as FIRST LP October 1985 many splines as you need connected end to end to get the job done Figure one shows us a good example A mere four cubic splines having a total of only sixteen data points are needed to draw this Roman O re gardless of the font size By way of comparison the figure one original measured roughly two inches by three inches At 300 dots to the inch resolution a bit map of 540 000 pixels would be re quired instead The first spline covers the top half of the outside edge The second does the bottom half while the third does the top inside edge The fourth handles the bottom inside edge A fill routine then uses an even
243. he latest versions of all that Macintosh and Laser writer system software are on line and downloadable not to mention all the Ie technical notes For more details on all of this you may want contact Ellen Leanse over in Apple s evangelist group I have personally been a little slow to get into modems in a big way since I live a very expensive distance from the nearest access numbers But it is getting to the point today where you simply must have and use a modem So much is out there now And so much of it is free or very nearly so Hey did you catch that July cover on A Of course since you are a very faithful Computer Shopper subscriber you knew all about this stuff long ago If you have not already done so be sure and send for your free Applewriter Laser writer demo pack As usual this is your col umn and you can get both technical help and rumors mongered per the end box E you are ever visiting the And now for our feature attractions How do I keep from Blowing Up a Diskette It seems I blew up a disk the other day so now is as good a time as any to review how you prevent blown disk hassles As with fire preven tion the cheapest and best way to fix a blown disk is to prevent it from blowing up in the first place When you have a diskette in your hands there are two and only two allowable places to put it And that s directly in the drive or directly and immediately back into its c
244. he marbles are red and half are blue The marbles sit in the pipe in an apparently haphazard order By picking a random starting place in the pipe you can get a random bit stream out Take six bits for a random number up to 64 For a deck of cards take out six bits and only keep those whose values are in the range of 0 51 and so on To get the same sequence back just start at the same entry point I have shown you only the essentials in figure one done so you can easily translate it to any machine language code of your choice You could also use a higher level lan guage if you are willing to use and accept pitifully slow execution speeds Four gotchas You must never allow your pseudoran dom word to contain all zeros or the randomizer will hang You should seed the word with a truly random number for a new starting point and a new sequence If you want an old sequence back again for a replay or noise that repeats just save the old seed some whare and reuse it Thirdly do not try using more or fewer words unless you know exactly what you are doing for any very long useful sequences are few and far between There s a fourth possible gotcha The individual bits you will get on a single shift easily pass all sophisticated randomness tests Believe it or not though certain com binations of sequential bits grouped into words can some times fail certain very subtle and very exotic tests Chances are th
245. he old DOS 3 3e version allows long filenames that include spaces and some punctuation The ProDOS file names must start with a letter can only be letters and num bers and must be less than 16 characters long Second those stored print constants files are now wildly different since the ProDOS print constant file has to tow along some serial port info The names are also different The old DOS 3 3e Applewrit er automatically prefixes a PRT to the print constants filename ProDOS Applewrit er automatically postfixes a PRT tag Third some of the user functions have been renamed or renumbered This is es pecially true of those Q Additional Functions com mands and O Disk Access commands Some WPL rou tines may end up requesting the wrong action because of this relettering Fourth any disk based text searches made in the ProDOS Applewriter versions are only allowed to use the as a delimiter Many older DOS 3 3 disk based searches used the instead Fifth attempting to write to an existing file may pro duce a Destroy Old File Y N prompt under ProDOS Applewriter When this oc curs under WPL you have to add a new line of space Y after each disk access These five are the major differences although there are probably a few more as well The ultimate way to translate a WPL program is to rewrite the entire program out in very simple declarative English sentences Then do each sent ence
246. he status quo To wit You can now buy I didn t expect to be able to third party lids for the H P printers that let them speak Postscript at a price that s only a mere thousand bucks or so above getting a Laser writer like you should have in the first place And at some future unspecified time and in some future unspecified man ner H P will offer far more substantial Postscript support One source of the Postcript This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter version AWD SYS only It restores modem communication on the Ilgs via the internal Ilgs printer port It works by linking to custom port drivers for Init Status Read and Write 1 Make a backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY and FOR INTERNAL Ilgs PRINTER PORT ONLY Get into BASICS SYSTEM Then CALL 151 BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 T 0C 4F35 AD 4F35 60 4F38 4D 4F40 45 4F48 01 4F50 10 4F58 02 4F60 47 Verify Change 2D1C 2D1C Verify Change 2364 2364 Verify Change 23A3 23A3 Verify Change 2515 BD 2515 20 Verify Change 251D BD 251D 20 Verify Change 10 UNLOCK AWD SYS D4 20 A2 C1 20 20 A9 C1 02 36 D 89 0 43 D 88 0 4D 89 43 89 4D 48 AO A2 CL C1 A2 11 11 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6030 T 0C 12 LOCK AWD SYS Fig 1 Applewriter 2 1 serial patch for the Ilgs lids is the PS Jet by QMS All o
247. he type style and out comes your ready to sell carved wooden sign Ron is doing the same thing for an ultra high pressure water knife used in fabric cutting Terry is working up an elaborate control system for a hydroponic greenhouse that involves hundreds of individ ual water control valves The timers previously used were really raising havoc after they got out of phase with each other Jim has made a brilliant breakthrough in solar pump engineering By dynamically changing the pump stroke in proportion to the available sunlight his small controller completely eliminates a need for any batteries inverters or other costly hard to maintain and inefficient add ons Jay is a wildlife biologist and ornithologist living in a primitive area He is very interested in remote data ac quisition and recording of any environmental and weather data He is also involved in spectral analysis of bird calls Gary is into model rail roading in a big sort of way Instead of simply detecting whenever a train goes past a certain point a bar code sensor reads a label pasted underneath each car Not only do you detect the presence of a train but you can also tell which train it is along with the speed direction and exact arrangement of all of its cars Bill is developing an ultra cheap video frame grabber that lets the Apple do most of the work A small control computer is invaluable when working out the initial timing detail
248. her 3 per cent of the time there is a slight delay of a few seconds But for the remaining two percent of the time the mac hine just sits there spinning its wheels running its laser and making strange noises for as long as five minutes Figure two shows you the workaround that repairs both problems Simply place this routine at the beginning of your Postscript code any time you want to use copypage for repeat imaging or any time else you get that stuck in the snow wheel spinning It probably is not a good idea to use this patch all the time as it slows things down somewhat and only adds to your program length There is also apparently a third bug that involves a fatal limitcheck on the frame de vice buffer This one is way out of the mainstream and so far has not been pinned down But it certainly is real By the way the new Las erwriter Plus has these main differences over the original machine The amount of ROM has been doubled by going to double sized chips There are some exciting and useful new built in fonts Operation is now slightly faster when using an Apple Ile and considerably faster when using a Mac However the apparent speed of a Ile remains faster than that of a Mac when running most of your typical applications In addition to the previous ability to download low cost unprotected and unlicensed user defined fonts from any source the new machine also offers you a special feature to downl
249. here is also now a revised Laserwriter Reference that ll be mostly of interest to the Mac people This jewel does include lots of details on the magic Postscript dictionary that can interact with Quick draw One source is APDA Another thick publication binder is called the A D S Information Exchange This includes wonder of wonders the actual names and phone numbers of who does what to whom at Apple For more information do contact Carol Lockwood over at the Apple Developer Services And our usual reminder to check out the new hot and independent Postscript BBS at 409 244 4704 Most of my Computer Shopper programss that you see right here are downloadable from this great resource Far and away the best entry so far in our hacker recipe contest was for those Hostess Twinkies Szechwan style But since it would be redundant to award a tinaja quest to an Arizonian I ll keep this con test open for another month Otherwise you can enter my Hardware Hacker contest that you ll find over in Modern Electronics just dream up a new and off the wall use for one or two linear stepper motors that offer 25 pounds of force over an 8 inch stroke in 002 inch steps And hey no fair writing a librarian of some nearby town to try and find out what a tinaja quest is All that this resulted in was the librarian going on one and thoroughly enjoying herself She ll never tell I ve got a brand new series of products shi
250. his day and age the fixed size font cartridges are an inexcusable and totally un justifiable ripoff The Laserwriter has a most powerful page composition WHAT IT DOES Clear and init page two Clear and init page one Clear current page to black Clear current page to color hposlo hposhi hposhi vpos shapelo shapehi shapelo shapehi color Position without plotting Position with plotting Draw line from last point Current position gt E0 E2 Draw a shape Erase EOR a shape Set Color 0 7 Load shape from tape Fig 3 Accessing Applesloth HIRES routines from machine language ASK THE GURU computer built in that speaks Postscript a language related to Forth that is fast becoming a de facto typesetting stand ard Postscript is available now on many of the leading real typesetting machines The Laserjet does not Which means that once you have what you want a single phone call can instantly upgrade the 300 DPI dots per inch resolution of your Las erwriter to 2560 DPI or even higher true typesetting Yes things do get smoother and sharper when you do this And that s still done using nothing but Applewriter on an Apple Ie along with your original textfile The Laserjet can t do this Typesetting from Postscript is now available at rates that average a dollar a page Nat urally that does include free corrections Run that one by your local printer The Laserwriter has a bu
251. horrendous prices The absolute reset for either Apple Ile will not work on a lic and should not be used Instead a three piece patch that overwrites part of the F ROM area should be used Note that the entire monitor gets written into a single 250 nanosecond 27128 EPROM To build an absolute reset for the new llc 1 Use SNATCHMON IIC to copy the IIc monitor BLOAD IICMON F A 8000 2 3 CALL 151 4 8B64 05 8CCA EE F4 03 AO 1C A9 C5 20 A8 FC 2C 61 CO 10 05 88 DO F3 FO 2A 8D03 C8 E5 EC EC EF 4C 59 FF 91 BSAVE KREBFMON F IIC A 8000 L 1000 Burn the new CDEF EPROM If your burner can handle a whole 27128 at once combine and move your files downward to a suitable buffer space in memory For instance do a BLOAD IICMON C A 2000 a BLOAD IICMON D A 3000 a BLOAD IICMON E A 4000 and finally a BLOAD KREBFMON F IIC A 5000 This gives you a 16K buffer starting at 2000 Free plans for a simple 27128 adaptor for older burners are available on request and are included in the reset package software The new booting prompt is Hello Note that the llc self test never ends The C006 00 black magic is also not needed on the llc To install the chip unplug llc power and remove the six outermost screws from the bottom Press into the front crack directly in front of the N key with a 1 dull putty knife to release the front snap The monitor is the chip directly under the keyboard center at D
252. ht now though it is a good buy Good enough that I have switched from one sheet of index stock over to two astro bright sheets in our mailers I will be happy to send you several samples Please let me know how they stand up when sent through the mail The stops are fixed for a business envelope three fold You can t easily adjust them Light index stock can be folded They advise against this but a slight edge trim might be needed Heavier index stock just jams the machine Real bad like Ive even made them one of the winners in our latest economical finishing stuff contest Give them a call for more info front bottom September 1987 What is this Month s Postscript Utility I was going to get into my rubbergrid utilities for forms and such this month but there just isn t room Instead let s once again prove just how easy it is to go off the deep end when not if you become addicted to Postscript Figure three shows us an isometric lockwasher and its code is shown you in figure four As far as lockwashers go this is a pretty good one eh what The trouble is that I have well over ten hours blown on developing this universal lockwasher module for all my isometric illustration utilities So to spread the addiction misery around I would like to make a contest out of this Send me your very finest lockwasher It doesn t even have to be Postscript It does have to be 1 storable on a disk
253. ication of ten fonts all at one time Note the automatic justification cancel on the last line of the paragraph Professional features do include an automatic initial capital a progressive three stage microjustification and hanging punctuation at the line ends Both italics and bold italics can be freely intermixed You can even include superscripts gracefully and print subscripts With equal ease Nothing very fancy is needed for a 51Q resistor or when m 3 14 While the mixed fonts may be any shape or size ranging from 3 point thru 20 000 point most Special Effects are best used rather sparingly Fig 2 A standard Laser Printer Test Paragraph 10 2 processing time is involved at all Which is very fast I can see all sorts of neat things to do with these cards One obvious possibility in volves flipping back and forth between programs similar to Mac s switcher Better yet we now have enough memory available for truly stunning long sequence animation Entire Apple snapshots can be taken and saved to a RAM card opening up all sorts of nearly concurrent processing or coprocessing options Programs such as Apple writer and Appleworks should be very easy to link to the RAM card although custom patches or upgrades will most definitely be needed Even without the custom patch Appleworks will appear to run much faster since all parts of the program will be in the machine at once Most time lost t
254. idelines These are in the must have There s also a pair of 10 companion disks for the Mac and IBM that include a great error trapper and several other useful and all ready to run Sony KV1311CR AMP 1 102397 5 34 pin male red ne green ma blue eae white ocon brown O yellow a Doaa 12 Volts Belden 9506 cable Fig 1 Apple Ilgs to Sony KV1311 monitor interface 27 1 category utilities Except there is one glaring stupidity in these guidelines Adobe does want Postscript to appear to be fast running so they are insisting you do as much processing in your host as possible Besides being just plain wrong this concept 1 slows you down 2 is elitist 3 favors the developers of the expensive applications programs over users and worst of all 4 severely limits which compu ters you can use No you always want to do as much of your Postscript work inside your laser printer as you possibly can All that you should require of your host computer is your favorite and unmodified word proces sing or editor program And nothing more We ll note in passing that the totally ab surd concept of host resident downloaded width tables went out with the introduction of the Diablo HYTYPE 1 twelve years ago and what makes all of the non Postscript laser printing ripoffs so bad is that totally unreasonable overload they throw onto their hosts just to save
255. idge reloading 19 4 24 3 Toner cartridge secrets 18 3 Toner reloading update 30 4 Tough I O circuit 3 3 T shirt printing 32 5 Translating computer programs 11 2 Type font ripoffs 15 1 Typesetting an ad 6 5 Ultimate hacker food 32 2
256. ies his cost is 3 cents per page If a gonzo buyer pays the low street of 3300 and maintains his own machine to get over 200 000 Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 Stan Veit E ditor COMPUTER SHOPPER 407 South Washington Ave Titusville FL 32761 Fig 3 Auto addressing Postscript shipping label ASK THE GURU copies out of it his per copy cost is around 1 7 cents Let s assume a three cent per page average amortized cost The toner costs will like wise vary all over the lot The doctor or dentist will always pay list for a new cartridge A 100 cartridge is good for 2500 copies so his toner cost will be 4 cents per page An average user will use three 25 refill kits per cartridge so his toner cost will be 2 cents a page Finally the gonzo user will nurse each cartridge Requires your own mylabelproc for the fixed portions of the labels Requires Synergetics pj justify routine Free copy available on request Version 38 0 needs plusbugfix NewCenturySchlbk Bold findfont 14 0 0 14 0 0 makefont setfont linewidth 500 def filljustify false def yinc 12 def indexcount 0 def numlabelspersheet 4 def vertlabeloffset 180 def nameleftstart 350 def nametopstart 150 def eraseheight 90 def erasewidth 250 def xlabelset 300 def ylabelset 60 def gsave xlabelset ylabelset translate numlabelspersheet mylabelproc 0 vertlabeloffset translate repeat grestore poscalc indexcount index
257. ikley to work on a II So what it boils down to is this A II user forever limits his options to older and less useful software This dearly will cost the II owner time money power and conven ience More to the point it is letting his competition gobble him gone Put another way the per hour operating cost of a II is substantially higher than that of a Ile Ridiculously so And that loss in time and money power and convenience can easily pay for your upgrade costs many times over Anyway I sure get lots of H calls every day One person called me and told me he installed a Ie monitor in his I but that it didn t seem to work for some reason I tried explaining to him that there was 6K of monitor code in a Ile and only 2K in a II and gently tried to ask him where he physically put the extra 4K Somehow it just did not compute Other callers are trying to cram Applewriter Ile down into a II minimizing those major problems with all the cursor keys all the memory management lower case 80 columns the live screen the auxiliary memory needs the relocated and semi custom DOS and the totally different screen imaging and type ahead buffering Even if it all fell together the only possible result would be a poor to utterly awful rendering of an absolutely outstanding word processing program And even Apple writer Ile itself now has been completely and totally eclip sed by the newer ProDOS Applewr
258. ill tend to average out all these scaling errors and thus be just as accurate for both your horizontal and your vertical measurements xstrt 776 def vstrt 200 def tick1 6 def pos xstrt def 436 pos vsirt moveto 0 tick1 rlineto pos pos 2 add def 0 20 setlinewidth stroke repeat 10 tick newpath pos xstrt def tick2 12 def 88 pos vsirt moveto 0 tick2 rlineto pos pos 10 add def 0 20 setlinewidth stroke repeat 50 tick pos xsirt def tick3 18 def 18 pos vstrt moveto 0 tick3 rlineto pos pos 50 add def 0 20 setlinewidth stroke repeat point numbers newpath Helvetica findfont 12001300 makefont setfont vstrt vstrt 32 sub def xstrt xsirt 12 sub def xstrt vstrt moveto 688 168 moveto 1 66 0 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 800 850 ashow 734 168 moveto 1 66 0 50 ashow 780 168 moveto 0 show 465 146 moveto Helvetica findfont 40 0 0 15 00 makefont setfont POINT RULE show newpath 776 135 moveto 870 0 rlineto 1 setlinewidth stroke showpage Fig 5 Postscript listing for a point rule Fig 6 aA 1f te4 LNI O cd OST OSE 00 osz o0z OSL 001 OS 00 009 OSS 00S 099 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU June 1987 Postscript labelmaker Speeding up postscript IIgs disappearing drive Appletalk vs 9600 baud Laser printing economics here s a new literature T program now available directly from Apple Computer that you might not yet
259. ilt in ability to handle cubic splines This will let you do graceful free form curves More important the cubic splines let you create very compact and ultra smooth typography whose resolution increases with increasing font size rather than getting chun kier as is the case when using bitmaps The Laserjet does not For instance a three inch high Roman O can be done with as few as fourteen data points when you use cubic splines This compares rather favorably with the 560 000 bits needed for a straight bit map of the same character On second thought it does not compare at all The Laserwriter has very powerful internal font ma chinery that lets you do just about any style of justific ation using nothing but a few external words in a totally standard text file Particularly powerful is the stringwidth command that automatically calculates how wide a string of characters will be The Laserjet does not Incredibly that Laserjet makes you do all the work in the host if you require a wall to wall justify with a custom font You have to provide your own external width table and do all the font calculations yourself This makes it extremely difficult to use the word processor and personal computer of your choice when doing fully jus tified text on the Laserjet So the essential things you should demand in a laser printer are 1 a full page full resolution bitmap giving an unlimited text and graphics mix
260. ily power the valve under direct computer control What do you use for actuators Traditional mini ature air cylinders have been available through Clippard Unfortunately they are also available at traditional prices Instead let us get non tra ditional There is a very little known key secret to any use ful low power hacker based pneumatic actuator Never have a seal that must move All of your low power air will either be wasted trying to move the seal or else will leak right by it Figure 2 shows us three different ways to build act uators that do not have any moving seals That rolling diaphram is available as a stock Bellofram part I like the bellows actuators myself I actually had a bunch of these blow molded long ago for use in a pneumatic attachment that let you use a Selectric typewriter as a com puter printer It worked more or less but never became a viable product Polypropylene is probably the best choice of material although EVA or urethane might also be con sidered The scientific supply houses sell bellows pipettes that are almost useful as bel lows actuators I ve even ripped apart those pump the water toys that were available a few years back The bellows pump in side these worked just fine Chances are that you will prefer the bladder or balloon actuators instead since these are the cheapest and are the mechanically simpliest By the way if you must have a seal anywhere at al
261. ine transformer Hint should certain areas look a tad ratty pay close attention to the difference be tween any two adjacent data points making sure these are changing in a smooth way Pll be most happy to send you the free listing of my curvetrace routine if you call or write I will also throw in some cartoon samples and some other goodies Don t forget that I also have a free Laserwriter demo pack that s available just for you Back to the program Figure three shows us how you handle a variable width curve What you do is trace two adjacent curves and then fill in between them Figure four shows how you would draw a wire a pipe braiding or even an elaborate March 1986 border You start out with a curvetrace Then you repeat this path three times The first time you draw a wide white line This line will then erase anything the wire or pipe runs over giving you the neat little break that you can see at the crossover Next you draw a slightly narrower black line This sets the outside diameter of the pipe or the wire Finally you draw an even narrower white line This produces the inside of the pipe or wire The apparent black line width you end up with is one half of the difference between the width of the black stroke and the white one Comprehende Now that may look like a plain old wire to you But for years I have been searching for a way to quickly and be lievably show natural looki
262. iness uses I have found that a black and grey letterhead on Guilford Gray classic laid stationary seems to work well for me Best of all there is no hint whatsoever of any comput ereeze about the final letter Except that the result is so good that it could not pos sibly be anything else You can experiment with various colors of paper and toners Repeat passes through the printer can be used for color and duotone effects The advantages of the on demand letterhead method are that it is fast easy and gives acceptable results for most people most of the time The disadvantages are that you are stuck with 300 dots per inch resolution have few colors available and are lim ited to the durability and inherent appearance of heat fused toner Thus you ll find the final on demand results can in no way directly compete against say full color raised ink hot stamped foil extreme detail thermography embossing or any of the other goodies that you can coax out of the traditional printing processes UPDATE The Kroy Kolor and Omnicrom processes can now give you stunning full color from your LaserWriter See column 21 and later for more details If high print quality is a must then you can instead use the Laserwriter to prepare your original artwork for traditional printing Note that you can work oversize and then photo reduce This can stretch the 300 dots per inch limit as far as you want to go You can even d
263. ing several hundred dollars cheaper than the stock Apple monitor this dude also has a composite video input for Ile use a remote control and even has a tuner so you can watch Captain Video or the Roller Derby Maybe even watch Kukla Fran and Ollie Figure one shows you an adaptor cable that will let you use this KV1311 CR_ with your IIgs One source for these monitors is 47th Street Photo There is one minor gotcha you do have to watch for The Apple DB 15 monitor connec tor does not have a 5 volt output Instead a resistive divider has to be used to get from the 12 volt source to the inputs that activate RGB and sound as shown Many thanks to Courtney Jackson who did most of the debugging and testing on this interface In addition Tom Weishaar This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS initially ran only on the 80 column lic or the 128K lle The patch unconditionally uses as the load to screen prompt This allows the use of self prompting glossaries It works by substituting for the underline token during a screen load 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS D2 Verify 396E CD DE B8 Change 396E C9 5C EA Verify 396E 3970 per above UNLOCK AWD SYS BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS
264. irst and expect to have compatibility problems with most if not all of your favorite software The chances are the double char acter generator adaptor will solve the worst of your com patibility hassles How Can I Start E T Watching The proper name of this activity is called SETI short for the Search for Extra Terrestial Intelligence Suprisingly there are a large number of amateur radio astronomers that are doing lots of very interesting very impressive and very legit imate research these days All on their own without grants or federal help Their own trip rather than someone elses And done in their own bureacratic free way I feel that an extra terrestial contact is possibly imminent Why do I feel this way Three main reasons First our sun suddenly and dramatically became a radio star in the June 1985 early 1950 s thanks to Uncle Milty Captain Video and the Roller Derby Kukla Fran and Ollie are now our good will ambassadors to those out there and they by now have traveled 35 light years from us This distance is now great enough to attract attention in many candidate star systems And yes we could detect them sending the same radio energy levels back to us with what we have today in the way of receiver and computer technology Secondly if we were being droid watched all of the pre vious messages transmitted would probably have said No problem for the past several mil
265. is on you Keep the call length under ten minutes max And if the call is useful to you pay for it somehow Perhaps by buying one of their products or by using one of their services At the very least lay some original software on them or else send them some local produce nuts and berries or whatever Play fair and everyone will win and win big How do I Convert Decimal to ASCII There are lots of times and places in microcomputer software when you might like to convert a decimal value to its printable ASCII equival ent or vice versa For instance you might have the decimal score of a game stashed somewhere and you might want to route it to a video screen Or you might want to show the number of char acters already used or still available in a word processor Decimal numbers are us ually represented by four bit bytes with 0000 0 0001 1 0010 2 up to 1001 9 One byte is used for each decimal decade One 4 bit byte coded this way is called BCD short for Binary Coded Decimal Each byte holds one decimal digit Figure two shows us how to get between BCD decimal and ASCII which is the standard character code The rules are simple To get from BCD to ASCII just add decimal 48 or hex 30 To get from ASCII to BCD just subtract decimal 48 or hex 30 And that s all there is to it Sometimes a pair of BCD bytes might be combined into an 8 bit word This is called Packed BCD If you ar
266. it ing problems Just to thoroughly confuse you ASCII is a seven bit code that has a mere 128 defined states Since most of the per sonal computers work with eight data bits at once the remaining most significant bit or MSB is free for any special uses as decided by the system designer This eighth MSB can be used to tell any differences between a key pressed and not pressed between normal and inverse text on a screen to mark the end of a word processing screen line to tell the difference between Apple sloth tokens and real text or in any of many other ways up to the system designer Thus there are two dif ferent ASCII codes as set by who uses the MSB for what If the MSB is zero we are using low ASCII Low ASCII is often used for standard non Apple textfiles and for use with Apple textfiles when under ProDOS If the MSB is a one we are using high ASCII Now high ASCII is common in older Apples both for the normal screen display and for DOS 3 3 textfiles Since many third party printer cards expect high ASCII as input ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 had to be upgraded to version 2 1 to make sure these cards would not get confused Note that high ASCII and low ASCII differ by hex 80 or decimal 128 A high ASCII carriage return is decimal 141 or hex 8D OK How Did You Do It Ah We have a typesetter in the audience Section WW row X seat 97 The one with the green eyeshade and the ink all over thei
267. iter 2 0 and 2 1 But the majority of all H calls are still asking for an absolute reset So at the risk of encouraging the continuing loss of time money power and convenience let s look at what is involved in doing a H absolute reset The original Apple II had an old absolute reset 2316 ROM in it This was called the F8 ROM and resided in memory from F800 on up to FFFF When you pressed the reset button you absolutely and unconditionally went into the monitor No ifs ands or buts and no way for a pro gram to stand between you and absolute control This was replaced with an improved or autostart ROM in the II While the autostart ROM would automatically boot a disk for you on a cold start all programs could now grab reset vectors and keep you from ever forcing an unconditional reset Some other goodies most notably a mini assembler the single step trace debug and the unique sweet sixteen 16 bit emulation software code were also dropped during this upgrade to Applesloth But the mini assembler and the sweet 16 were really part of the Integer BASIC ROM area September 1985 from F000 F700 Strictly speaking these are not part of the monitor image itself You can still find copies of this ROM in original Apple Ms While they used to be available in these Computer Shopper ads for 10 they are now extremely rare These are also theoretically available from an Apple dealer but only at
268. ith ProDOS 8 renaming it as ProDOS If your software disk is locked find the CEO of the software house that sold you the product and then stake him to an anthill What Are the Economics Of Laser Printing Suprisingly good I ve just gotten into some heavy self June 1987 publishing and the economics are absolutely amazing Let s start out with some numbers First there are no economics whatsoever to a non Postscript speaking laser printer Since only a thousand copies or so are printed out before the user finds out how bad they have been had and since all these totally useless machines cost around 2000 each you are talking a flat 2 per page operating cost That is before a new 3000 Postscript attachment lid is inevitably purchased and then installed The real Postscript printer costs are very sensitive to who is buying it how There are three main costs involved here These are the amortized cost of the machine the paper cost and the toner cost For simplicity we ll ignore the time value of money and the actual production labor In these days of low interest rates the former does not amount to much while the latter can often be your own children or a teenager from down the street If a doctor or dentist pays the Laserwriter full list price and buys a newer toy at 80 000 copies his amortized capital cost is 5000 80 000 6 25 cents a page If a more average buyer pays 3600 and gets 120 000 cop
269. l use an O ring These are far and away the best route be sides being reasonably cheap and standard Let me know what you can come up with here There is a fantastic opportunity going begging And you can be in on the ground floor Your feedback and networking is most important to other readers and this column rolling diaphram bellows April 1985 How can I Eliminate Applewriter Shortlines All versions of Applewriter do have a nasty bug in their printer routines If you try to imbed printer commands in your text the commands will get imbedded and will get used correctly The trouble is that they will also get counted as real characters and will shorten any printed lines they happen to appear in Figure 3 shows you a fix for both DOS 3 3e versions of Applewriter You can run this patch as an Applesloth pro gram and then you insert your third or higher backup copy when asked to The shortline patch is then permanantly installed on your third or higher backup copy Do NOT make this patch to either factory diskette Use only your third or higher copy One way to backup AWlle is with Copy I and a parameter change of 10 96 After the patch is made any embedded sequence that consists of an escape that is followed by a single letter gets perfectly repaired If you want to fix shortlines on any longer commands or repair non escape imbeddings just use an esc esc to bank two characters or else use
270. l bind two books per second But there s something about this machine that makes it seem a tad pricey Maybe it is the 115 foot length or the 275 ton weight Or perhaps the fact that it looks like it might need three full time highly trained operators On the other hand this just might be a loss leader since they are really interested in selling you an entire turnkey book production facility What is this Month s Postscript Utility Curve tracing is one of the features that does seperate Postscript printers from their useless low end imitators Figure three shows you the many things you can do with a good curve tracing routine These include smooth typo graphy fancy borders nifty cartoon characters electronic wiring pictorials the circuit symbols and abstract art Figure four is a listing of my Postscript curve tracing routine This elegantly solves many problems and requires nothing in the way of an in put digitizer except possibly for a safety pin Please note that this is copyrighted and _ properitary code You may use it for your personal work so long as suitable credit is given in each and every copy of the code actually used No com mercial use of any sort will be tolerated in any manner To use my new curvetrace routine you pretend you have a fairly flexible ruler and decide how far along the curve you can get with that one ruler You then enter triads of data points for each end of each ne
271. le of Applesloth HIRES sloth ticity involves calculating the position of any dot on any horizontal HIRES line The internal routines do this by repeatedly casting out sevens a process that can take more than ten times the obviously fast method of using a lookup table instead Sure go with these routines on your own But do not expect for even an instant to be able to put them into a commercial product These internal routines are far too slow and too ungainly for that But they are a great first step so be sure to play with them along the way December 1985 continued from page 9 4 Isometric is ideal for any exploded views that show how things go together par ticularly when lots of round parts are involved One limit ation is that boxy subjects seem a tad out of proportion with the far corner looking too big You can see this if you stare at figure three long enough This is caused by your brain being used to see ing things in perspective Actually isometric is only one of an infinite number of possible axonometric project ions Tech illustrators will typically avoid all the other viewing angles since they used to be a royal pain to draw Oftentimes some really offbeat projection will show an object or a drawing in its best light But neither Applewriter nor Postscript could not care less A trig calculation is a trig calculation no matter how funny the ellipses There are a nearly infinite
272. lion years Current messages would instead sud denly be of the Oh oh we now got a problem variety And thirdly we have much more powerful listening tools available to dedicated individ uals on a sane budget than we ever did before And my oh my do we now have scads of powerful computers As personal and convivial tools And as mind amplifiers Anyway the center of the amateur SETI activities seems to be a group known as the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers which is headed by one Jeffrey M Lichtman Jeffrey has self published several very interesting and very useful books One is Microwave Radio Astronomy An Amateur Introduction A second title is Solar Amateur Radio Astronomy and a final nuts and bolts book is the Amateur Radio Astronomers Circuit Cookbook Cost is around 35 total for all three It s interesting to note the similiarity between all of the radio astronomy circuits and those things that electronic hackers are already doing such as legal access of satel lite broadcasts and not quite so legal piracy of MDS dis tribution systems Much of the same circuitry can be used directly or adapted and the larger market for the satel lite stuff has driven the costs way down Antenna mounts and tracking mechanisms of course scream robotics Another thing you can do is stop at the free visitor center at the VLA radio astronomy Very Large Array facility out side the town of Magdalena down
273. ll increase the likelyhood of a blowup I do not know what the best answer to this one is A two step approach of socket ing the non volatile startup memory and providing for some password reset proceed ure will probably be best A wrist slap rather than a kick in the teeth might be instead used for password misuse Requiring that the lid be physically removed from the machine to reset your password should do the trick Removing that idiotic and stupid single machine protect ion scheme from the fonts would also help things out bunches Meanwhile do not under any circumstances try and change your password from its default value Any ideas on this How About Another One Hmmmmm Once upon a time long ago and far away there was this programmer who very much wanted to make a printed disassembly listing of a file he had on a diskette If that programmer was using an Apple IIe all he would have had to do is punch in these keystrokes BLOAD FILE A 2000 CALL 151 PR 1 2000 LLLLLL But this programmer was so incredibly stupid that he was instead trying to use a Macintosh disk and was try ing to do his listing directly on his Mac printer How silly can you get After three weeks of work and innumerable trys at var ious software packages that programmer still does not have his disk file properly disassembled to paper After five disk blowups though he finally did find a poor way of doing the lis
274. ll out they will flop over auto matically into the drawer stacking up in the right order How long does a Post script routine take to execute Figure one shows you a rather simple stopwatch listing that you can temporarily build into a program to find out where the time is being spent This is most useful for speed ing up your programs One of the nasty suprises the stopwatch revealed is that the crucial stringwidth com mand takes an intolerably long 12 milliseconds and is nearly independent of the number of characters in the string being imaged All the time is wasted deprotecting That translates to several min utes to justify a page of text unless you get very sneaky We ll end the gossip with the usual reminder that I have a free demo pack for you that shows you the superb and unbeatable graphics you can get out of plain old Apple writer running on a Ile Call or write for your free copy What is Anti Aliasing By now just about every body has stared at those jaggies on an Apple HIRES screen or wherever and has wished there was some way to get smooth diagonal lines and believable circles One obvious route is to increase the resolution This is a really dumb approach that ups system complexity and slows things down bunches Instead there is a rather simple way to get rid of the screen jaggies This method is called anti aliasing While anti aliasing is used all the time in movie and televisio
275. ll have to move clear on up to the next question What s new in Digital Image Processing Digital image processing is any manipulation of visual data bases photographs or video by a computer Until recently this was strictly lim ited to large and expensive dino mainframes Today though there s a flood of new digital image processing products for the Apple Ile and other personal computers that are now hit ting the market Ferinstance there s a new integrated circuit called the MV1001 by Multivision This chip lets you inset a digital picture inside another video image doing all that nasty gen locking frame grabbing and synchronization for you Then there is the Grafex card new from Ray Dahlby Electronics that adds a magic NEC 7220 chip to the Apple giving you a display of up to Fig 2 A Jaggy HIRES line see text 640 by 1600 pixels along with dedicated graphics firm ware that s much faster than Mac s Quickdraw graphics And there is also a new Copyscan text scanner from Image Peripherals that gives you an ASCII textfile for any printed page you feed it But all these pale totally when compared to the new ImageWorks card made by Redshift Limited This 200 jewel plugs into slot seven of an Apple IIe and then sup erimposes a 256 x 256 video image of 256 grey levels on top of any Apple screen You can now show full gray scale photographs and other images on your Apple screen all
276. ll vertical single pixel lines encounter at least one black dot in the halftone So if your gray lines oc casionaly drop out either switch to a denser screen or else change to a darker gray So far I have been unable to find any dense halftone screens having 7 8 or 16 gray levels Please do let me know if you find any There is one restriction to the use of very dense screens The lightest available gray ends up fairly dark This is caused first by the limited number of dots and secondly by the fact that each dot will overprint somewhat so the toner dot ends up larger than its intended size If this did not happen solid lines and any blacks might not end up continuous Thus a halftone function with half of the dots printed and half of the dots blank will appear considerably darker than a 50 gray You are free to mix half tone screens in any way you like Thus you can use your 133 line screen for medium and dark grays and the 100 line one where you have to have the lighter grays To find out what great Laserwriter grays really look like just write or call and I will gladly send you a free gray scale demo that you simply will not believe Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU March 1986 Curve tracing The VIP computer VIP user applications Apple s Laserwriter plus Accessing USGS data bases the Computer Shopper booth at the West Coast Computer Faire April 3 6 in the San Francisco Moscone C
277. lly used and read help lines bul letin boards or other generic places to get effective ans wers to all of the stock and common problems on these machines One clarification from last month The Ie upgrade will handle inverse uppercase on old programs without hassles provided that the older pro gram uses the stock FDFO Fideyfoo or FDED monitor entry points and if the 80 col umn firmware is active and if the mouse nest is switched off Unfortunately many if not most of these popular and higher quality older Apple programs use their own dis play routines particularly for direct pokes of inverse char acters directly to the screen Naturally the programs you are most likley to use such as older Applewriter and Visi calc are the ones that have the worst hassles with the upgrade The best and the cheapest solution remains the character generator switcher shown you last month Unless you want to buy all newer software or install bunches of patches As a reminder I have some free detrashing patches available for Applewriter Ile These do work on either the IIc or the new Ile Just ask On to some utter ignomity Oh the shame and horror of it all SAMS tells me we still do have over 17 copies of En Co ge GK cco Q 1 2 3 n Take the object in Bin 1 and exchange it with the object in a random bin 1 to n Then take the object in bin 2 and exchange it with the object in a random bin
278. ly supports download able fonts But this needs some clarification for things are not at all what they seem You always had the ability to download custom fonts from an Apple Ile to the Las erwriter either with each job or once on initial power up Thankfully this ability still does remain What has been added is a method of downloading a new series of extremely expensive highly protected and strictly site licensed fonts Since any idiot with a cheat book can easily scarf up his own downloadable fonts for the Laserwriter I can see a great battle shaping up be tween cheap unprotected and unlicensed fonts on one hand and very expensive locked protected and site licensed ones on the other Yet this entire battle can be easily avoided by A rem oving ALL protection from both the fonts and the font access B eliminating need less and utterly unworkable site licensing and C reduc ing the price of downloadable fonts below the level that makes using a cheat book so attractive in the first place Time will tell Several readers have asked what the internal Laserwriter computer looks like Well there are really two internal computers one that s built by Canon as a mechanism cont roller and one built by Apple as a Postscript interpreter The Apple manufactured computer is very big very simple and very awesome A 68000 CPU with 1 5 mega bytes of RAM and 1 meg of ROM A total of 48 RAM chips and
279. m asks a user to set a baud rate by inputting human type num bers a comparison must be made against the baud rate table Should a hit be found on the table the proper com mand is then sent to the serial interface chips as needed Among quite a few other programs both Applewriter and Appleworks do require internal tables of this type On our current contest I have yet to receive ulp even one entry As you may recall from last month the goal of the contest is to show me any way at all to get Laserwriter graphics out of a Macintosh that are even remotely as good as convenient as pow erful or as fast as the great Laserwriter graphics you can get out of Applewriter run ning on a Ie Speaking of which isn t it utterly amazing how all these things just happen to come up my brand new five volume Appplewriter Laser writer Utilities Package is all ready to go Its many features totally boggle the mind Call or write for more info I have also arranged with Synergetics to stock the auto graphed copies of practically all of my books SAMS and otherwise This should ease greatly any hassles you have been having with your local bookshop or computer store Write or call for a complete and free list And as usual this is your column to handle all your questions and your problems The absolute reset for the old Apple Ile will not work on a new lle or a Ile upgraded to the new ROM set and should definitely
280. machines from a Ile do a JSR FEIF If you return with a set carry flag then you have a Ile If you return with a cleared car ry flag then you have a Hgs or something newer You also get some system info returned in the A X and Y registers I also may have leaned on the vertical resolution a tad too heavy The stock He can display 26 880 pixels in any of six colors or 53 760 in black and white The IIgs can display 128 000 pixels in any of 256 colors from a palette of 4096 The Mac can display zero color pixels or 173 000 pixels in black and white By way of comparison the IIgs full color display has just about the same resolution as the Macpaint window So which is the better choice 128 000 pixels in full color or 173 000 black and white ones The jury is out and will now decide Need a hot stock tip Adobe Systems who are the Postscript people recently went public The market price at this writing is somewhere around 14 and it s symbol is ADBE on the NASDAQ over the counter market It s listed in the Wall Street Journal and in many other financial newspapers You can get a prospectus from Steve Piper at Ham bricht and Quist Some very interesting revelations appear in this prospectus For in stance Apple now holds around 17 percent of Adobe Another stockholder of note is Evans and Sutherland the super whiz bang computer animation people The most stunning news in this prospectus is that A
281. map of the secret Laserwriter grays 25 4 onto virtually any surface Postscript is both threaded and extensible Which means that you can simply add your own custom routines that can become an integral part of the language Thus you can very easily customize Postscript to do what you want in exactly the way you want it done As many of you already know all of the Ask the Guru text and graphics is done by using Postscript and working from the Applewriter word processor that is driving a Laserwriter Plus Many hundreds of Post script fonts are now available and any individual font can be shown any size from 3 point to 65 000 point 72 points equals 1 inch Thus you can letter anything from a tiny model railroad sign to the name on your town s water tower all done with a single procedural font Fonts are easily stretched in any direction leaned out lined clipped or modified for other special effects You can even create your own very high quality fonts Postscript does have a very strong cubic spline drawing and curve tracing ability that can let you draw smooth and continuous curves six ways from Sunday Photographs and grays are easily included although the final halftone quality depends on the actual printer you have in use In fact it is Postscript that has made Apple s Laserwriter Plus the best selling printer in the world today There s several good ways to get started with Postscript
282. me Monitor Manual 030 3110 Apple Numerics Manual 17741 2 Apple Personal Modem Users Guide 030 2001 Apple 5 25 Drive Owners Manual 030 2040 AppleColor Monitor Manual 030 0976 Appleline Manual 030 0975 Applesoft Reference Manual 17222 6 Applesoft Tutorial 17724 2 DMP Reference Manual 030 0607 BASIC Programming 17721 8 Cable and Connector Manual 030 0623 DOS 3 3 Manual 030 0115 DOS Programmer s Manual 030 0209 Domestic 9 inch Monitor Manual 030 0976 Duodisk Owners Guide 030 0715 Fig 2A Apple technical books and manuals 26 2 product will be retrofittable to earlier Laserwriter machines through a simple chip swap Here at Computer Shopper we have already started a once a month listing of the Postscript utilities beginning with last month s column Starting with this issue you ll also find a Don Lancaster s Laserwriter Corner sidebar that will give you short and simple Postscript ideas and problem solutions that are very hard to find elsewhere There s also now a new national Postscript on line bulletin board It is open and free to all beginning users Advanced users can get at the real goodies at a higher level on a put one on take ten off basis Commercial ads are welcome and placable here at a nominal charge All of the many Postscript routines in this column will be available on this BBS on a downloadable basis and I ll try to add some extra goodies
283. mmand print Helvetica findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont 0 0 moveto timerstart 1000 A stringwidth pop pop repeat timerstop Figure One This stopwatch will help you debug slower Postscript code 15 1 ASK THE GURU Pm still fighting a bad Framedevice Limitcheck error bug on the plus that seems related to the Apple Ile serial communications Please be sure and immediately call me collect if you find a way to reliably activate this bug Apple s internal service manuals are not especially noted for being stacked on the street corners everywhere for free distribution I ve found out that the Hewlett Packard Laserjet manual 02686 90904 has bunches of useful stuff in it that applies directly to the Laserwriter print engine The manual costs 50 Most of the mechanical parts are interchangeable be tween the two printers Of particular interest is the detailed troubleshooting section for the various print quality problems Several surprises from this manual There are three dif ferent sensitivities to the toner cartridges set by small clips at the cartridge left rear That fried toner smell is really ozone And the cleaning pad also contains a special silicon fuser oil so any cleaning and reusing of these pads is a no no There s a quick cure for Laserwriter s reverse collat ing hassle Just put your printer on a two drawer filing cabinet and open the top drawer As the pages spi
284. mmands Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS D2 Verify 2A5A DO 01 60 Change 2A5A 4C 6B 45 Verify 456B AO FF C8 B9 Change 456B FO 0B C9 08 FO 4570 07 C9 15 FO 03 4C 5D 2A 4578 60 8 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS Fig 3 ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 Swallowifier patch 22 3 ASK THE GURU that is coming in from up there A small secondary motor using a worm screw drive is used to adjust the pump stroke Thanks to the big flywheel the pump runs at an optimum and nearly constant speed so long as any power at all is coming out of the panel I guess I am particularly proud of all this because Jim is one of my students And he is successfully doing some very exotic things in a dis tinctly low tech part of the country Give him a call if you want any more details Show me Some More ProDOS Applewriter Patches In continuing our ongoing Applewriter patch series figure two is a GLOSSIFIER patch for ProDOS Apple writer 2 1 that eliminates a rarely activated glossary bug that can cause all sorts of problems This is similar to the ProDOS 2 0 GLOSSIFIER patch that appears over in my Applewriter Cookbook Figure three is the new SWALLOWIFIER patch used with ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 This one eliminates the screen hassles when
285. month my Vaporlock is a fast and simple software only way to mix and match text LORES and HIRES in any combination on the Apple screen besides letting you do flawless animation screen switching and true video wipes Full details appear in my Enhancing your Apple II and Ile volume II SAMS 22415 While the vaporlock has been around for quite a while and had I thought been very thoroughly tested all of a sudden problem cards have been showing up that hang the Vaporlock The culprit Interrupts The present vaporlock will not work properly if an in terrupt arrives from most any source during those screen locking time intervals Interrupts are seeing more and more use on new cards intended for use on the Ilc and on the new Ie Partic ularly nettlesome are mouse cards and fancy video cards There are several obvious solutions One is to not allow use of problem cards A second solution is to read the processor status byte before starting the vaporlock locking routine If the inter rupt flag is set do nothing If the interrupt flag is cleared set the flag with a SEI Then do the lock Finally reset the flag with a CLI after locking is complete How Can I access the Applesloth HIRES Routines From Machine Language You wouldn t believe how many helpline calls we get on this one While there s lots of places to go for an answer perhaps the best three are the AC Tech Notes the All About Apple
286. ms lacks a handle and has video noise problems for night people using very low settings for their brightness and contrast We will first note that you must use a linear RGB moni tor in order to tap the full performance from your lgs The digital or TTL color monitors common to the IBM world simply will not do Now purchasing an unseen monitor on price alone is insane So rule number one is to not buy any monitor unless you can see exactly how it will look when running your own programs A few helpline callers have asked about using the Amiga monitor Apparently it can be done but only with circuit modifications My spies report the blanking widths of the color channels on the Hgs are much too narrow to suit the Amiga blanking circuit Please let me know if you have a solution on this The real winner seems to the be the great new Sony KV 1311 CR combined mon itor and receiver The praise lavished on this machine by all you helpline callers was enough for me to actually go out and buy one to test What you have here is a 13 inch 400 street price every thing machine It is first a television receiver with 196 channels of off the air and cable capability including a handy remote control On the side is a fancy panel that has inputs for composite video digital RGB linear RGB for audio and even teletext The outputs include video audio multiplexed sound and VCR editing A special cable is required to i
287. n special production it has seen very little usage in personal computers Anti aliasing requires that you be able to smoothly dis play any shade of gray on a black and white screen or any saturation value on a color screen What you do is replace any pixel that is touched by a line with that amount of gray that is pro portional to the percentage area of the covered pixel The picture gets slightly less sharp but all of the jaggies nearly disappear Let s look at three exam ples Figure two is your usual diagonal line on a black and white only screen Since we cannot trust the Computer Shopper printing press with exact gray shades you ll have to insert your own grays Using a soft pencil and coloring only inside the lines shade all the boxes of figures two three and four Leave 0 white Shade 100 black You then make 50 a medium gray and so on As you can see there are two severe jaggies in the line caused by the pixel sampling process Exact anti aliasing is used in figure three If you drew the exact line over the boxes the shade of gray you get each time would equal the percentage of the box that was covered by the line Observe that this line did get a little wider But at the same time the jaggies got much less severe The only problem with exact anti aliasing is that you have to make seperate and very complex calculations for every line on every screen Things get particularly nasty when seve
288. n old slot six controller card and change the IIgs front panel selection to your card for slot six Instead figure one shows you a simple adaptor that you April 1987 can build that will let you connect a pair of older 20 pin drives to a single DB19 connector This connector can either be plugged into the IIgs itself for a 5 1 4 inch only system or else into the last 3 1 2 inch drive in use This adaptor is certain to become commercially avail able soon but for now you might want to build your own I would start with a small printed circuit board being sure to use the type of 20 pin DIP header that has a plastic box around it Graphics Tablet Manual 030 0076 Hard Disk 20 Manual 030 1228 Hard Disk 20SC Manual 030 3138 Imagewriter II Appletalk Manual 030 1313 Imagewriter II Owners Manual 030 2002 Imagewriter II Sheetfeeder Ins 030 2005 Imagewriter Technical Reference Man 17739 0 Inside Macintosh Volume 1 17731 Inside Macintosh Volume 2 17732 Inside Macintosh Volume 3 17733 Inside Macintosh Volumes 1 3 Hardback 17737 Inside Macintosh Volume 4 05409 4 Instant Pascal Reference Manual 17740 Language Card Manual 030 0217 Laserwriter Owners Manual 030 1094 Laserwriter Plus Manual 030 1292 Lisa Cluster Controller Man 1 030 0611 Lisa Cluster Controller Man 2 030 0667 Lisa Motorola 16 bit Micro Manual 029 0055 Mac 512K Enhanced Owners Manual 030 1326 Ma
289. n said before but the power of the press lies in owning one I guess I have been doing some personal publishing for almost a year now It sure is nice to be able to send in camera ready artwork for my stories and columns and know that what I send in will be exactly what appears in print Its even nicer to be able to do all of my own ads without having to tangle with grossly overpriced printers incom petent ad agencies misguided copywriters and so on So is that ability to print letterheads labels and so on on demand as they are used rather than tying up money in horrendous minimum orders Best of all is the ability to make a small change at the last minute without any cost or hassle Run that one by your local printer And Bee has really gotten into custom printing in a big way doing bumperstickers badges logos and letterheads data sheets greeting cards menus batik patterns cer tificates business cards and whatever for local people In fact the only negative thing I ve noticed is how the Laserwriter absolutely and totally dominates your life style once you have one This beast is clearly and obviously both physically and psychol ogically addictive Chapters of Laserwriters Annoynmous are bound to start cropping up everywhere followed by Laserwriter re hab centers and withdrawal clinics A toner junkie is not a pretty sight to behold Anyway how do you get started on all this As
290. nal package Ignoring the fact that most of these materials are easily misplaced particularly in any family with several children have you ever noticed that the all of your protected games are absolutely and irrevoc iably inferior and second rate to those that are unprotected Consistently on adventure after adventure with no ex ceptions whatsoever Apparently some of your game authors are so hung up over protection that they ve forgotton to be creative play able or even humorous Let s flush this protection racket once and for all and get on with reality This is a serious disservice to your customers That Passport program we looked at a few columns back that lets you transfer IIc Ile or IIgs files to Mac and back The APDA people have it for 10 A must have for sure By the way some of the old Macintosh power supplies will melt if you do your upgrade improperly Which isn t quite as bad as all those Compaq machines that can literally ex plode when you try the same thing See your dealer or user group for some more details on either of these For the name of your local Apple user group either check out the listings right here in Computer Shopper or else call toll free 800 538 9696 Extension 500 Time for a brief 23 word message from our sponsor Bound Ask the Guru reprints are now available from me back to day one Write or call if you want a complete set This patch is for ProDOS Appl
291. ncaster s ASK THE GURU June 1986 A keyword indexer Laser printed badges Postscript circular text Apple rumors mongered Applewriter WPL versions he publishing deadlines Th what they are I am actually writing this a few days before the West Coast Computer Faire But if I got there and if you got there and if the great quake of 86 is far behind schedule many thanks for stopping in and visiting As per usual this is your column and you can get tech nical help per the ending box I also have some new freebies for you Besides the Apple writer Laserwriter demo pack you can now pick up free handouts on RS 232 C inter facing and the ASCII code Just call or write New products include my disassembly script for the Apple 1 Megabyte RAM card This script shows all of the innermost secrets of the for matting and the disk access firmware including a few things Apple might not want you to know about As I mentioned in our last column I like this card very much and think it is the way to go for both Apple II and Ile memory expansion Apparently AST agrees with me since they have just knocked off a clone that im itates Apple s version Their clone optionally piggybacks a second megabyte of RAM on the same card if you need it I have also just recently reprinted my Micro Cook book Volume I so this once hard to get text is now back in stock here And now Care to monger any Apple Rumors
292. nd the two transition arcs connecting the corner loops to the edge loops To really get fancy you can use a double border like this with a slight size dif October 1985 ference This will make the lines fatter in some places and thinner in others just like real engraving I have a free Postscript listing of figure four available for you Just ask for a copy This particular border takes around twenty seconds to create using the Laserwriter s internal computer All of the cubic splines do need lots of processing time While ideal for laser printing or creating final bitmaps of fixed visual images splines are not well suited for real time animation unless you have a humongous computer available Figure five shows us the covered wagon Eleven cubic splines are needed Do you see where each cubic spline starts and ends Note partic ularly that the smoothness of the curve remains no matter how much you magnify it and no matter how much you reduce it unless you get it down to a really tiny size This image was part of an award that used the figure four border the wagon and a few words Something magic happens to the Laserwriter toner when it is heat fused to parchment like calligraphic paper The toner gets super black and literally leaps out at you Also rather neat is doing customized certificates and awards at a production cost of around thirty cents each most of which goes for the fancy paper VV
293. ndirect indexed addressing will move you along by two memory locations due to a double access Another solution is to go ahead and use the indexed addressing but be certain that you cross a page boundary For instance a BFF8 X will work just fine but a C000 X will double whap Note that this very strange and double whapped indexed access does apply both to the 6502 and 65C02 but does so for different reasons One big surprise is that the Ramcard does not signifi cantly speed up any Apple writer file access As a timing example a 25K text file takes repairs copypage and prefeed bugs insert at beginning of textfile intendcopypage gsave initgraphics 100 100 translate 1 1 true 100100 lt 00 gt imagemask grestore def copypage systemdict copypage get exec intendcopypage def intendcopypage Figure Two This workaround will bypass two serious Laserwriter Plus bugs 14 2 ASK THE GURU 16 seconds to read from disk and 10 seconds when reading from the Ramcard The reason for this is that Applewriter reads files one block at a time so its internal powerful searching delimiters can be used to retrieve por tions of a file For a 25K textfile a total of fifty ProDOS calls will be needed each of which grabs one 512 character block At any rate I ve just put together a complete disas sembly script and source code capturer for this card along with some utility routines Included ar
294. ndow setting commands The first 0C sets the bottom right of the window The second 0D resets the cursor to the left of window The third 0E sets the upper left of the window while the fourth OF opens the window back to full screen Macro 10 is used to beep the speaker for an error alert Finally macro 11 does a horizontal scroll with the next byte deciding how far to go in which direction Positive 00 to 4F values go to the right while negative FF to CF values go to the left Much more detail on all this appears in the brand new pre release of my Appleworks Disassembly Script What s new in Solar Energy Jim Allen of the Solarjack company has come up with a genuine breakthrough in solar energy economics And he has done so with a production product that has been quite thoroughly field tested Windmills have tradition ally been used in remote areas of the arid southwest for livestock and game watering But windmills are costly to service and perform poorly with erratic winds and drop ping water tables On the other hand most solar pow ered pumps have simply been too expensive to use Why Because each solar array had to drive a costly inverter and a bank of expensive and hard to maintain batteries Worse yet the efficiency of the inversion and storage process gets so low that you lose all the way around Jim got to thinking that solar energy would make a lot more sense if you could
295. ng full 6502 source code for EDASM and the ready to run object code along with links for BASIC the screen plot test a card shuffling demo user examples etc It s also available on disk As another and seperate use you can route this gen erator to a speaker to generate a hissing white noise that really sounds awful Show us the sneakiest use you can come up with for these unique pseudorandom sequences What is The Word On ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 There is a brand new upgrade of Applewriter out It runs under the ProDOS op erating system and has lots of new features These do include faster operation much improved compatibility with other ProDOS programs easy hard disk access a built in transmit and receive modem settable screen margins for what you see is what you get spreadsheet editing up to 240 columns an optional page and position display and many other improvements and performance upgrades Best of all the new version is unlocked unprotected and freely copyable for any num ber of backup copies Even the source code is capturable What is wrong with it Very little A few parallel printer cards will not work properly on first try notably the Grappler and the Pkaso You can write me for a free patch or else make use of the 2 1 upgrade that corrects this defect The NULL patch for Epson superscript use is no longer needed since a _ can be substituted The shortline problem remains
296. ng wires for electronic pictorials and such Thanks to good old Applewriter wires are now a trivial task Let us move on Figure five shows us how to handle a cusp or a sharp edge All you do is double the data point repeating the same point pair twice Figure six shows us a Roman I that combines a mix of straight lines cusps and smooth curves Now for the artsy craftsy stuff There is a parameter in my curvetrace routine called the tension Normally you hold the tension to its op timum value of 2 82 The tension determines the enthuasiasm with which the curve leaves or enters the next point With the optimum tension you do get the most accurate possible curvetrace But being accurate is no fun At least not all the time Instead some very neat things happen when you vary the tension away from its optimum value If you use a tension of 1000 or greater you will get straight lines between all the points These straight lines are a useful debugging tool that make sure the points are really where you want them A tension of zero does the exact opposite and shows you the tangent line through each point This is also useful as a debugging tool Tension values positive and above normal tend to flatten the curve Any tension values positive and below normal tend to loop or destabilize the curve Positive tension values near zero say 0 3 give you spirograph effects while negative tension values near ze
297. ng the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 49D1 99 Change 49D1 20 Verify 49F8 4C Change 49F8 4C Verify 59CA 11 Change 59CA 59D0 59D8 59E0 59E8 99 04 FO 04 4c 00 CA DE D6 11 00 E6 0E C6 DE 1C 59 4B 59 11 11 11 1C 75 B9 75 4B C9 1B E6 75 00 1C c6 75 DO 60 C4 7E C9 1B DO 88 DO EE Verify changes per 4 5 and 6 above BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C Fig 2 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Stretchifier patch 23 2 ASK THE GURU deluxe high end version with zillions of built in fonts a fast 32 bit microprocessor a dual page memory and all sorts of other neat stuff The software compatibil ity percentage for the Hgs continues to fall dramatically One recent casualty is the Imageworks card because a three cent internal video con nector was left off the IIgs Even AppleWriter has its problems If you want to run stock ProDOS AppleWriter on a IIgs the simpliest way to do it today is by providing your own super serial card instead of using the internal serial firmware I have been working on patches for IIgs Applewriter and should have them for you shortly Pll be publishing the bare bones essentials here while Don Thompson of Thompson amp Thompson will add them and many more to his already excellent new utilities The new pat
298. ningnumber 1 add def if 0 incvert translate repeat grestore inchoriz 0 translate repeat grestore showpage grestore repeat def DEMO remove before use Helvetica BoldOblique findfont 11 0 0 11 0 0 makefont setfont startingnumber 673 def runningnumber startingnumber def numstring 10 string def repeatproc 57 70 moveto This is business card show runningnumber numstring cvs show def seqbuscard stepandrepeat Fig 4 Postscript step and repeat routines At any rate figure two shows you how to create an Applewriter disk for your IIgs that boots very fast and lets you access the control panel from within Applewriter To access the control panel just do the usual open apple control escape By the way on the He IIc or IIgs don t forget that you can simply and quickly get from BASICS SYSTEM into Applewriter by first doing a PREFIX D1 followed by a AW SYSTEM This is a powerful booting trick A Finishing Materials Contest Changing any laser printed sheets of paper into final out the door products needs any of a number of finishing materials and techniques As you probably have already found out this will usually involve ridiculously costly machines made even more expensive through distributors and the final no discount resellers Since laser printing is a new ball game it stands to reason that we need new ways of cheaply and quickly doing tasks that the traditional
299. nly a few dollars You plug two adaptor sockets into your Apple where the CD and EF monitor chips are sup posed to go Then you plug two 27128 EPROMs into that adaptor A pair of switches is then flipped left for the high monitor and right for the low monitor One very good source for EPROM chip programming is E TECH Services who do low cost and prompt work Note that you have to send them the exact images of the code that you want burned into your 27128 EPROMs The key to the adaptors is to use the premium machined contact sockets that may be safely and reliably plugged into each other These sockets are spaced apart by machined contact DIP strips that give enough seperation to make room for the switch Be sure to use a slide switch and not a toggle November 1985 switch and be sure the SPDT switch is the usual type that breaks before it makes There are several obvious modifications and improve ments you might like to try You could replace one switch with a wire that reaches over to the center of the other switch on the other adaptor This way only one single switch flip will be needed to pick one monitor or the other Switch flipping is best done cold If you try to flip the switches during a program strange things may happen depending on whether either monitor is being accessed at the time the switched is flip ped and whether the code being used at this instant is any different between the two moni
300. ns The key test on building an Apple clone kit is this If you normally use your own per sonal Tektronix oscilloscope more than two hours a day then you might be able to successfully build your own Apple clone kit If you use your personal oscilloscope less than two hours a day on the average then you should not even think about it What is really sad about all this is that Apple could in stantly eliminate the entire clone market with one simple and painfully obvious step Just offer some very sub stantial trade in allowances for Apple II or II owners when they upgrade to a Ile or IIgs Do this and the clones will all magically dry up and blow away Show me Another ProDOS AppleWriter 2 1 Patch Sure thing In continuing our one a month series of patches for ProDOS Apple writer 2 1 in figure 2 you ll find the much asked for Stretchifier patch What this patch does is not count any embedded printer commands as part of a real line count This eliminates the shortlines caused by exten sive printer commands es pecially while fill justifing Details on this patch for the older ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 have appeared in my Apple Writer Cookbook Incidentally Apple has now quietly reinstated the 50 upgrade policy for owners of DOS 3 3 Applewriter who wish to upgrade to ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 You can contact them directly for more information The up grade delivery is apparently a tad on the slo
301. ns b smargin esc Y p August 1985 wheel settings are stored in non volatile RAM that can only be written to a total of 10 000 times over the life of the machine Do not change the wheels continuously or you may end up in deep trouble Plan your work so you have an average of three wheel swaps or less per day Fourth bypass the micro justify bug The key test for Diablo compatibility is the magic esc M command to do true fill microjustification Without this command you more Fig 4C Auto formatter continued ASK THE GURU just flat do not have Diablo compatibility Wonder of all wonders there actually is a more or less working esc M feature on the Laserwriter But sadly there is a major and nasty bug in the Laser writer s esc M A working microjustify routine should start at the first printable character in a line Leading spaces should not be justified You guessed it Laserwriter microjustifies those leading spaces as well So what s the big deal For one thing any para graph indents not repaired by hand will end up variable width since the indents will get squashed or unsquashed to suit the rest of the text line Worst of all any left margin set by your word processor will also get microjustified leaving you with a ragged left margin There are several cures for this One obvious solution is to individually mark each line at the point where you want the mic
302. nslate 270 307 90 270 310 90 270 3105 278 312 5 278 312 8 301 308 8 301 308 90 301 298 90 301 298 175 294 297 175 294 297 90 294 302 90 294 302 170 270 307 170 ctf grestore gsave 0 5 5 translate 269 300 90 269 302 90 269 3020 270 302 0 270 302 90 270 300 90 270 300 180 269 300 180 ctf grestore gsave 6 3 9 translate 269 300 90 269 302 90 269 3020 270 302 0 270 302 90 270 300 90 270 300 180 269 300 180 ctf grestore gsave 10 5 2 9 translate 269 300 90 269 302 90 269 302 0 270 302 0 270 302 90 270 300 90 270 300 180 269 300 180 ctf grestore gsave 0 5 6 translate 284 296 90 284 299 90 284 299 1 289 298 1 289 298 90 289 295 90 289 295 1 284 296 1 ctf grestore 276 306 1 289 304 1 ctb 289 302 1 295 303 1 ctb def Negs 355 372 90 355 367 90 355 367 180 328 296 90 328 296 0 330 296 0 330 296 92 328 285 92 328 285 180 320 285 180 320 285 92 318 296 92 318 296 0 320 296 0 321 296 90 296 367 180 296 367 90 296 372 90 296 372 0 355 372 0 ctf 370 377 90 370 372 90 370 372 180 310 372 180 310 3725 370 377 5 ctf newpath 324 280 2 8 2 8 360 arc closepath 0 setgray 1 setlinewidth stroke gsave 0 7 dup scale 300 180 translate 355 372 90 355 367 90 355 367 180 328 296 90 328 296 0 330 296 0 330 296 92 328 285 92 328 285 180 320 285 180 320 285 92 318 296 92 318 296 0 320 296 0 321 296 90 296 367 180 296 367 90 296 372 90 296 372 0 355 372 0 ctf newpath 324 280 2 8 2 8 360 arc closepath 0 setgray 1 setlinewidth stroke gr
303. nslated for the Apple l there was exactly 10K of code space available for it Lots of new HIRES graphic features had to be added to Applesloth to pick up Apple s unique color capabilities Something had to go And the main something to go was printusing No there isn t a printusing present in the core Applesloth code There never was and there probably never will be Meanwhile Applesloth has become so entrenched that it would be very foolish indeed to select another BASIC just because it provided a resident printusing command What you may gain in column for matting you would lose in color graphics and in overall comptaibility with all of the zillions of existing Applesloth programs out there today Instead printusing has been left as a rite of passage to beginning Applesloth BASIC programmers Your first non trivial program assignment is always to come up with a printusing module that you can add to all your programs as needed Later on as you build your skills this can be replaced with a much faster ampersand linked machine language printusing routine So no I will not give you a printusing routine You have to do it yourself But if you insist on cheat ing you will find ready to go printusing modules in various bargain priced Applesloth utilities that you can obtain from either Beagle Brothers or else from Roger Wagner Publishing There are nearly a zillion different printusing routines of va
304. nt on a hand fed heavier paper such as the Dorian Gray or Baronial Ivory Classic Crest cover stock by Neenah Paper After printing it is usually a good idea to spray some matte fixative from the art store onto the cards This will greatly improve their scuff and wear resistance The disadvantages of the cheap route is that at least right now you can t do things like raised color ink coated papers foil or paper emobos sing thermography and such There is also a very slight rattiness to the 300 dots per inch resolution One major way around the rattiness is to print all smaller fonts with some extra kerning between all the letters This makes a dramatic difference and is one of the key secrets why my Ile stuff looks so much better than their Mac stuff For the fancy route you simply use Applewriter and your Laserwriter to generate the pre press artwork for a real business card printer By working oversize the virtual resolution can be in creased as much as you want The printer will then photo reduce your art to final size when he makes his plates Major advantages of using the Applewriter and Laser writer combination for pre press art are that this can quickly and simply can give you full custom card art with no limitations at all on any text and graphics mix Don Lancaster s Updates on the new IIgs Applewriter swallowifier ASK THE GURU December 1986 Appleworks screen macros Solar
305. nt coming up The locations and the exact spacing of the points is up to you Obviously the more points you use the closer the curve fit and the better the Figure Six Curve tracing can include straight lines corners and smooth curves as in this Roman I Figure Seven Varying the tension produced this Applewriter graphic art Only seven data points were used 13 5 results The fewer points you use the shorter the file and the faster the image will get drawn Not so obvious is how you choose the spacing between adjacent points But if you follow the two rules and remember that the slope at any point is set by the ad jacent point pair things will work out pretty good Next you punch these data points into Applewriter then bracket them and follow them with the magic word curvetrace and out comes figure two an unbelievably smooth curve You should have previously installed my curvetrace routine into your text file Both ends of the curve do need special treatment At the start you tell the curve the direction you want to head in expressed in degrees At the end of the curve you tell the curve the direction you want to come from also expressed in degrees My routine takes the points and then converts them into the data values needed by the cubic spline feature of the Laserwriter Once converted to cubic splines the rest is trivial You can think of my curvetrace routine as an in verse spl
306. nterface the DB15 con nector on the IIgs to the 34 pin DIP header connector over on the monitor receiver We saw this cable in the March 87 ATG column You can also get these for 20 from Redmond Cable If you use the ready to go cable be very careful to plug it in correctly To keep the cost down their connector is neither keyed nor is it idiot proofed So how good is it The picture quality and the color is every bit as good as the stock Apple monitor But since there are only 192 or at most 200 active scan lines on the IIgs video their 13 inch display tends to break up the characters into individual dot scan line Thus I do feel the original monitor does have a tad higher character readability that is particularly noticable when doing word processing On the other hand 13 inches is often too small to be pleasant for such things as group VCR watching So I guess one problem with the KV1311 CR is that the screen is both too big and too small Rumor has it that the low street price is caused by this being a discontinued model and that something better is now in the works But some thing better is always in the works And probably will be much more expensive One warning One person bought this for his IIc and tried using a composite NTSC Never The Same Color vid eo input He was appalled when he found that all his 80 column text was hopelessly smeared out September 1987 There simply is not an
307. number of ellipse templates sitting inside the Laserwriter and they all are equally access able Thus axonometric or even perspective drawing is now easy to do Some more axonometric options appear on page 77 of Wellman s Technical Des criptive Geometry which is published by McGraw Hill Actually is there anything that Applewriter cannot do All parts of all the figures and all the text you see here were done with Applewriter on a Ile I even have a neat routine here that lets Applewriter play Stars and Stripes Forever as an error message So how about a second contest this month A free SAMS book to the first five Computer Shopper readers that show me the best ways to milk cows by using Apple writer on a Ile And a tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ of course to the overall winner WINNER Feb 86 Assuming you are in the moood for a contest that is Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU January 1986 Laserwriter rumors Electronic halftones Printing a video image Post processing techniques Translating computer programs here are bunches of ex i citing new Laserwriter happenings this month Firstoff Apple has slashed the list price of their old Laser writer by 1000 to a new list of 5995 But even this fig ure is virtually meaningless since the street price is now around 4300 if you shop around or can find a hungry enough dealer I have even heard of a lowball Laserwriter offer of
308. o Place the existing llc monitor chip into your EPROM burner and clone a copy of the monitor image into RAM Search the RAM image for an EXACT MATCH to the following bytes which should begin at the start of your RAM image plus 3CCA AO BO 64 A9 AO 91 3C EO 01 DO F2 3C A2 BF 86 3D 88 91 3C CA Overwrite the exact match to the above RAM image with this sequence EE F4 03 AO 2C 61 CO 10 AC 59 EF 3C 12 20 A8 FC 07 88 DO F5 Burn a new 27128 old IIc or 27256 new IIc EPROM using the above patched code ig 2 An improved absolute reset for the Apple llc ASK THE GURU fundamentally different types of RGB montitors These do include the linear type and the digital or TTL type A linear monitor can display all 4096 of the IIgs colors A digital monitor can not and is usually limited to a total of 8 or 16 colors Thus even if you could adapt a TTL monitor to your IIgs it would not show all of the intended colors in their intended way Further it is not a simple matter to get attractive and readable 80 column text on a RGB monitor s screen Many of the bargain priced monitors simply cannot handle IIgs text attractively So your first rule is to never buy a monitor for IIgs use unless you have seen exactly how sharp the text and the Super HIRES images will appear One monitor that has a lot of helpline interest is the new Sony KV1311 CR Besides having an acceptable picture and be
309. o admit that yes there are flaws in Applewriter graphics In fact until this column the single most often used Mac intosh graphic image has been completely and utterly lack ing from Applewriter and just not available there in any way shape or form So admitting defeat in figure five you will find a Postscript listing that we can call Applewriter s Glaring Omission You are right It was absolutely inexcusable for the Apple IIc Ile IIgs community to not be able to share this mainstream Mac graphic So sorry I ve now got lots of new Postscript goodies available some free some not so free Some will now even run under Appleworks some on the Mac and even some for one of those Incredibly Boring Machines There s even some Atari stuff Write or call for your usual free samples and whatever Applewriter s Glaring Omission Postscript gsave 1 setlinecap 5 setlinewidth 0 setgray 450 520 translate 27 5 rotate 8 newpath 15 0 moveto 20 0 rlineto 10 0 rmoveto 12 0 rlineto stroke 45 rotate repeat grestore newpath 0 setgray 300 400 100 0 360 arc fill gsave 1 setgray newpath 200 305 moveto 10 setlinewidth 200 0 rlineto stroke 200 495 moveto 170 0 rlineto stroke grestore gsave 300 520 translate 1 setlinecap newpath 0 0 moveto 50 100 125 60 150 0 rcurveto gsave 1 setgray 16 setlinewidth stroke grestore 12 setlinewidth gsave stroke grestore 8 setlinewidth 85 35 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub
310. o full color by printing seperations when and as needed Outstanding pastels and halftones can be done using the internal Laserwriter half tone machinery Just do not forget that the screen size changes as you enlarge or reduce the image And of course you have an infinite range of type styles shapes and sizes compared to the fixed height and fixed width of old way instant transfer lettering Let us look at an example Figure five shows you one typical letterhead and some of the Laserwriter special ef fects you can easily do Once again you can print this letterhead on demand as it sits or else you can use the image as master artwork for traditional printing processes Figure six gives you the Postscript listing for this letterhead This listing also shows why it is so important October 1986 to use a Postscript speaking printer in the first place It also dramatically drives home why you will want to work directly in the unique Post script language instead of using someone else s canned layout routines Check closely and you will find lots of subtlety here The company name is imaged by using the charpath operator in a forall loop Each letter is imaged three times The first time a fairly wide white out line is put down This will automatically break the base hairline exactly when and where needed Next the letter is filled in with gray using a custom and very dense half tone screen Finally
311. o whirring disks can now be saved One big advantage that all programmers now have is a newly standard and now well defined expansion environ ment This is far better than having to do custom patch work for each and every third party add on memory card that comes along How Can I Find Out All About Bar Codes Bar codes are those funny product code labels you ve no doubt seen at the grocery store The best running com mentary I ve run across on the societal impact of bar codes appears on the cover of every issue of MAD magazine over the past several years Chances are that you would prefer some more technical information than this though It turns out there are at least five major bar code standards The one you already know the most about is called the UPC short for the Universal Product Code You can get a copy of the UPC standard from of all places the UPC Council Actually they just renamed themselves UC for Uniform Code While this sounds a tad presumptious they do seem to be running away with all the marbles Other competitive bar cod ing schemes include the Code 3 of 9 used by the military and the automotive people the Interleaved 2 of 5 used for containers and transport ation the Codabar also used for transportation and the European EAN A few further details on these standards appear in the Hewlett Packard bar code components folder publicat ion number 5954 2152 H P has lots of fairl
312. oad from one single source of expensive protec ted and site licensed fonts How Can I draw an Electronic Schematic Why with Applewriter on an Apple Ile of course How else could you possibly draw an electronic schematic The image quality and the flexibility both end up vastly better than anything that s currently available from any screen oriented graphics rou tine on any microcomputer Why Because an exact text description is far and away the most powerful the most flexible and the most exact way of wringing the ultimate perfomance out of your Las erwriter or Laserwriter Plus By the strangest of coin cidences I ve put together an electronic schematic routine that is a small portion of my 1Y 2 3Y 4Y SY 6Y 7Y 8Y 5V ULN 2803 top view elh 2A 3A 4A 5A 6A 7A 8A GND April 1986 Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities package What I would like to do here is share with you some of the key secrets and show you how its done As figure three shows us you can start out with a gray rubber grid that will let you 5V 4A 4B AY BY 3B 3A top view ofA 1B W N 2A 2B GND Ce EO K aonoononoononoononoonon 0 Figure Four Now drop your symbols in place where you want them 1Y 2 3Y 4Y SY 6Y 7Y 8Y 5V ULN 2803 top view ofA 2A 3A 4A 5A 6A 7A 8A GND 4 C432 a OC 5V 4A 4B AY BY 3B 3A 4093 ofA 1B W 2 2A 2B GND Ox OO
313. oblems it sure will be a big help particularly for initial feasability work We sure had been getting tired of burning EPROMs for each and every code change We also were getting tired of having a dozen alike but different somehow designs on hand none of which ever quite got fully debugged Anyway here s a list of what real people are doing right now that involve VIP like small control computers Dave is automating the adjustment of cotton picking machinery by using his small handheld controller that ad vances a linear stepper used as a micrometer This very much speeds up the exacting Figure Three A variable line width is handled by tracing a pair of curves and filling the area between them 13 3 picker shim setting process besides greatly increasing the yields and the grade of the recovered cotton Phil is building intelligent taps for the cable tv system he manages allowing indiv idual customer services to be remotely switched on and off Newer and much more flex ible cable services can now be offered besides complete ly thwarting the midnight pole climber Claude is now retrofitting ancient paper tape numeric control machine tools so they become fully Apple compat ible Now the full resources of an Apple including disk storage printing etc are available to these early tools Anne is designing a robotic router for the sign making trade You simply type in your message the size and t
314. ocations are needed for each card Those locations are the four lowest slot bytes in the I O area While we have shown the addresses for slot five similar addresses for slot two would be COA0 COA3 and so on up the slot sequence Note that all reads and writes to this card go through a single data location This way you can substantially speed up memory swaps for such things as HIRES ani mation Direct memory moves are much quicker than the already fast RAM disk access Since we are talking far more than 64K here you need three address byte locations rather than your usual two You can think of the low address byte as the position byte on a 256 byte page the mid address byte as the 256 byte page in use and the high address byte as which bank of 256 byte pages is to be used The address will auto inc rement on each read or write This way all you have to do is use repeated LDA CODO commands to extract as many bytes as you want in sequen tial order Note that there is no 64K limit on this If you do not want to read or write in sequential order you can preset the address bytes to any chosen location Do this just before each read or write Naturally it is far faster to have the card auto increment whenever you are able to do so Since that auto incrementing is done by using gate array hardware no CPU ere s a laser printer test paragraph that shows H whole word breaks and full wall to wall microjustif
315. ode and a com plete disassembly script of Applewriter Ie that includes all the inside details plus full detailed source code capturing instructions The usual companion disk ettes are also available power supply up to 40 volts DC micro ground Fig 2 A tough medium power I O driver Show me a Tough Integrated Circuit Power Driver O K Figure two shows one of my favorite interface cir cuits It uses the Sprague ULN 2813 This beauty has eight seperate drivers in it that can handle half an amp each at up to forty volts DC complete with internal spike protecting diodes It is easily driven from most any parallel microcomputer port Note that the load and the computer must share a com mon ground connection Do this exactly as shown Cost is under 3 I need a Good Book on Motors for Robotics How about a great book instead costing are you ready for this only 3 50 It is called the Small Gear motor Handbook and Bodine publishes it See the listing at the end for an address This older text is very read able and very heavy on the fundamentals What is a Forced Return Option Picker It is a powerful way to let a computer jump six ways from Sunday that works especially well with the 6502 Figure three shows details There are lots of times and places in a program where you want the code to go to any of a large number of dif ferent routines As examples a word processor s S
316. of my own from time to time The board is independent so hacks and cracks should also be listed Oh yes the Postscript BBS phone data number is 409 244 4704 and is up 24 hours a day Standard baud rates are 300 1200 and 2400 There is also a brand new magazine called The Post script Journal This one looks like it is going to have some great goodies in it but it is still too soon to tell The cost is 15 per year to all charter subscribers Briefly turning to another of those insidious advertor ials my own unlocked and unprotected Postscript Show and Tell is in stock here for the Apple Mac and the IBM PC Now newly available is an Introduction to Postscript user group videotape I put together that includes toner cartridge reloading Kroy Kolor details plus bunches more It is in VHS format And the usual reminder that my Applewriter Laserwriter Utiities and the complete set of reprints to this Ask the Guru column remain avail able So are the usual free laser printing demo packs and other goodies We return you now to our program already in progress How can I use Older Disk Drives on the Apple IIgs The Apple IIgs has an incredible variety of disk drive options For instance there is a plug in SCSI card that can access any number of floppy or hard disk drives that make use of this optional interface Then there are all the RAM disk plug in card oppor tunities Today you could go as high as 8
317. of the Laserwriter plus EPROMs are showing up in many larger cities at costs of 95 or less Naturally you can clone your own for 35 if you have a large enough EPROM programmer There is one thing that needs the record set straight on this though The Apple claim that the plus chips are required to download fonts is simply that which is not so You always had the ability to download any custom un locked and low priced fronts from any old source on any Laserwriter The new chips now give you the additional ability to download overpriced single sourced and highly protected fonts as well Speaking of laser printers did you see where HP shot themselves in both feet at once this time The LaserJet always has been a hopeless cripple when compared to the Laserwriter since it lacked any full screen full resolution graphics a useful page des cription language the any size at all procedural fonts cubic spline smooth curves flexible scaling rotation and translation transforms and freedom from font cartridge ripoffs to mention a few of the more obvious defects Rather than go with the industry standard Postscript page description language that would eliminate all these hassles in one swell foop HP choose an obscure and arcane page description language from so far out in left field that it does not even provide for procedural fonts And the ultimate kicker is that at least for now this language has to resi
318. ohn Q Hackerturkey walks into his Apple dealer and asks for a book the dealer never heard of John of course does not know the exact name of the book nor the Apple part number During his fifth trip John finally convinces the dealer that the book really exists The dealer finally checks and sure enough Suprise suprise And all the dealer has to do is send Apple a check for 150 to close a 50 sale Dealers have lots of names for transactions like this the nicest and least obscene of which is negative cash flow For some strange reason they do not agressively seek out such deals O K Here s how to get the manuals First politely but firmly go to a large Apple dealer with the exact part numbers and try and buy them If you have a friend who is into sumo wrestling and frowns a lot bring him along for effect Renting a Bengal tiger just might also prove useful If that does not work group at least three or preferably five orders for the same manual at once You do this with some friends or through your local school or club Note that borrowing one of these manuals will not work since no one in their right mind would ever let one out of their sight for more than a Check Validity PRINT PRINT D IF PEEK IF PEEK IF PEEK PRINT D IF PEEK IF PEEK IF PEEK POKE 1506 POKE 1506 POKE 150 POKE 150 POKE 1507 POKE 150 POKE 150 POKE 1508 POKE 150 POKE 150 POKE 1508 POKE 150 POKE 150 POKE 17
319. ome paper embossing methods both plain and foil 20 Raised ink techniques such as thermography 21 Reasonable punching systems or alternatives 22 Ways to increase the durability of toner 23 Economical sources of specialty papers particularly self stick transparent and fluorescent 24 None of the above Well you get the general idea Next month we ll look at several of the binding systems that are available today Without no exceptions all of them are grossly over priced What can you show me that is better What is this Month s Postscript Utility Another of my most asked for routines of course This one is an automatic step and repeat used for most any thing from business cards to July 1987 bumperstickers to labels to tickets to whatever For any time you want several images on a sheet of whatever that are either identical or in some manner related Sequential numbering is very easy to include for tags tickets and such Figure three shows you some sample output In this example the step and repeat is used for cassette videotape labels Figure four shows you the fundamental step and repeat Postscript routine You can either use the predefined values in the stock dictionary or else define your own for whatever step and repeat function you need There are several ground rules Your image must be named repeatproc and must be well enough behaved that you can save and restore
320. omputer Commodore ever built Since then it has been downhill all the way To this day there is no better way to learn all of the fundamentals of machine lan guage programming than on a KIM 1 The KIM 1 is also an excellent choice for a ded icated micro for a solar panel a cattle feeder a weighing station a pump monitor or whatever else you dream up Boufal Services also carries most of the manuals includ ing the obscure and harder to find ones Check them out How canI doa Laserwriter Manual Feed The manual feed feature lets you hand feed one sheet at a time instead of using the paper tray Manual feed is essential for envelopes labels or for very stiff paper stock To activate this manual feed from Postscript you do a statusdict manualfeed true put command To shut down your manual feed either wait for the 30 second automatic job timeout or else do a statusdict man ualfeed false put By the way I haven t had much luck with Laserwriter envelope printing quality The results have been very poor to date Please let me know if yuou come up with a solution or two on this September 1985 Continued from page 5 4 the correct starting point to enter the code Sometimes a short file will purposely be embedded with in legal opcodes One text printing scheme called the embedded file method does this Others notably in Apple works and in all the Adam s Adventures will pass param
321. omputer or printer set up to handle them set a START point an END point and the two influence points Then tell the software or firmware to have at it Once again the first influence point sets the direction or bias you leave START while its distance sets up the enthuas iasm or tension the curve will head in that direction The second influence point will behave in a mirror manner with END Note that the curve usually will not pass through either influence point More often than not it will miss these points by bunches on the inside since the smoothest possible curve is being drawn Many curves will stay inside a fence drawn between the four points Here s how simple it is to draw the curve of figure two on a Laserwriter 2 2 moveto 3 10 9 10 10 2 curveto stroke This says to move two blocks in and two blocks up to set START Then define the first influence point at three blocks in and ten blocks up Then define the second influence point at nine blocks in and ten blocks up Next set the END point at ten blocks in and two blocks up Finally activate the curveto operator to draw the curve You will also of course have to scale and translate the curve to where you want it as well as setting your line width and shade of gray It turns out that the curve of figure two is actually eas ier to draw than a plain box Figure three is a page out of a spline catalog I worked up Not too shabby for old Ap
322. one A RAM Card wipe takes between 0 4 and 1 2 seconds 9 Image rectification can be used for improving the quality of a low cost video camera reducing any non linearity and improving gray scale 10 Architects can super impose a HIRES sketch on top of a site photograph 11 Microbiologists can automate culture and cell counting HIRES crosshairs are easily added under game paddle control And of course 12 photographs can now be easily printed on your Laserwriter so long as you are willing to trade off the halftone screen density versus the number of available grays So much for my ideas Now what are yours A free SAMS book to the top ten ImageWorks new ideas with an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner On top of that Charlie Springer of ImageWorks will seperately judge any and all entries as a second contest On any entries he deems meritorious he will either lend you or outright give you an ImageWorks card and pos sibly some other goodies For the best odds of win ning mail one copy to me and one to Charlie continued from page 14 5 the word ohms To show a capacitance mu you just type the word micro and so on Things such as arrowheads clock pulses and connection dots are similarly handled You do not have to redefine these in each textfile for a particular schematic they are already predefined in the pre loaded schematic routines
323. oner is really a mix of two things black stuff and hot glue Most people use toner to see the black stuff Instead you can think of any laser printed or for that matter any xerox copy as a sheet of paper that has had hot glue selectively applied in certain locations An Omnicrom sheet con sists of a carrier that has a smooth layer of real ink ap plied to it in any of 60 colors These sheets cost around 35 cents each but any unimaged portion of any sheet can be reused later Once the word about the cubic goodness of this vir tually unknown process gets out you can probably expect competition and deep dis counts I predict the ultimate sheet cost will be less than a nickel maybe less What you do is take the laser printed image and put the Omnicrom sheet in con tact with it You then apply heat and pressure usually in the form of rollers at 160 degrees C The heat and pressure melts the hot glue grabs the ink off the carrier and gives you a solid color ink where the toner was Which leaves you with a bright real ink image that is actually more durable than the original toner Of course for high wear uses you may still want to overspray a fix ative or else use plastic lam inating or page protectors For most uses the durability is just fine There are at least three ways you can transfer the ink As we have just seen the Laserwriter does a reasonable job of this simply by shoving the page back
324. only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile This patch shortens the ProDOS options menu to four lines leaving more of a previous catalog on the screen It also frees room in the code for other patches Note that this patch is REQUIRED if the Cursifier and Stretchifier patches are to be used 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 5937 20 20 20 50 72 Change 5937 5938 5940 5948 5950 5958 5960 5968 5970 5978 5980 5988 5990 5998 59A0 59A8 59B0 59B8 59C0 59C8 59D0 59D8 59E0 59E8 59F0 59F8 5A00 5A28 50 72 41 6F 4C 28 74 20 79 72 20 28 6D 20 20 4C 29 20 72 3E 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 6F 29 67 6F 45 65 53 20 6D 20 42 65 55 28 69 20 20 69 00 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 44 20 20 63 29 20 75 28 61 20 29 20 6E 46 6E 50 20 6E 99 11 11 11 11 11 11 L1 TL 6F 43 20 6B 20 20 62 49 74 20 20 20 6C 29 65 72 28 74 00 11 11 11 Ttt 11 T1 11 11 73 61 28 20 44 20 64 29 20 20 52 20 6F 20 20 65 4A 65 11 11 11 1a 11 11 11 TI 11 3A 74 43 20 65 28 72 20 20 20 65 28 63 4F 20 66 29 72 11 11
325. opefully all of this is ancient history Uh let s tie up a few other loose ends before we untangle some new ones Hats off to the Japenese who recently told the US re cording executives to take their inane and useless copy protection scheme for digital audio tape and shove it side ways Score one for the good guys I ve just had a lot of fun going through Infocom s new X rated Leather Goddess of Phobos text adventure Its more or less up to their usual high standards and I par ticularly liked the part with the horse and Catherine the Great But it would be much more interesting if the roles of Tiffany and Trent were inter changed Only Infocom there is one big thing I have noticed that someone really ought to bring to your attention You have Apple Ilgs Assembler Tool Interfaces Apple ligs C Tool Interfaces Apple ligs Firmware Reference Apple ligs Hardware Reference Apple ligs ProDOS 16 Reference Apple Ilgs Programmer s Workshop Apple Ilgs Toolbox Reference volume Apple Ilgs Toolbox Reference volume II Programmers Introduction to the Apple lIlgs Programming the 65816 Technical Introduction to the Apple Ilgs The Apple llgs Fig 1 Some Apple Ilgs Books and Manuals 25 1 ASK THE GURU two types of text adventures unprotected ones that any body can run from any copy and the protected ones that demand certain oddball mat erials maps clues etc in the origi
326. or difference This material is not cross linked properly until it is exposed to light and then chemically treated Here is how you use it With your laser printer print the die cut outlines onto a clear acetate sheet Then you place the sheet in contact with the diecut material and next expose it to strong sunlight or one of the usual UV exposure boxes The toner prevents the light from cross linking the material When you next wipe the material with a develop ing chemical every place that the toner has covered will dissolve leaving you with perfect die cut letters or whatever ready to use Contact Randy Bailey over This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS initially ran only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile The patch unconditionally uses as the load to screen prompt This allows the use of self prompting glossaries It works by substituting for the underline token during a screen load 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C D2 Verify 3974 CD DE B8 Change 3974 C95CEA Verify 3974 76 per above UNLOCK AWD SYS BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 T 0C LOCK AWD SYS Fig 4 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 promptifier patch 27 4 ASK THE GURU at Kroy for samples and more info on this new material
327. or light editing or compaction Finally see if there are not any other compaction tricks you might use For instance you can find lots of different ways to reduce HIRES pic tures down to much smaller sizes than you you d expect One very simple trick to pick up one free sector per save is to do a BSAVE HIRESPIX A 2000 E 3FF7 instead of using E 3FFF The last eight bytes of a HIRES screen are invisible and do not appear on the screen Yet they cost you an entire extra sector per picture There are quite a few other 28 pin machined contact dip sockets 11 pin machined contact dip strips 13 pin machined contact dip strips machined contact dip pins miniature SPDT slide switches Misc 6 inches of 24 green insulated wire 6 inches of 24 red insulated wire epoxy or superglue solder Fig 1 Parts list for a Ile dual monitor adaptor ASK THE GURU graphics and textfile compac tion schemes available once you tune yourself into them So send me your favorites so we can share them My Customers Are Bitching That My Software Won t Run Properly HELP Naturally there is no pos sible way that you could stay competitive if you actually do spend all the time and effort needed to get your software working properly before you shipped it Besides software buyers are expected to pay for the programmer s mistakes education and their overall klutziness It s the American way Worse yet
328. or the motherboard swap Many earlier IIc s had a problem on the 1200 baud modem Apple tried to use a baud rate that was pretty nigh but not quite plumb A new crystal and two trace cuts can solve this pro blem and current IIc boards include this fix A mother board swap would pick up any older IIc s that still do not have this defect corrected Another reason for doing a board swap is the reliability involved in the jumpering and cutting which could lead to repair and warranty hassles A fourth i d byte is now needed to tell the old and new IIc monitors apart Location FBBF is an FF back in the ORIGINAL USE Do nothing or null Start of heading Start of text End of text End of transmission Enquiry Acknowledge Bell or alarm 2 Tam bed ba bed Bal bed bad Backspace Horizontal tab Line feed Vertical tab Formfeed Carriage return Shift out Shift in Bamm kamed emee bae bel Bad baed al Data link escape Device control 1 Device control 2 Device control 3 Device control 4 Negative acknowledge Synchronous idle End block transmit Tml baed Bad bad bad bad bad baad Cancel End of medium Substitute Escape Form seperator Group seperator Range seperator User seperator gt ANX lt K S lt CHAWMWOV OZSrxAc I OAAMIODPyY a r r DELETE Delete Figure Two Standard ASCII control codes can be shown in many different ways 12 2 original IIc ROM FBBF is a 00 in the new 3 5 I
329. ork to be digitized for laser printing The gray lines are also nice on business forms Recently I checked into how the grays are imaged and came up with some suprising results For some strange rea son the stock grays on the Laserwriter are spacey and crude with the dots inten tionally spread so far out that you get that Sunday funnies appearance I suspect that the reason for the lousy stock grays involves purposely degrading the Las erwriter grays so they are compatible with the lower resolution Quickdraw routines in the Mac Fortunately it is quite easy to restore the grays back up to Apple Ile and Applewriter quality resulting in a dramat ic improvement in all your images In many cases your grays will look almost as if they were painted on with an india ink wash There is only one way to print a truly gray image on a sheet of paper And that is to use gray ink Should you want several different shades of true gray on the page sev eral passes through the press would be needed each with an ink change to a new shade Since this is very ungood the eye is instead tricked into looking at bunches of dots on the page that are so close to gether they appear as a gray image As you re purposely exceeding the eye s angular resolution those black and white areas get integrated together and you end up be lieving you are looking at gray when there is actually no gray present With traditional printing
330. ormation on this probably will appear in MAUG on Compuserve Turning to a brighter side the fatal flaw in the ProDOS 1 1 1 operating system has finally been stomped into no thingness Many thanks to Tom Weishaar to his readers and to Tom s really outstand ing Open Apple magazine It appears that some sloppily done initialization in ProDOS 1 1 1 would rarely and at random trash blocks 0 1 or 2 of the ProDOS direc tory of your favorite and most used diskettes The problem previously had been blamed upon poor power supplies on Appleworks on AppleWriter and even on the price of yak butter futures Quite a few power supplies seem to have been needlessly swapped out over this There is a quick and sim ple patch that once and for all eliminates this problem Just contact Tom at Open Apple for your free copy Uh I may have given you a bad Omnicolor phone num ber two columns back Try using one of these 601 264 2466 617 881 4100 800 447 2326 800 257 8263 Also the Viewfax model six machine didn t turn out quite as good as I first re ported Good thing I am the training officer for our local fire department Oh well Its back to the drawing board on this one To best fuse the Omni color material you ll need a line contact heat roller whose temperature is precisely regu lated There is some sort of anti wrinkle bar in the real Omnicrom fusion machine that in part explains why it does a mor
331. ortional space fonts is to space out to where you want the left margin to be and set the margin with an esc 9 Then you continue spacing out to the right mar gin and do an esc 0 Which leads to three more nasty suprises Firstoff the space character varies with the font To bring a space up to an exact tenth of an inch add F kerning offset to Hel vetica or G kerning offset to TimesRoman This is done with an esc Q F or esc Q G as needed Next what the Laserwriter calls a right margin is not a right margin at all but is the printable line width If you change the left margin the right margin tracks with it keeping a constant width of printable line area Finally resetting the mar gins once they have been set is tricky I have found no reasonable way to reset the left margin left of where you first set it short of using the Laserwriter s 30 second job timeout Unless I have missed something this tells us you must remove all the margin settings from your file for repeat copies of multi page text files You can use your word processor for temporary mar gin shifts so long as you do not both move the left margin and microjustify at the same time You can also hand patch each line that has to have a non standard left margin Sixth post process your textfile Figure four shows an automatic WPL routine that will take a more or less stock textfile and set it up for full professional quality
332. os sary entry that will let you insert the time and or date into your textfiles using a single keystroke Note that a space must preceed all lines in the WPL routine Contact Don directly for patches to other Applewriter versions or to be able to show the date only And of course if you want to know more about this unmatchably superb word and full graphics processor check into my Applewriter Cook book SAMS 22460 Any More Info on Toner Cartridge Reloading I have been intentionallly pushing a Laserwriter toner cartridge to see how many reloadings it would take On the fifth reload at something like 17 000 copies the cart ridge sensitivity started to drop and a persistent edge streak appeared September 1986 As we found out last month you get the blackest images and the best looking copies somewhere around 7500 pages This will usually takes place after the second cartridge refilling Reloading of course will dramatically change the laser printer economics If you pay 100 list for a cartridge and get 2500 copies out of it you are talking four cents of per sheet toner cost On the other hand if you pay 60 wholesale for a cartridge and then do five reloadings at 18 per reload your per sheet toner cost drops to almost exactly a penny per sheet Note that the first figure is well above that of jiffy printing while the second is quite competitive But I suspect that the 18 refill c
333. os ytop 21 sub def 1 setgray kern 2 def xcen ypos NEW FROM cj ypos ybot 47 add def yinc 18 def xcen ypos kern 2 def Box 809 CSL Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 cj ypos ypos 24 sub def Helvetica Bold findfont 28 0 0 2400 makefont setfont ypos ytop 45 sub def kern 2 def xcen ypos DON LANCASTER cj ypos ybot 69 add def Helvetica Bold findfont 30 0 0 24 0 0 makefont setfont kern 3 def xcen ypos SYNERGETICS cj visa 0 setgray ypos bb 8 add def xpos br 70 sub def Helvetica Bold findfont 14 0 0 14 0 0 makefont setfont xpos ypos moveto 0 5 0 VISA MC ashow big print xcen bw 2 div bl add def ypos bt 45 sub def Helvetica Bold findfont 38 0 0 38 0 0 makefont setfont yinc 40 def kern 0 def xcen ypos APPLEWRITER LASERWRITER UTILITIES cj ypos bt 344 sub def xpos ypos Helvetica Bold findfont 45 scalefont setfont 49 95 cj ypos bt 160 sub def xpos bl 20 add def Ninewidth 272 def Helvetica Bold findfont 20 0 0 2200 makefont setfont yinc 24 def Five diskette package gives unmatchably superb page graphics for your Apple lle pi ypos ypos 12 add def Unlocked Requires ProDOS Applewriter Apple Ile and an Apple Super Serial Card pi ypos bt 376 sub def Helvetica Bold findfont 17 00 18 500 makefont setfont yinc 20 def xcen ypos FREE Demo Pack FREE Laser Helpline cj showpage Fig 2 Postscript code for a Computer Shopper ad 6 2 ASK THE GURU copies of
334. ose in grid font sizes will typically be very small Use 0 7 point as a Starting baseline Your grids can be easily turned on or off by putting or not putting a percent sign in front of each showgrid line I do have bunches of Post script stuff in stock for you here some free and some not so free Write or call for the usual listings and whatever Also be sure and let me know if you want to see a quasi public domain Post script program exchange BBS started up ularly interested in low cost corner rounding punches un ique cover materials binding systems color options unusal papers etc Any stuff that exists but is obscure enough that nobody knows about it As usual a free Incredible Secret Money Machine to the best ten entries and an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner UPDATE My favorite refill toner source today is through Arlin Shepard at Lazer Pro ducts in Colorado Current pricing is 7 60 which includes a new fusion wiper pad Don Thompson of Thompson and Thompson now has an independent toner testing service that reports on the best refill toner quality and price on a weekly basis Remember that this is your column and you can get tech nical help gossip and off the wall networking per the end box Be sure to phone or write for your copy of the new free stuff list and your Laserwriter Demo Pack Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU April 1987 Ma
335. ost may be a scam Yes you do have to use the special negative acting toner But ordinary old toner costs around 4 for a comparable amount What I think may be happening is that toner refiller supply houses are buying case lots of generic toner from a yet unknown source And toner costs of half a cent per page would turn the jiffy print industry on its ear UPDATE Feb 87 What is the Feature Product for This Month Marcia Swampfelder sent me a press release on her major new product intended to solve once and for all any interpersonal relationship pro blems you may have had with computer salesmen waiters bureaucrats car mechanics admininstrators or whom ever Figure three shows you this exciting breakthrough Note that there is usually no fear whatsoever of any reprisals since the level of technical expertise needed to point the nozzle in the proper direction is well beyond the abilities of nearly all of your intended targets Price is 4 50 per 12 ounce can A remote unit for use with popular modems over standard telephone lines is currently in devlopment This should also revolutionize tele phone courtesy Besides put ting a real crimp into phone solicitation and it mercifully will eliminate music on hold once and for all Marcia strongly suggests wearing rubber gloves when using this product Seriously Who me Now that I ve got your attention check out the fine print in figure thre
336. other compacting it much As you can see you can very easily draw outstanding cartoon characters using Ap plewriter on an Apple Ile Also as you can clearly observe the quality of the Applewriter and Postscript graphics is absolutely superb Oh yes You do need a digitizer A safety pin makes a very good one but if you can not afford such expense just use a needle instead Although little known as a computer peripheral a safety pin digitizer easily will out perform just about any other personal computing input dig itizing device Here is how you use your safety pin digitizer Firstoff make your original as big as possible using an enlarging copy machine Note that you can easily reposition rotate scale stretch remap or distort your final Postscript file most any which way but loose continued on page 19 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU August 1986 Tech consultants list Toner cartridge secrets Flushing copy protection Postscript window decals Hex and Decimal to ASCII ats off to both the PFS Hire people and to the crew at Dollars and Sense Word has it that both these outfits have completely dropped all copy protection from their software Actually more and more software houses are waking up to the obvious facts that copy protection 1 does not work 2 hacks off users 3 creates all sorts of hard disk hassles 4 dramatically in creases the number of bootleg copies in circula
337. ou are lucky you might even be able to put some of the monitors several hundred feet apart There are some gotchas involved though First it is far and away best to run one continuous cable from moni tor to monitor rather than using a rat s nest of seperate cables from the computer to each monitor Second just about all monitors have provisions to terminate or not terminate their inputs Termination is done by putting a 75 ohm resistor directly across the video input Sometimes this is done with a switch at the back of the monitor Other times you may have to use a solder jumper or else a cus tom plug of some sort Regardless of the method used only the final monitor in the entire daisy chain should be terminated All of the in termediate monitors should be switched to their unterminat ed high impedance mode Naturally you should keep all your cables as short as possible and never use a long cable without terminating its far end For longer runs you will get the best results with real coaxial cable and BNC connectors instead of plain old audio cable and the usual RCA plugs For extremely long cable lengths you might require a video buffer of some sort RCA has a 3450 video op amp that could be useful here There s also a new product called the Rabbit that s in the Heath catalog among many other places This gives you one way to extend VCR sig nals all over your house by cable I am not s
338. ou ll need two printable characters to show a single 8 bit hex word pair Thus it will take you twice as long to send converted bytes over a serial interface than it would to send straight hex It also does take twice the space to store hex values in ASCII form Which gets par ticularly nasty when you laser print video or photographs To review a four bit byte can be shown in hexadecimal There are sixteen possible 4 bit states The first ten states 0000 through 1001 are shown as decimal digits exactly as is done with BCD The final six states are often shown as uppercase letters with 1010 A 1011 B on up through 1111 F Figure three shows us how to do these conversions To get from hex to ASCII add decimal 48 or hex 30 if the number is nine or less If ten 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 or more add decimal 54 or hex 36 To get from ASCII to hex you first have to test to find out if you are converting a valid letter or a numeral Such range checking is al ways a good idea anyway If you have a numeral CHR 48 58 or hex 30 39 then subtract decimal 48 or hex 30 If you have a letter such as a CHR 65 69 or a hex 41 46 subtract decimal 54 or hex 36 instead The actual conversion de tails will depend on your programming style and on the microprocessor and language that is in use In the Apple Ie monitor there are several built
339. ou see a disassembler will only work properly if it starts at a valid entry point in valid working code If you do not disassemble from a valid entry point in valid working code you will get aliasing in which the disassembler will tell you that which is not so The usual signs of alias ing are bunches of question marks denoting illegal op codes or else highly unusual op codes working in strange address modes that involve bizarre addresses Normally when you first begin a disassembly you may not know where the valid entry points exist in valid and runnable code So you will get bunches of aliases on the first disassembly pass By a careful study of these aliases and by recognizing how and why they occur you can then make a second pass that gives you a clean disassembly on only the good parts of your actual code Recognizing and working with aliasing is thus a very powerful analysis tool Let us look at several good examples of this disassembly aliasing We ll speak 6502 here but the same idea will hold for any micro family In figure two we have attempted to disassemble a textfile of ASCII characters Since there are no valid op codes here you get lots of aliasing Uppercase ASCII text will often be lots of 4X 32 00 4B 00 6E 00 96 2C 02 BO 08 07 60 09 OE 20 25 4B July 1985 and 5X entries combined with many 20 spaces and 0D carriage returns Usually the aliasing will clue you in
340. our program intact and with no trashing of the HIRES screens Figure two shows you an improved way you can do an absolute reset on your IIc which may be used both on the original and on the new IIc enhanced 3 5 monitors Unlike the previous version this patch is all in one piece and does not change the title of your bootup screen This new IIc method does require the use of an EPROM programmer that s capable of directly handing either of the 27128 or 27256 EPROMs How About Some More Applewriter Patches There is a feature in the ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 and 2 1 that you might want to do away with For some reason the load to screen trailer command was made the same as the underline token Should you use no underline token you loose the ability to load to screen for a preview Worse yet since the load to screen command can change with time many unique self prompting glossaries will no longer work So figures three and four show you the two Promptifier patches that will modify your ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 and 2 1 to always use the reverse slash as your load to screen prompting trailer Can I do Die Cutting On a Laser Printer The amazing answer to this May 1987 question is that yes you can easily do die cutting on a laser printer The Kroy Kolor people now have a super new material that is more or less like the vinyl and carrier used by all the professional sign people except for one maj
341. over and draws the picture You can trade off gray levels for screen resolution The more grays the farther apart the gray dots have to be placed With a stock Applewriter you could handle a tad under five square inches of picture in one piece This can be dra matically increased by going to some suitable compaction scheme or else by using a RAM card for textfile length expansion I don t happen to yet have any digitized video or photos on hand but if you send me some on disk I ll be happy to play with them for you Be tween all those tinaja quests of course At 106 DPI these dots are barely discernable For line artwork you might prefer even denser dots and fewer gray levels My favorite screen is a 133 DPI 28 deg ree one that gives you six gray levels As you can see from figure three the dots are so close together that the February 1986 grays look as if they were an ink wash Yet they still re main readable as a halftone by most printing processes Figure four shows you the Postscript commands needed to set these special screens You can also design custom screens with background pat terns or anything else you want Full details on these pattern screens appear in the two Postscript books We can now see from both figures one or two exactly why certain grays drop out on one pixel lines There is a minimum amount of gray ness needed in those spot functions to be sure that all horizontal and a
342. ow threat ening to add a manditory and lunacy based hardware lock system that 1 any idiot can bypass 2 degrades all music run through it 3 prevents you outright from recording IBM COM1 DB25 female TXD RXD RTS CTS DSR SG such things as concert piano and all for a system that is only 4 marginally improved over the recording that can be done today in a suitably high tech living room Are you still there It turns out there is another Postscript bulletin board BBS system up Besides our great board at 409 244 4704 you just might also like to try out the other 415 261 4813 BBS Our own board does have over 200 downloadable Post Script routines You can also get these all on disk in most popular formats which is far cheaper than doing on line downloads As usual any and all sponsors advertisers and contributors are welcome I am still not fully happy with the IIgs modem interface for ProDOS Applewriter For right now if you need actual Apple Serial I O DB25 female TXD RXD RTS CTS DSR SG Fig 1 IBM to Apple textfile comm adaptor 31 1 ASK THE GURU modem communications you are most likely still best off using your Super Serial Card instead I have gotten hacked off just enough with those lousy and pitifully slow IIgs serial interface circuitry and firm ware that I have gone to the bare metal So I should soon have an honest 57500 baud Laserwri
343. ower supply and baud rate considerations both limit the size of the teleportation chambers Those chambers on the MTT T1 and MTT R1 are slightly larger than a quarter In the usual demo of these cards you place a quarter in the chamber on the MTT T1 card and it reappears intact approximat ely 12 minutes later over on the MTT R1 card For a real Golly Gee Mr Science demo you can use four regeneration cards from each dissociation card The single quarter you placed in the dissociation chamber will simultaneously reappear in all four receiving cards again in a twelve minute dissociation regeneration time interval Put another way the quad demo returns a dollar in change for every quarter that is invested Marcia reports that all of her current production is going to the importers of specialty herbs and spices Her new teleportion system eliminates all of those long delays at customs besides allowing users to set their own international currency exchange rates How About Some More Applewriter Patches Sure thing This month we will just do a cosmetic pair of patches for both ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 and 2 1 When you run Applewriter in the fast mode on the Igs the tweedle gets ricidulously high in pitch and very garish The Tweedleifier patches of figures three and four reduce the pitch down to tones that sound acceptable both in the slow and fast modes This patch is recommended only for IIgs use Show me
344. pages You can alter the code for any number of header and footer lines If you wanted to you could even use a 33 line header and a 33 line footer provided you do not have too much to say in the body of your text file So there print final with first header f lt lt rm240 gt lt y P ppi66 pp1l65 ppd1 ptlsa perl plm x prm y put pnp P erase old scratch file Gotchas To use P DO TRIPLE HDR WPL L means lt control L gt Fig 4B WPL Triple Header concluded continued from page 3 3 and support software disks that let you link your own routines to control the printer Now for the neat part The part the Mac people do not want you to hear Try and guess which software package makes the best use of Post cript and the Laserwriter No not MacPaint Why Because MacPaint has no way to use high resolution typography No not MacWrite Why Because MacWrite does not handle Postscript very well No not MacDraw first because MacDraw is far and away the most user vicious of all Mac software besides its not existing at all in usable form The inability to use bitmaps totally cripples Mac Draw Besides every seven weeks Apple very carefully takes MacDraw apart and then removes all of the old bugs Then Apple carefully puts lots of brand new bugs back in so the next seven week cycle can continue And there s still no way to directly command Postscript So which is the best pro
345. path gsave currentlinewidth 4 mul setlinewidth 1 setgray stroke grestore gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke the black end diameter 2 div dup 0 866 mul exch 0 5 mul neg moveto 0 thickness neg rlineto width dup neg 0 866 mul exch 0 5 mul rlineto 0 thickness rlineto gsave fill grestore stroke the right side gsave 0 thickness neg translate mark diameter pitch sccw45 curvetrace 0 thickness rlineto stroke grestore more Fig 4a Postscript for the lockwasher contest 31 4 a monitor or to flatten it for tv watching There s also no handle a major defect that this monitor receiver does share with the original Apple display The center of gravity of both of the monitors are in a most unexpected place making them very easy to drop The Apple monitor is much worse on this though Where can I get Some Heat Transfer Ink An awful lot of helpline callers seem to feel that the Spinnaker charges for their Tee shirt color ribbons are both unconscionable and just plain inexcusable One alternate source is I O Designs The thermal ribbons they offer list for 14 95 We saw two months ago how Gerber Scientific has a heat transfer flock available It also turns out that one leading manufacturer of real heat transfer Tee shirt ink is Van Son In fact they are the leading manfuacturer of just about any ink product Typical heat transfer inks go for 50 per pound But a pound of ink is good for a zillion
346. picture of the non changing parts of the label into the Laserwriter A mailing list is then read and the address or changeable part is put down for the total needed number of labels A mailing list is input in the form of an array of strings One single string is used for each and every name and address group The code is set up to process a hand fed strip of four labels at once You keep feeding till all of the names get used up The label routine is easily adjusted for any number of labels of any size I get my blank labels from Hy Tech first because they are down the street second because they have a large die selection and third because they are reasonably priced Figure five shows you a fairly user friendly new WPL pre processor that works under ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 This starts with an address file consisting of name and address lines each total address seperated by double carriage returns The addresses can be any number of lines As many hidden informa tion lines as you want can be added to each address and coded any way you care to Subject to the rule that the hidden code line must start with a period One product code can be added to each printed address line but sub ject to the rule that your product code have three or more spaces in front of it Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU July 1987 Apple resources IIgs serial firmware Applewriter fast boot Desktop publishing tools Post
347. plewriter on a Ile eh what At any rate these cubic spline curves may seem a little dull because the catalog is based only on a 9 x 9 integer grid Even at this grid size there are over 6500 splines in the 81 page catalog Many of these are rotations or mirror images of each other START is always set two blocks right and four blocks up END is always six blocks right and four blocks up The first influence point shows as round dot The second influ ence point is a square In the upper left figure the dot and square are sitting on top of each other Should you widen out the influence points the curves will gain in impact grace and all around impressive ness As it is the catalog does show all the possible shape families you can get with a single spline Note that even on one catalog page you have concave and convex shapes shapes both symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes with cusps loops open loops and shapes with or without any changes in the direction of curvature There are a near infinite possible number of splines that you can draw between START and END Those in fluence points do not have to be integer values Figure four shows us a totally different and totally mind blowing use for splines Fancy borders like this are utterly trivial to handle with cubic splines Only five dif ferent splines are needed These are the main side loop from the crossover point the inner arc the diagonal end loop a
348. ppening It turns out that all of these people were making those absolute reset mods that I ve shown you a few columns back and all were doing so on expensive and stand alone EPROM burners Instead of using my Snatchmon they were simply trying to read the original Monitor chips by plugging these IC s into the burner and hand patching that absolute reset mod into the programmer s memory and then burning a new 2764 And they all were getting for their effort was fatal read errors Why Well because the monitor chips used in an Apple Ile are not 2764 EPROMs They are instead 2364 factory program med ROMs A 2364 turns into a 2764 only when pins 26 27 and 28 are all externally con nected to 5 vdc The Apple IIe motherboard does do this jumpering for you but a big and old stand alone EPROM burner will not when it is in its copy mode The solution Just use a cheap EPROM burner instead of an expensive one and the copy protection problems will all magically disappear What is the Difference Between a Formfeed Control L L FF CHR 12 and ASCII 0C Nothing whatsoever These are all exactly the same thing All of these are different ways you can show the ASCII February 1986 control commands These commands form the bottom 32 codes in that standard ASCII character code These control commands are used for such non printing things as carriage returns escapes form feeds line feeds bells and
349. pping this month These include my new Postscript Technical Illus trations and are available for the Apple Mac IBM and for the Atari ST Included are schematic and isometric drawings pictorials pixel line remapping curve tracing charts graphs rubber grids layouts plus lots more While only your preferred word processor or editor is needed the final results are ridiculously higher in quality than what most people can get from most of the graphics programs most of the time The unlocked and unprotected routines may be used as is or else dropped into most any application that accepts direct Postscript code Our biggie this month is my Postscript curve tracing code But first Where can I get IIgs Cables and Connectors At long last some cables and adaptors at sane prices are starting to show up for the August 1987 IIgs Besides all the grossly overpriced stuff at your local Apple dealer ve found four interesting sources The first is JDR and you can check out their ads over in Computer Shopper These good people were the first to stock the DB 19 connectors A second source is KGB Enterprises who should have old drive adaptors and other goodies available by the time you read this A third source is Redmond Cable They have printer A B WARNING Interim code for gonzo hackers only This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter version AWD SYS only It allows XON XOFF two way communication with the La
350. pr shipping labels Labels after the first one in the ppr batch are produced at maximum Laserwriter ppr speed approximately 32 per minute ppr ppr This super fast operation results by keeping the ppr label art inside the Laserwriter and then changing ppr only the address for each successive label ppr ppr Note The label art must be in Postscript but ppr the address list is a standard text file ppr psr2 psx 1 pgoa bp psr1 ppr For a demo use DEMO LABEL and DEMO LIST ppr pin Name of Postscript label art gt B ppr p d2 unless demo pcs B demo label pgof pcs B DEMO LABEL pgof psx2 pgoff f psx1 ff oh d x p p pin Is the list loaded Y N gt C pes C Y pgoc pes C y pgoc ppr pin Name of list to be loaded gt C p p ny I C pgoc pgoz c psr2 psx 1 pgob p p psr1 pin Remove hidden lines Y N gt A psr2a psx 1 pgod b f lt gt gt lt gt lt a pin Remove product code Y N gt A psr2a psx 1 pgoe b f lt gt lt gt lt a y p ep psr1 ppr formatting mailing list f lt gt gt lt gt gt x lt a p June 1987 p Din next line is D f lt lt nameproc gt gt D gt gt lt fl y p p psri ppr getting letter p b I B pgog pgoz gp p p oh d1 p p qcwide p ppr printing labels ppr ppr ppr busy please wait p pnp p pgox zp pnd ppr L ppr Uh There
351. printers and in terface cards can now be made compatible with both ProDOS and Applewriter A free upgrade has been available from your Apple dealer now since November of 1984 But there is no point in upgrading unless you have these problems to start with Most printers and cards have long since corrected their firmware to be fully ProDOS compatible Unfortunately the 2 1 new version progressively gets a few dozen bytes longer than the 2 0 version Which means that most of the essential 2 0 patches shown in my Apple writer Cookbook will not run properly on 2 1 For far too many months now I have been promising many of you a full set of patches for ProDOS Apple writer 2 1 So what I think we will do is run a patch a month here for a while In general there is one major patching difference between 2 0 and 2 1 The AWD SYS found on 2 0 is a SYSTEM type file But the AWD SYS on 2 1 is a 0C type file Thus 2 0 requires a TSYS following a patching BLOAD or BSAVE while the version 2 1 requires a T 0C instead Let s get the easy patches out of the way first The Prefixifier patch stays the same The AlJOifier and the Grapplifier patches are no longer needed as 2 1 solves this particular problem on its own And the Bootifier patch also stays the same since it occurs so early in the code As we ve just seen the 00 character is reserved for a marker in all newer versions of Applewriter so the stock p
352. pt stuff you are better off using a two step process First you get the image you want in the way you want it no matter how long it takes Then if the image is to be often reused you can rewrite your routines to optimize for speed So as a second contest this month just send me your best suggested use for pixel line remapping Ill publish the very best of these Let s hear from you soon 32 6 Ask the Guru Help Page NEED HELP Phone or write your Ask the Guru questions to Don Lancaster SYNERGETICS Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 Voice Helpline 924 428 4073 Ht Aliasing contest winners 7 1 Anti aliasing 15 2 Apple books and manuals 4 Apple clone help 23 3 Apple developer s express 28 1 Apple i d bytes 20 1 Apple IIc 3 5 monitor 12 1 Apple IIc new absolute reset 27 4 Apple IIc Ile absolute reset 7 2 Apple Ile dual monitor 9 2 Apple Ile upgrade 4 1 Apple IIgs books and manuals 25 3 Apple IIgs cables and connectors 30 2 Apple IIgs color monitors 27 2 Apple IIgs disappearing drives 28 3 Apple IIgs new ROMs 32 1 Apple IIgs picture noise 27 3 Apple IIgs old drive adaptor 26 3 Apple IIgs serial cables 24 1 Apple IIgs serial firmware 29 3 Apple IIgs updates 22 1 Apple II to He conversions 5 4 Apple II reset hassles 7 2 Apple memory expansion card 10 1 Apple RAMcard entry points
353. pt window decals Hex and Decimal to ASCII Care of floppy disks Repairing blown disks Applewriter clock access Toner cartridge reloading Postscript surface mapping Apple i d bytes Laser letterheads RAM card snooper Applewriter nullifier Machine language contest Password horror stories The hidden grand piano Disassembly on the Mac Applewriter Scrunchifier Appleworks virtual memory Updates on the new IIgs Applewriter swallowifier Omnicrom and Omnicolor Appleworks screen macros Solar energy breakthrough Appleworks utilities Postscript signatures Help on Apple clones The most used Mac graphic Applewriter 2 1 Stretchifier Serial cables for the IIgs Multiple video monitors 5 toner cartridge reloads Applewriter 2 1 Creepifier Finishing materials contest 25 26 2d 28 29 30 J1 32 IIgs books and manuals Applewriter IIgs patches More on the Omnicrom color A new Postscript rubber grid De putrifying Laserwriter grays Mass teleportation Postscript fontpath IIgs old drive adaptor Applewriter tweedleifier Apple technical literature IIgs monitor options Postscript point ruler Die cutting with a laser Applewriter promptifier Improved IIc absolute reset Postscript labelmaker Speeding up Postscript IIgs disappearing drive Appletalk vs 9600 baud Laser printing economics Apple resources IIgs serial firmware Applewriter fast boot Desktop publishing tools Postscript step and repeat Curve tracing se
354. ptsize gets the closer together the numb ers get And a zero ptsize will only slightly spread the letters apart What to do Use negative values for ptsize on the top of the badge The more negative the num ber the further the spread of the characters along the top of the badge Summing up the font def inition will decide how high the letters will be On the bottom of the circle a bigger ptsize will spread the letters On the top of the circle a bigger but negative ptsize will spread the letters for you Once you have preloaded these routines you can type circular text just as quickly and easily as you would type a plain line of characters Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU September 1986 Care of floppy disks Repairing blown disks Applewriter clock access Toner cartridge reloading Postscript surface mapping Boston area be sure and see the Computer Museum and check out their incredible collection of historic comput er goodies They have just recently placed a few of my original prototypes from the TV Typewriter and Decimal Counting Unit days on per manent exhibit The big news this month is that Apple s new Applelink user group technical info ser vices have gone on line at CompuServe What you want to do is become an ambas sador for your user group This entitles you to some free connect time as well as access to insider info that is other wise unavailable Among other goodies all of t
355. put some magic marker in your Applewriter file where you want the dump to take place A suitable marker might be a carriage return followed by an IhdMYPIXFILENAME or something similar Then do a magic PD8 and print your fully formatted file to disk Finally you can read your PD8 formatted file not with Applewriter but with Apple soft Have Applesloth read one line at a time If there is no magic marker present then print the line as is If a magic marker is found load your picture activate your HIRES dumper and print the picture in its intended place July 1986 When finished with the dump keep reading textfile lines one at a time and then printing them If things seem a tad slow get the process working any way Later on you can speed things up with a hard disk a RAM card a total load or some machine language code The same post processing idea works well for wall to wall microjustification for printers that do not have this feature built in It is also good for such things as soft hyphens sticky spaces to prompt for daisywheel swaps in mid line and so on How can I draw Cartoon Characters Why with Applewriter on an Apple Ile of course How else could you possibly draw decent cartoon characters Figure one shows you a typical cartoon character as drawn by the Applewriter word processor on the Laser writer The text cartoon file ends up the size of a business memo mostly since I did not b
356. r You will find many more details on this in my Hard ware Hacker column over in Modern Electronics And for some even more intriguing materials do check into those translucent and opaque vinyl Form X Films from Graphic Products that accept toner and cost around 70 cents a square foot Signs were never easier Why not print toner onto diffraction gratings or gold foils plastics whatever For full information just contact the Coburn people who have a very wide variety of these materials available at most reasonable prices Write or call me for some free samples or just use the Ask the Guru helpline to keep up to date on the incredible happenings in this new field Can I run Applewriter On an Apple IIgs Except for one tiny and nit picking detail ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 runs reasonably in the fast mode on a IIgs The only trivial hangup is that Applewriter blows up the IIgs when you try to print I can t imagine any of you Ask the Guru diehards fussing over such an insignificant bug but for those of you purists and perfectionists out there that absolutely insist that a word processor should really be able to print as well as to process words a few minimal printing patches are shown you in figures two and three for ProDOS Applewriter versions 2 0 and 2 1 These patches perform by defeating the testing made for the Super Serial Card If this test fails no 6551 serial port firmware will be assumed
357. r bin selected at random This does have a slight bug in that it introduces some bias if you do not have many bins The bias bug is eliminated by always inter changing a bin only with it self or with a higher bin For most uses though the bias becomes very small for shuffles of eight or more ob jects so you might prefer using the simpler and faster swap with anything code How can I convert an Apple II into a Ile Simply remove your line cord from the II Save the line cord and throw every thing else away Then find a Ie that is missing a line cord Then plug your I line cord into the Ile The update is that fast and that simple This route is also far and away the easiest the cheapest and the technically cleanest as well resulting in 100 compatibility In fact it is the only way What Causes Aliasing During Disassembly A disassembler is some software firmware or people based routine that takes a block of machine language code and tries to convert it back into assembly language computer op code listings Disassemblers are extreme ly powerful debugging and analysis tools Examples do include the Apple L mon itor command or Bugbyter for an automated pocket card disassembly and programs like RAK Ware s Disasm Ile that automatically can try to capture source code simply by reading the final ready to run object code But just about any disas sembler will sometimes lie like a rug Y
358. r dealer for further details Among its numerous changes some of the toolbox utilities now do reside in ROM rather than being RAM based Some previous bugs have also been corrected I think the System Utilities disk version 2 0 will remain current at least for the time being A board swap really should be made to eliminate nearly all the gruesome noise pro blems with the sound synth esizer circuitry It seems the routing on the main circuit board couples far too much digital noise into the sound output Sorry but I do not have any more on this Meanwhile my own Hgs has had its third major failure This time the second 3 1 2 inch drive gets completely HOSTESS TWINKIES Szechwaun Style Hostess twinkies 26 Stale fortune cookies 8 oz El Fumarole Salsa De Mucho Caliente 1 can 1 can 2 pkgs 1 cup Dr Pepper Jolt Lime Jello Tapioca 6 NoDoz tablets 8 oz Honey 34 Cloves Secure the necessary OSHA EPA SPCA WCTU and state haz mat permits for one time use of the El Fumarole sauce Break or bend open the fortune cookies and remove the messages Put all ingredients except the Hostess Twinkies into a blender and run on high for five minutes Be sure to secure the lid on the blender ignored and two non existent drive entries now get created for slot 6 drives 1 and 2 Wonderful Any ideas on this Be sure to catch Sculley s act in the September issue of Playboy H
359. r hands Figure two is very hard to typeset on most of your big mutha typesetting machines because of the proportionally spaced text For a very good example of how not to do this check page 26 of my Enhancing Your Apple II amp lle Vol II SAMS 22425 If you try to bracket or put a hex on a proportional typefont the columns will all end up ratty Will they ever Since it doesn t matter in the least which direction you build up a Laserwriter bitmap image you simply work dir ectly with each column rather than with each row Which ends up far easier and far faster Now for the tricky part Each column in the figure is treated as an individual and very narrow paragraph The ASCII column paragraph is left justified The HEX column paragraph is fill microjustified placing a space between the and the first numeral and a second space after the first numeral The spaces automatically get compressed just enough to keep all of the hex values at an exact constant width yet still hold attractive characters that are spaced proportionally Note that the spaces get squashed bunches rather than your usual stretch The Dec column is right justified The Key column is fill justified through use of an opening bracket a space a symbol another space and a closing bracket Once again the pair of spaces get squash ed just enough to keep the brackets at a constant width The final Use column is left justified To
360. r images on plain old white paper The Omnicrom full color process has been taken over by the Kroy Sign Systems people and has been renamed Kroy Kolor Which should mean much wider availability and much lower prices Several add on products including a cheaper fusion machine a binding system sign holders and laminating materials are now also newly available For more details and samples contact Randy Bailey over at Kroy Four tips on the original Omnicrom stuff 1 Stick with those metallic colors because they will fuse much better 2 Use a lightly coated paper stock such as Paloma Matte from Butler Paper Inc 3 Seperate the image from the carrier as soon as possible after fusion and 4 An iron can be used for the transfer provided you use a pressing cloth or an additional sheet of paper And there s lots of other new products that beautifully use toner for new and won drous things Some new mylar sheets are available from the Meadowlake people that will let you immediately transfer toner onto a printed circuit board where it can be used as an etch resistant A hot iron is used for the transfer Cost is under a dollar per sheet This will ridiculously sim plify hacker printed circuit board construction It also means that you can now transfer toner to virtually any surface that will sit still long enough for a toner transfer from a hot iron Yes you can use Kroy Kolor on top of a Medowlake transfe
361. r of any combination of left centered and right side entries with or without page numbers in any position This particular version will work best on ProDOS Apple writer 2 0 or 2 1 Changes may be needed for certain printer and I O card combin ations on other versions or to suppress the first page headers To use it you put the file you want printed in your Ile or IIc Then you put a disk that has TRIPLE HDR WPL and lots of scratch space into the active drive Finally a DO TRIPLE HDR WPL will next prompt you for the header info and then do all the nasty stuff for you both invisibly and automatically When prompted you enter each header line exactly the same way you would a TL or a BL entry using delimiters and a to substitute for the page number Only minus the TL or BL prefix June 1985 Since this new WPL routine does the impossible it takes its good old time about doing it Up to several minutes may be needed to format and then print a longer textfile All the sneaky stuff is handled by a trip or two through PD8 land Neat huh If you get tricky enough you might have single spaced headers and double spaced text or vice versa Any way you like at all print second header E lt lt rm240 gt lt y P pero ptmo pbmo ppmo plmo prm z ptlsB ppi64 pp1l64 put pnp ZZZ By embedding a TL com mand as a TL line you can neatly handle even and odd page formats on your successive
362. raight lines The lower values make the curve more agressive eventually doing fancy loops A zero tension draws tangents to each data point triad And small negative tension values create inverse spirograph effects There is also a parameter called showtick Make this true and you will see all of your points and directions on your curve Make this false and you get only the curve Note that the showtick stuff is scale sensitive Figure five is a Postscript self study curvetrace aide Let s hear from you on any new and exciting uses for curve tracing that you can come up with Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU September 1987 Far Eastern typefaces Postscript lockwashers Paper folding machinery IIgs linear RGB monitors IBM and IIc file exchanges here is some really l bad legislation pending that you might want to rattle a few cages over First and probably worst the FCC has decided that they do not like any computer hackers so they are going to tax them out of existence The initial tax charges will only be a mere 5 50 per hour extra on your connect time to most popular BBS systems Later on of course the tax will be sub stantially raised when they really get serious And yes this definitely is a hacker only tax Fortune 500 companies are all spec ifically exempt Meanwhile the IRS has now decided that they do not like consultants so they have ruled that while you can still remain a comp
363. ral lines cross the same pixel at once Instead figure four shows us a quick and simple ap proach to anti aliasing known as low pass filtering What low pass filtering does is re place any given pixel with the weighted sum of adjacent pixels For instance we might use this low pass matrix 06 12 06 12 50 12 06 12 06 What this says is to take half the blackness of the pixel we are on and add it to an eighth of the adjacent pixels and add one sixteenth of the diagonally adjacent pixels to that You then replace the center pixel with this value But isn t this the same as purposely blurring a photo graph or de focusing a lens Well yes except for one key point The highest frequency information in a digital dis play is caused by the process of pixel sampling Therefore when you low pass filter you remove a lot of the jaggies while you only somewhat blur the image you are after The net result is a tremendous improvement in viewability Note that you can do low pass filtering on just about any image of pretty near any size You can easily apply anti aliasing to all of your existing HIRES images More information on anti aliasing appears in various Siggraph issues of Computer Graphics that should be avail able in most large technical libraries Uh the only little gotcha is that we need some cheap and powerful way to show decent grays on your Apple screen For such a mind boggling breakthrough we wi
364. rbitrary path and put down in any order anywhere on the page in any of many different styles Since many of these fonts use analytical descrip tions as the fonts get bigger they get smoother unlike the Hershey Bar Effect typical of the clones The Laserwriter is also mercifully free of any plug in cartridge scams Besides the hundreds of ready to use Laserwriter fonts available today it is a simple matter to create and download custom fonts of your own The Laserwriter includes a fantastically powerful internal computer In fact it is the biggest and most powerful computer that Apple builds Because of this any old word processor on most any computer can easily control the Laserwriter without any overhead hassles or excessive CPU time Many knockoffs will totally tie up the host computer to do such essential laser printing tasks as jus tifying characters The Laserwriter has a built in cubic spline ability that easily lets you do free form curves super smooth typography or virtually step less curves of any type Automatic signatures are particularly fast and easy with cubic splines Check out figure one for a totally different curve tracing example To put my money where my mouth is Ill give you a free SAMS book if you can show me how to print this same figure any way on any of the imitation laserwriter knockoff clones UPDATE No takers How do I get Started In Desktop Publishing It s bee
365. ric Environment products have Fig 2 A typical convention badge 16 2 quitely been removed from some current price lists I do not know whether it is an outright flush or simply some last minute bug repairs These SANE packages are were most useful for any floating point mathematics and similiar calculations Worse yet much of the old DOS 3 3 support has been dropped The DOS Toolkit DOS users manual and the Programmers manual have been dropped from some current price lists What are the two single things Apple could do right now that would benefit them the most 1 Unbundle the Ile and offer anybody and everybody a very substantial trade in allowance for a I and 2 Make all the servicing information and all the ser vice routines very much more widely available than they are at present Why are Applewriter WPL Routines Version Dependent WPL is the macro super visory language used by most newer versions of Applewrit er Without WPL Apple is an outstanding word processor But with WPL Applewriter is incomparable Many users are finding out that some WPL routines written for the older DOS 3 3e version of Applewriter will not run on the newer ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 and vice versa Why There are enough signif icant differences between the two versions that many if not most WPL routines will need at least minor changes if they are to run on both operating systems Firstoff t
366. ro try 0 3 give you inverse spirograph effects with all the loops on the inside rather than the outside of the curve Finally our just for fun figure seven shows you the effects of varying tension of a simple curvetracing What utterly and totally boggles the mind is that this entire figure is derived from only seven data points So What Good is Curve Tracing There are all sorts of in credibly powerful things you can do with curve tracing The biggie of course is downloadable type fonts By curvetracing you can have very smooth letters and char acters that even get better as they are magnified and yet need only one compact file to handle any and all different sizes and orientations of text on the page Next on the list are sig natures There are two ways to handle laser printed hand signatures You can create a bitmap of a signature with a digitizer or else you can use a curvetrace The curvetrace will almost always end up far smoother and vastly more convincing besides taking up far less file space and not needing any costly equip ment skills or special setup Cartoon characters are one obvious possibility As I men tioned above I have a few I would like to share with you if you call or write Free form art of any style is another obvious candidate One ex ample would be an indian head for a silk screened Tee shirt We have already seen how our pipes and wires can be handled for tech illu
367. rogram will accept and then substitute a US or a _ control underline for the NULL character So if your printer or whatever needs a NULL all you have to do is use _ the same way you did with ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 But if you need _ for a US ora CHR 31 printer command Figure 4 shows you the Nullifier patch for the newer version 2 1 code What you do is make a one byte substitution for the NULL character If you want no NULLs substitute 00 If you need no US or CHR 31 Do a reset or an absolute reset WITHOUT turning of the power Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor Enter SOFOO SOFO8 SOF10 A2 38 AO 00 84 06 A9 60 85 07 AD C3 CO 91 06 C8 DO F8 E6 07 CA DO F3 60 Set the RAM card address at C0C0 low C0C1 medium and C0C2 high Slot 4 values DoaOFO0G The selected pages or blocks of the RAM card will be moved to main memory starting at 6000 and ending at 98FF Fig 3 A snooper for the Apple RAM card 20 3 then substitute 1F If you must have both a US and a NULL then you will have to find some different control character that you do not need and substitute it instead Stay tuned for next month s exciting new 2 1 patch Be the very first one in your neighborhood to collect them all What is This Month s Laserwriter Scam Uh would you believe custom business stationary Done of course with both the Applewriter word pro cessor and the Laserwri
368. rojustification to start The second and program mable solution tells you to always use a fixed paragraph indent say six spaces and a b ppr remove margins f esc Y x k psrl psz 1 pgok p restoring margins b Imargin p pat ppr printing copy y psy 1 pnp p prt 0 pnd ppr L zero left margin with your word processor Then set the Laserwriter s left and right margins to handle the page centering To recap set your word processor left margin to zero and set your right margin to the number of printed charac ters you want per justified line Always use the tab key to enter the fixed paragraph indents Let the Laserwriter set the actual left margin and the actual width of the printed line on the page There is nothing built into Laserwriter to automatically cancel the microjustification on the last paragraph line Further the microjustification apparently must be cancelled at the start of the last para graph line and not the end Fifth understand how the margins work Because of the microjustify bug you have to use both the Diablo margins to do a full microjustify Both margins are also needed to center proportionally spaced titles especially if you are stretching or offset kerning them at the same time The only way I have found to set the margins that works ppr Don Lancaster s DIABLIFIER automatic Laserwriter formatter Fig 4D Auto formatter concluded 6 7 with the prop
369. rom a cold start Should you be making repeat badges the per badge time will be much less than this one Any Secrets Involved in Setting Circular Text One or two First be sure you have on hand copies of both the Postscript Reference Manual and the Postscript Tutorial and Cookbook These continued on page 18 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU July 1986 A dual IIe monitor Great mouse surfaces HIRES Applewriter dump Desktop publishing secrets Postscript Puss De Resistance have just gotten back I from a several day visit with the folks at Apple Computer And while there s lots of great stuff I am not allowed to talk about I think its safe to tell you this First and foremost there has been a total and complete turnaround in the Apple II division ever since they flush ed old what s his name a year ago Many aggressive new Apple II products are most certainly in the works Apple is now going out of their way to work closely with user groups and is ac tively seeking input from both users and hackers And tech info is becoming much more available both through the monthly technical notes and user group access to their newly expanded Applelink BBS system Second many of the new II family products will now strongly support an open and fully expandable architecture Third and as much as is possible all of the newer II products will be able to run older and existing II software Apple has
370. rregular clipping intervals pixel line remapping or elaborate charpath stuff except for Uh Compared to What applications Use the usertime command as a stopwatch to time out the critical portions of your code Run at the fastest possible baud rate preferably 57200 Make sure your comm software s de facto baud rate is near the intended baud rate Have postscript do as much internally as possible Any host based manipulations or calculations are almost always much slower Use hard disks rather than floppies Use a5 in 1 program that will create edit send code receive error messages and record error messages preferably without any manditory disk access ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 is nearly ideal Use your own custom Postscript code rather than a canned applications program Aviod any and all attempts at putting anything on the video screen except for Postscript listings Keep the serial files as short as possible Use shorter variable names Use rubber grid systems Leave such things as form letters letterheads label art in the PRINTER Erase only the parts that change such as the names and addresses Use a Ilgs at 19200 baud or higher rather than a Mac at anything Quickdraw does not so do not Yellow single flashing means your speed is Postscript limited Yellow double flashing in the absence of errors means your speed is communications limited Fig 2 How to speed up your Postscript code Pos
371. rs Truly random numbers can assume any one of many equally likely values Instead pseudorandom numbers are the next number available in a contrived series that appears on the surface to be any one of many equally likely values There are computer uses for both types Real random numbers are truly unpredictable but they are hard or inconvenient to generate and there is no way to get the same random se quence back over again at a later time On the other hand pseudorandom numbers are easy to generate and you can easily get the same short se quence back again Repeating any random se quence is handy for replaying a hand of cards reviewing a 1 Put a random number into four memory locations Make sure the values are not all zero To repeat or replay a sequence reuse this old seed PSR3 PSR2 chess move or getting noise that repeats for industrial testing The usual way to get a ran dom number is to ask for a user response and then rap idly count until they hit a key That flea bitten Hi What s your name prompt is often one sneaky way of picking up a genuine random number The Apple does this auto matically with two page zero machine language locations called RNDL and RNDH in 4E and 4F Just read these and you have a truly random number Similar code is easy to add to virtually any micro computer Unfortunately this will get you only one random number and your user may get tired
372. rst Let us start with the saddle staplers Talk about sticker shock At any rate if you do scrounge around a junk store or a Hong Kong junk direct mail catalog you ll find a gadget called a Rorostapler that sells for around 3 and has a built in swivel so the staples end up at right angles to the main arm Thus you staple in from the top or from the bottom and do not need a long throw on the arm For a very complete catalog of overpriced and obsolete binding systems check into the GBC catalog Nobody in their right mind would con tinue to use a plastic comb left hand 408 544 95 450 500 10 480 499 10 502 508 90 480 binding in this day and age since it is such a gross insult to your customers Another big comb binding outfit are the HOP Industries people While you wouldn t want to buy comb binding stuff from anyone HOP does have far and away the lowest price for unpunched 5 mil clear acetate stock Cost is under a nickel per sheet in larger quantities By the way the very best looking covers I have done so far are done in one of two ways You can laser print onto heavy weight parchment and then use one of these clear acetate overlay sheets or else you can laser print onto other heavy cover stock and then use Kroy Kolor and the Kroy lamination materials If you want any specialty cover materials do check into Catalina Plastics who for a price will custom cut all sorts of interesting stuff for you
373. rt ridges are usually somewhat too badly washed out for the first few hundred copies In fact most drums do not get up to their best blackness until several thousand copies after they first run out of toner So always keep two or more cartridges on hand Run the first one until it starts putting out solid blacks Then immediately switch to the second one for all the rough copies internal memos and anything else that does not need a super black output Use the old cartridge for quality work and the new one for anything non critical Seventh pick your paper carefully Some papers give excellent results some mar ginal and some others are totally unusable For everyday use the plain old xerox paper from your local price club at 1 80 a ream should work ok For the blackest black on the whitest white the best paper I have found is Classic Crest Avon Brilliant White This is made by Neenah Paper and is now available through most paper distributors We get ours from Ingram Paper Eighth yes you can repair cartridges About one in six or so will fail some other way than running out of toner It may be permanantly gray or have bad shading or may have a scratch a ghost or a dropout If this happens you can move the toner from the sick cartridge over to a good one that just ran out of toner And finally yes you can easily reload the cartridges yourself A cartridge can be reloaded three to five times at a cos
374. rtridge or emptying the holding tank For this month s contest just tell me of a cheap local and no nonsense place to buy the specialty papers that are suitable for laser printing Out here in Arizona Paper Plus is the outstanding winner What we need for future column coverage is some nationwide listing of similar places As per usual a free Incredible Secret Money Ma chine to the best ten entries and an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner DB19 male connector from last IIGS 3 5 inch drive rNOMOTNH ON DD 9 0 fe 12 V 12 V EXT INT WR PROT Oornnmntnonoan RD DATA WR DATA o GND PHI 0 GND PHI 1 GND PHI 2 GND ONORA ON 0009090000 PHI 3 12V oO0O0O000000 C OONOHRWD WR REQ 5 V 5 V 12 ENBL 12 V RD DATA o 16 12 V WR DATA o 18 12 V N o gt T Q fa 0 te N to o 2 p o ke o f O14 G E a o N a wo 20 pin male header to 5 25 inch Drive 1 WR PROT 20 ASK THE GURU So much is happening to Postscript this month that I don t even know where to begin Sources close to the barber of an associate of a usually reliable spokesperson seem to feel that a major overhaul of Postscript is in the works and in the hands of some super secret developers The ne
375. rying quality in most any club library or in just about any public domain collection Two of the best lower cost collections of public domain disks are available from the Call A P P L E people or the Public Domain Exchange By the way the best two ways to find all of the secret insider details of Applesloth are still with the All about Applesoft book from the Call A P P L E people or with the Applesoft Source Code from S C Software UPDATE There is now a new BASIC available for the IIgs that does in fact provide useful and ready to use print using routines No it is not October 1987 compatible with any existing Applesloth code Yes it does offer some very powerful new features A P D A does stock it The list price is 50 Copyright c 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All Rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains intact requires an unmapped image called pixel proc whose origin is 0 0 and whose height is defined as pixelprocheight and whose width is predefined as pixelprocwidth requires a mapping function predefined as mappingproc that decides how each of the pixel lines of pixelproc will be mapped into their final page position mappings involving large text areas may take an hour or more Compiling can speed this up This code is for vertical pixel lines pixellineremap 0 1 pixelprocwidth 30
376. s any third party slot zero memory expansion cards might not be usable after an upgrade A related rumor and some plain old common sense says that cards that plug into slots 1 7 might get into very deep compatibility trouble unless they slavishly make exact use of the I O SELECT and I O STROBE lines Should future address spaces end up wider than 16 bits the partial de code as done by some cards could cause all sorts of con tention problems This might get very sticky on multifunction peripheral cards that do a phantom slot decoding On to this month s vast collection of goodies Where do YOU go For Technical Help Why to the Gila Valley Apple Growers of course You will find no finer col lection of technical expertise available anywhere ever Tellya what Im gonna do Figure one is my super secret list of where I go to get my own technical help Those people with 602 area codes are charter mem bers of the GVAGA those without are honorary mem bers but members none the less Most of these people are willing to listen to your help requests Provided of course that you extend the usual courtesies in the same way that most of my helpline users already do Ferinstance be certain to check the area code against the time zone and never call before 8 am or after 9 pm local time Remember that all of the California clocks are laid back Do not ask for or expect a return call unless the tab
377. s without the need of any costly custom hardware changes Elaine is working on a temperature controller for a new fusion process that should lead to full Laser writer color and do so at a tiny fraction of the going rate for these systems As I said these are all real people doing real things that the VIP can and will greatly help All of these people do welcome inquires and con sulting work They also do accept cash in small bills Just write or call if you want me to put you in touch with any of them Are USGS Maps Available As Data Bases Yes Much of the contents of most USGS topographic maps are now available as computer readable tapes un der the Geodata program from the National Carto graphic Information Center The format is your choice of big dino computer tape or else in cuneiform on fired clay tablets packed with a 0 03 cubit spacing of papyrus reeds The price is not cheap but it is not bad either if you really need the data Charges around 100 per tape are more or less typical Typical data bases include survey boundaries state and county lines place names and water features The actual topographic contours are not yet available since a vastly bigger data base would be required Some day though In fact some day you will flip a CD videodisk into your new Apple XVIII hit a few keys and then instantly print yourself a high quality full color laser copy of any map of any part of t
378. s a special Apple Link resource called the Third Party Library that for a fee OE 4C 6E 65 20 70 72 20 69 63 68 Fig 2 ASCII message disassembly aliasing 98 15 43 T5 3E 15 49 15 51 15 75 15 AO 16 0E 16 16 16 21 Fig 3 Address list disassembly aliasing July 1985 can get your stuff into the pipe Uh better not tell them who sent you but be sure to check it out How do I Shuffle a Deck of Cards The proper name for this sort of thing is called ran domizing without a replace ment Besides the obvious use in card games the problem also comes up in educational software where you want to give a student a set of pro blems in random order yet never repeat or miss A first and an incredibly stupid stab at shuffling might grab a random integer Then grab a second random integer Whoops better check to make sure you did not get the same one over again Repeat this 52 times for a card deck Among the many problems with this route is that when you get near the end of the deck you will be throwing ASL ROR JSR 2R JSR DP PLA TYA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ASL ASL ASL 43 X 3F X 49 X 51 X 75 X SAO X SOE X 16 X 21 X ASK THE GURU hundreds of cards away for each of those good ones you end up with This takes forever even in machine language In BASIC it takes forever cubed Which might be just fine for modeling earth tides snail geriatrics or con
379. s an updated and improved version of Freewriter that is much better documented and has been classroom proven Dave Blair of Blair Des igns has solved the Coburn problem And elegantly As you may recall the Coburn people have some absolutely outstanding graphics materials available things such as gold foils diffraction grating stuff glow in the dark sheets and various other wonders Unfortunately toner won t properly stick to any of their products So what Dave suggests is this Print a negative black toner image on plain paper Then Kroy Kolor or else Omnicrom this sheet Next throw the sheet away and save the Kroy Kolor carrier Finally Kroy Kolor the new Coburn material with the used carrier It turns out that Kroy Kolor sticks totally all over the Coburn overlay film The results are unbeliev ably spectacular For instance if a used car salesman shows up and asks you for some thing sedate in a new custom business card you can give him gold and pearl ink over a glow in the dark diffraction grating background Dave will be most happy to send you several finished samples provide you do help him along with his hobby of collecting federal reserve notes He also does custom magnetic truck signs and bus iness cards I have found at least one competitor to Coburn Try the Flormel people as an alternate source for unusual foil and film materials Some blueish computer outfit in upstate New York has
380. s not that tedious or time consum ing a job at all And the final results quite often will be absolutely spectacular Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU April 1986 WPL and Q C Laserwriter Plus bugs New Apple RAM card A new control computer Postscript schematic drawing e sure to stop in at Be Computer Shopper booth at the West Coast Computer Faire April 3 6 in San Francisco s Moscone Center I will try and be on hand to meet you all four days Pll also haul along a bunch of autographed books and software particularly the new Laserwriter Utilities my new Ramcard Disassembly Script and my freshly re printed Micro Cookbook Bee should be there with all of her demos to answer all your desktop publishing questions and Pll probably be speaking on laser printing with the Apple Ile Drop by for a while So much is happening so fast that I don t know where to even begin Forrest Mims sent me a copy of his brand new Siliconnections book a most readable history of the roots of the microcomputer revolution And Tom Weishaar sent along his Your Best Interest book on calculating interest rates by using a spreadsheet Tom reveals many of those things that banks and other lending institutions definitely do not want you to know I also just got word on an incredible new card for the IIe that can let you cheaply display real photographs and video images directly on your Apple Ie monitor screen with f
381. save 1 setgray fill grestore stroke 46 402 135 38 424 45 ct 44 443 150 44 418 40 ct 96 400 80 90 415 150 ct 95 412 40 98 430 110 82 438 170 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke right bod 186 208 120 140 34090 172 408 25 188 412 20 188 412 75 195 435 75 curvetrace gsave 240 440 rlineto clip newpath 176 210 105 158 330 85 172 39060 195 405 85 210 440 85 100 400 0 100 200 0 curvetrace gsave 0 95 setgray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke grestore stroke left arm 74 383 70 120 320 40 220 3000 255 330 80 255 370 100 235 390 180 200 350 110 200 350 170 145 351 170 145 351 135 95 400 125 95 400 180 74 383 110 cif listing continues Fig 2A Postscript Listing for Meowwrrr The puss de resistance 17 3 ASK THE GURU continuing Meowwrrr left ear 270 530 40 340 560 20 340 560 55 312 490 120 curvetrace gsave 0 4 setgray fill grestore stroke 300 520 45 338 553 30 338 553 70 312 504 130 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke 2 setlinewidth head 156 508 80 228 406 30 274 390 10 306 401 40 306 401 0 335 432 80 335 432 95 325 447 125 325 447 70 320 508 120 238 540 160 170 500 160 170 500 145 156 508 145 curvetrace gsave gsave 0 95 setgray fill grestore clip newpath 210 418 140 196 455 80 235 480 40 254 437 60 270 422 20 298 430 80 318 430 60 326 433 50 318 404 150 260 370 180 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke
382. script step and repeat am slowly but surely I getting the IIgs to turn into a decent driver for the Laserwriter In fact if you use my patched version of Applewriter on the IIgs at 19200 baud you ll end up with an effective baud rate around 18200 This rate is roughly three times faster than using a Macintosh with or without Appletalk as a Laserwriter driver The actual speedup you get depends on how much time is spent serial communicating and how much time is used running Postscript but the speedup is always significant By the time you read this the IIgs version 2 0 system software disks should now be available Check your dealer Included are new print drivers and various other mods and improvements Apple stock has 2 1 split and is now paying a small dividend But it is the time to be getting yourself out of stocks not into them There are plenty of laser printing developments for this month Rumor has it that the Riccoh laser engine has some fatal or near fatal long term print quality flaws and is quietly being discontinued by several printer manufacturers Meanwhile Canon is moving some of its laser engine and its cartridge production work over to Tennesee Canon now has a new laser engine they call the SX in production It is heavier duty and gives far blacker and much more consistent print quality The new cartridge is also smaller and somewhat cheaper No I do not have any refilling information
383. secret manual for the Ile called of all things the He Technical Reference Manual There is a similar top secret manual pair for the IIc called the Ze Reference Manuals And there is one humongous pair of Q level security binders and dozens of support diskettes called Inside Macintosh and the Macintosh Software Sup plement It is categorically impos sible to do ANYTHING useful on ANY newer Apple ma chine without these manuals Their pricing is not at all April 1985 out of line with their contents In fact they are worth far more than the asking price The lic manuals are stock A2L4038 while the Ile manual is stock A2L2073 The Mac stuff is now pub lished by Addison Weseley So what is the problem Apple reasoned that if they came out with thorough in dispensible and complete tech manuals that they really would not need full page Wall Street Journal ads to promote something so obviously good and so obviously needed Particularly if all of their machines are utterly and to tally useless without access to these manuals In addition since hackers would be beating the doors down of their dealers to get at these manuals some book keeping could be eliminated by asking those dealers to order the manuals in lots of five or more Since the average dealer could easily sell a thousand of these a month if he wanted to surely buying five would not inconvenience anyone at all would it Well J
384. serwriter at an honest 19200 baud This is three times faster than Appletalk It works by altering the scrolling routine and by stopping character input during scrolling One present bug A Q I MUST be done at least once before doing any O A catalog or L load 1 Make a backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY and FOR INTERNAL Ilgs PRINTER PORT ONLY Install the serial patch of figure one to this disk Get into BASICS SYSTEM Then CALL 151 BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 T 0C Verify Change 24B7 C6 24B7 EA 24B8 EA 24CO C6 24C8 A5 24D0 68 24D8 48 24E0 54 24E8 8D 24F0 AO Verify Change 4C8A 2A 4C8A 60 A6 A5 22 EA 20 07 A6 A5 22 28 85 26 18 69 01 20 FA 24 CO 20 00 55 CO 20 00 20 7E Add to end of existing code 6100 18 6108 A9 6110 60 UNLOCK AWD SYS FB C2 27 00 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 61FF T 0C LOCK AWD SYS Fig 2 Applewriter 2 1 fastalker patch for the Ilgs ASK THE GURU Fig 3 Some uses for my curvetracing routine 30 3 switch boxes that will work with the new IIgs mini DIN 8 connectors along with all the usual cables gender changers whatever And a final source that just showed up in today s mail is from Micro Computer Cable Their prices are super low As a ferinstance the IIgs printer cable costs a mere 5 50 Can I use the Applewriter Modem on the IIgs Question Which is
385. setscreen gsave 0 99 setgray stroke grestore gsave 350 340 translate 0 0 moveto 35 40 35 80 0 120 rcurveto 20 40 20 80 0 120 rcurveto 1 setgray fill grestore 0 setgray newpath 270 511 moveto 60 0 rlineto 0 30 rlineto 60 0 rlineto closepath fill showpage ig 5 Applewriter s Glaring Omission continued from page 22 5 wrinkle or two can show up on the first pass If you get a wrinkle you just tape a small new strip of Omnichron mat erial over it and then shove it back through again You will want to tape the Omnicrom material to your copy at the top being careful to keep the leftmost 3 8 inch free so the seperation belt and drive roller do not wrinkle the sheets At present you can expect around a 50 percent success rate on the first pass and a 90 percent success on the second pass If you are using entire sheets of Omnicrom be sure to trim them so they clear the mylar seperation belt and the drive rollers I suspect that some sort of carrier could be added to optimize Omnicrom for the Laserwriter Something like a 9 1 2 x 11 mylar sheet folded 1 2 inch on either edge and sprayed with anti static gunk or metallization might work out fairly well Mostly I think it is just a matter of getting to know the material and working closely with it Let me know all your experiences on this Tellyawhat For the con test this month just tell me about a copier machine that works with Omnicrom or fin
386. sheet is finally ironed in place fusing the image to the cloth Retail cost is around 2 The Xerox people do have a new thermal transfer mater ial intended for their color copiers This stuff irons full color and permanant images onto just about any fabric or textile surface Retail cost is around 3 per sheet I have seen some gallery quality re sults done with this process It is not at all clear how a thermal sensitive process can be sent through a copier with heat fusion rollers The best way to use a laser printer here would seem to be to create the originals with the laser and then use the Xerox copier to actually produce the tran sfer sheets There is also a process called Sublicolor that consists of a color seperation scanner and an imager that puts some sublimation inks onto sheets October 1987 From what I have seen of this process the final colors tend towards the pastels All the examples in their ads are very highly reduced The process and or the pricing also would seem suspect because they do advertise primarily in the very scroungiest of those get rich quick publications right be side all of the usual Find out how I make money Just send 19 95 to ads Which reminds me Did I ever tell you about my classic Incredible Secret Money Ma chine book Oh well You can also buy your own thermal transfer ink and use it on an ordinary offset printing press Van Son is a leading supplier of
387. sing half tone screens provided you are extra careful You can also use this tape to process several different colors onto your copy at once One fusion pass can give you a few to a dozen or more colors There are sixty colors in all Around thirty of these are usually in stock while more stock items are being added Sheets are available in boxes of 100 of one color Rainbow packs of 100 assorted sheets in metallic or normal colors are also available Besides plain colors and metallics there are also golds silvers and a nice pearl There is even a clear material This will convert dull but ac ceptably black toner into a high gloss and obviously printed black It can also add a high gloss finish to the regular colors I have found the gold a tad garish for business cards I instead use the more sedate and cheaper Pale Bronze But the gold certainly is snappy Actually the Laserwriter is not quite ideal for fusing Omnicrom Before reaching the fusion rollers there s some electrostatic charging and some edge feeding done along a long and not quite straight paper path continued on page 23 5 Heat and pressure fuses ink to re melted toner Omnicrom ink and carrier Toner original Omnicrom ink opaque negative Ink coated toner original Fig 5 How the Omnicrom color process works 22 5 Appleworks utilities Don Lancaster s Postscript signatures Help on Apple clones ASK THE GURU tenses
388. single page of 256 bytes 02 for one ProDOS block of 512 bytes up to a maximum of 38 for 28 blocks The actual memory dump will begin in the RAM card at the address you select and will be moved down into the main memory starting at hex 6000 The upper limit is set to 9900 to prevent inter ference with a DOS 3 3 or ProDOS reboot The starting address is high enough in main RAM that you can perform a warm reboot of ProDOS around it without hurting the copy Several reminders about the RAM card Always set your addresses in a low mid high order Remember that any RAM card read or write will auto post increment the RAM card address Finally re member that you must not try to read or write to the RAM card using indexed addres sing unless you intentionally cross a page boundary To use with a slot other than slot 4 note that CODO through COD2 are the low mid high address for slot 5 while COD3 is the data read location and so on up and down the line of slots Thus CO090 starts slot 1 COAO slot 2 and so on More insider information on all of this appears in my new RAM Card Disassembly Script How About an Easier Contest This Time Right on As usual a copy of my Incredible Secret Mon ey Machine to the best ten entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two to the overall winner Since not just anybody can be trusted with such a powerful and useful module as a RAM card
389. sition of a symbol from its corners you define it from a logical connection point The usual action point for a resistor would be its center The action point of an in CdS Light Sensor 4093 top view 1 Then add the lettering to complete the final schematic tegrated circuit pictorial is the center of pin number one Some symbols make use of an automated DIP pictorial generator To draw a com plex 40 pin integrated circuit you use a special routine All you have to tell this routine is the number of pins the name of the chip and two strings of callouts as needed for the top and bottom pin rows Thus an entire DIP pictorial can be drawn with a few keystrokes Complement bars are easily and automatically added when and as you need them Symbols can be simple or complex To show the resis tance omega you just type continued on page 15 4 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU May 1986 Anti aliasing Laserwriter gossip The Imageworks card Ripping off a type font Digital image processing ello again There are H of really great new things happening so let s just jump right on in I ve got two new freebies for you A pair of handouts on RS 232 C interfacing One details the pinouts while the other shows how to build your own breakout box Write or call if you want these I have also just personally reprinted my hard to find Micro Cookbook Volume I and am also shipping my new Apple
390. size and then photoreduce the result Another way is to find one of the many real typesetting machines that speak the same Postscript language the Las erwriter does Once you have First select a daisywheel number from this list 0 Courier 1 Courier Italic 2 Courier Bold 3 Courier Bold Italic 4 Times 5 Times Italic 6 Times Bold 7 Times Bold Italic 8 Helvetica 9 Helvetica Italic 10 Helvetica Bold 11 Helvetica Bold Italic 12 symbol To change the normal daisywheel use this Postscript command in the Postscript mode normalwheelchoice 8 def serverdict begin 0 exitserver statusdict begin 62 normalwheelchoice seteescratch To change the bold daisywheel use this Postscript command in the Postscript mode boldwheelchoice 10 def serverdict begin 0 exitserver statusdict begin 61 boldwheelchoice seteescratch Do not change daisywheels more than 10 000 times over the life of the machine Fig 3 Postscript code to swap daisywheels exactly what you want the same software on the same machine can give you arbi trarily good typeset quality to 2600 dpi and beyond Instead an awful lot of people are going to have a rather obvious response if they were asked to accept a slight reduction in typeset quality for 1 100th the cost 1 100th the time and with 100 times the convenience Hail yaess A second obvious problem is that there is no way at all to tractor feed
391. snooper step 2 of figure 3 is written in a secret very mysterious and highly arcane code Just tell me in English exactly what is happening here along with your suggestions for some heavy duty new uses Only let s play fair You are automatically disqualified if you can sight read step two And if you eat this sort of thing for lunch how about 20 57 FC instead Or else take a 00 Actually this super secret encryption technique is so powerful and so good that maybe we could even talk Apple into using it someday Tell me all About Applewriter NULLs Many printers require the ASCH 00 or NULL com mand to do certain things This is incredibly stupid be cause the NULL command is specifically reserved as an ASCII control command that is not supposed to do any thing anywhere anytime Nonetheless things being the way they are certain printers and some cards need NULLs to operate properly In the DOS 3 3e version of Applewriter all NULLs were specifically excluded and a custom patch was needed to let you imbed any NULLs in all your printer control com October 1986 mands Write or call me if you need a free copy of this DOS 3 3 Applewriter patch The problem was sort of fixed in ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 or 2 1 But the stock solution introduced a new problem for other printers And Apple never bothered to tell anyone about handling NULLs in the first place What they did was let you substit
392. so on Unfortunately you might find many different ways of showing these ASCII control commands as well as finding many different ways of reach ing them Figure two shows us five different ways of naming the ASCII control commands and their equivalents The ASCII column shows us the memonic for every control command As some Ferinstances CR is a carriage return FF is a formfeed BEL is a bell and BS is a back space This mnemonic is a reference for people only and is not recognizable by most personal computers The hex code column will show us the same ASCII code in hexadecimal accessed by really really really really really really HT really M CR Figure Three Here s the secret ASCII control codes as used by the special Apple keys 12 3 ASK THE GURU a machine language program or subroutine Here CR is an 0D FF is an 0C BEL is 07 and BS is a 08 You are likely to see this hex notation when you re reading machine language code The dec code column shows us the very same ASCII codes in decimal as would be need ed by Applesloth or another high level language Here CR is a 13 FF is a 12 BEL is a 7 and BS is an 8 As decimal use examples you might print a CHR 13 CHR 4 during DOS 3 3 disk access This will output a carriage return followed by the Control D DOS access command Or you might do a POKE 28756 13 to force a carriage return into a textfile
393. soft from A P P L E or the Applesoft Disassembly Disk from S C Software Figure three shows us the details Each internal Apple sloth HIRES routine may be accessed by calling it as a subroutine For instance a JSR F3D8 will clear and init the HIRES page two screen Several of these routines require that you pass infor mation to them using the A X and Y registers Note that there is no rhyme or reason to which register gets used for what Since there are 280 pos sible dots on a stock HIRES line you need two address bytes The high byte is a zero for dots less than 255 and a one for dots greater than 255 The low byte equals the num ber of dots for dots less than 255 or the number of dots minus 256 for dots of 256 or greater For instance to position yourself on the HIRES screen you put the vertical line number 00 BF in the ac cumulator the low byte of the horizontal dot count into the X register and the high byte of the horizontal dot counter into the Y register Then you JSR F411 To draw a line you must first have a position set either by using HPOSN or by hav ing drawn a previous line Then you put the vertical line number 00 BF into the Y register the low byte of the horizontal dot count into the accumulator and the high byte of the horizontal dot count into the X register To draw a shape from a shape table first you have to learn all about and use shape tables under Applesloth The DRA
394. ss teleportation Postscript resources IIgs old drive adaptor Applewriter tweedleifier Apple technical literature pple has just released A new version of the Ile It is now packaged in a platinum color case and now uses the IIgs keyboard including the numeric keypad A few other changes were made to reduce the production cost and standardize the use of IIgs type components Instead of eight 64K x 1 memory chips you now have two 64K x 4 dynamic RAMS And instead of that pair of 64K monitor ROM chips a single 128K chip is used The list price is 829 and the dealer cost is half that Except for the brand new numeric keypad and a newly introduced and very bizarre bug the performance of the new Ile should be identical to the older units The power supply might possibly run very slightly cooler and a tad more power might now be available for peripheral cards The very bizarre new bug resulted from a change to allow mouse cards to auto matically sense the shift key If you have any peripheral that uses the SW2 input and if you simultaneously press the shift key then you throw a dead short onto the power supply trashing everything currently in the machine Uh Apple there is this product out there that has a linear voltage and current relationship and is able to automatically restrict currents to selected levels You might not have heard of them but these are called resistors and they cost around half a cen
395. strations The very same ideas can be abstracted for borders braid ing and such One thing that radically excites me about curve trac ing is that you can eliminate the need for any digitizer scanner or video camera when grabbing your artwork Those curvetrace points are sparse enough that you can quickly and easily digitize almost anything by hand Here s how I currently digitize stuff First I enlarge the original art on a copier making the image as big as possible I then run off several copies These copies are then put into the Las erwriter paper tray and one of the gray grids from my Applewriter Laserwriter Util ities package is overprinted onto them In the case of a character in a font a special grid is used instead that is carefully scaled and rotated until the character is squarely sitting inside a 1000 x 1000 box Continuing you then put the combined grid and art image on a piece of cork and stab your data points with a pin or needle Then you hand enter the points into Apple writer and you are all set A light box helps a lot here Any variations from your original art are also easily done You can pick off only the part of the image you really need You can also change the shape and size of everything as you go along adding or dropping detail Try doing that on a digitizer or a scanner Once again remember that you need suprisingly few data points for a curvetrace so doing things by hand i
396. t It does in fact let you receive and record any shorter 19200 baud error messages sent from your Laserwriter Be sure to use a copy from an original v2 1 disk The simple printing patches I ve shown you earlier will defeat this new code Yes the figure one code also lets you print properly One interesting result of the patched code Applewriter on a IIgs at 19200 baud com municates your Postscript to the Laserwriter approximately three times faster than does anything on a Mac that is using the Appletalk network What s new in Toner Cartridge Reloading Well firstoff both H P and Canon are spreading all sorts of horror stories on the many unspeakable evils of toner cartridge refilling When they ever do catch you filling a cartridge they will spank you and send you to bed without any supper It seems that there s this horrible side effect of doing the 5 to 15 toner cartridge refills Would you believe that there are people out there that actually would stoop to paying 15 for a black car tridge compared to spending over 100 for a grayish one The cartridges of course do not get up to their max imum blackness until after their second refill The best source I have found for wiper pads and for refill toner is through Arlin Shepard at Lazer Products You can also get a product known as a wide mouth wash bottle from any lab supply house such as the B7893 1L from American Scientific Products Pull
397. t each in production quantities Why even JBM has made use of this emerging new technology A complex set of math theory has also been developed and seems to stand up to experimental verifica tion It is called Ohm s Law Apple apparently made the Ie look very similar to a IIgs and have narrowed the price differental between the two machines to a mere 170 Any disinterested outsider might conclude that Apple is trying to quash the identity of the He and eventually replace it outright with the IIgs Just like they quashed it with the Lisa and the Apple II machines Uh huh Apple has also dropped the EDASM assembler and their ProDOS Assembler Tools disk A2W0013 from the current developer services listings Apparently they feel that everyone is now immediately supposed to shift to the new C language development tools and use a sophisticated assembler named ORCA M that can handle the full re sources of the 65C816 Several CS readers have questioned the safety of toner cartridge refilling While the toner has not yet been shown to cause laboratory hamsters to become excessively horny if you were purposely were trying to develop a human lung carcinogen you prob ably would pick a very fine black powder full of soot and fancy organic chemicals A little common sense is in order here Do the refilling outside and in a slight breeze Hold your breath or wear a mask when actually dumping the toner into the ca
398. t printer driven from just about any mini or microcomputer This month s Postscript utility is the gray rubber grid The listing appears in figure six This gives you an ad justable gray grid background for such things as schematic diagrams flowcharts graphs Keep the toner cartridge right side up as much as pos sible when you perform your refilling It is definitely not feasable to try and ship any refilled cartridges except by hand carrying There is absolutely no need to take the cartridge apart But if you really want to open one the special screw driver needed is the 10 tamper proof torx insert bit found in EVCO s 945B700 set This set is also available at Jensen Tools How About Another Contest Sure thing We ll have an easy one this month The next big market to open up will be the area of finishing processes and materials for use with laser printing Sure the laser pages are nice but it is the complete final package that really counts So just tell me about any finishing products that are suitable for small quantity laser printing I am partic invoices or whatever This grid ends up both dropout free and glitch free All the code that follows the rubber grid routine will be locked to it and can easily be expanded and contracted as needed You can also lock the grid to automatically track a border or inset Several gotchas The grid works best at 1 1 and may not scale well Also th
399. t important to us low pressure air has fantastic hacker potential You can Fig 1 A 30 cent robotic 3 way air valve literally beat one of these systems out on a brick in your back yard and still come up with a promising and useful product You ll need an air source The larger aquarium pumps are ideal when combined with a small storage tank Small tanks are easily built from plastic toilet tank floats You can instead use a larger tank filled with a tire pump or even use a scuba tank or a Scott Airpack bottle Hoses and connectors are no big deal Get your hoses from Hygenic and the con nectors from Value Plastics A regulator is also needed I ve had the best luck running at 3 5 psi although you get much more force up in the 5 7 psi range You can get regulators for around seven bucks from most of the sur plus houses mentioned below Now for the fun part You need a control valve Unlike electricity or electronics you cannot simply connect your air supply to an actuator to move it and then disconnect it to return Try this and the air stays stuck in the pipe and the actuator will remain extended Instead you need three way air valves that act like elec tronic SPDT switches When powered the air supply gets connected to the actuator When the control signal is turned off the pressure re maining in the actuator vents to ambient through the sec ond valve arm You simply will not believe the price
400. t of 20 per reload or less One supply source is Laser Printer Products but dozens of others are showing up ve found their toner to be somewhat blacker and denser but also somewhat less crease and scrape res istant than the original Present pricing is 20 for one toner reload and 1 50 for a new wiper pad They will also buy old cartridges outright for 10 each I have yet to discover the original source for bulk toner Let me know if you find it How can I Reload a Toner Cartridge Few people are aware that there is a snap on snap off filling plug in the toner car tridge The reason they don t realize this is that it takes a special screwdiver some car ving spring popping shaft removing getting fingerprints and light on the drum and enough other hassles that this filler cap is simply not worth accessing at all 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B Cc D E F August 1986 Why it is almost enough to give you the impression that Canon might not be totally in favor of letting you do 1 5 cost reloads Reloading is fairly simple though if you forget about the plug Just add your own filler hole in a sane place Remove the large card board label popping it off from the middle with a dull knife Then scrape a 5 8 inch square hole in the top end of the inside toner tank using a plexiglass cutting tool Pour the toner into the tank using a plastic funnel shaking gently as you go along Then tape
401. tal user time Around fifteen minutes for the entire figure This could be sped up further with some practice and a little help from WPL Note that this entire figure was typeset no pasteup was involved One very big advantage of working by columns is that the content of any column holds identical stuff while the usual row holds a mish mash of wildly conflicting character strings In fact this entire Guru column was written drawn and typeset on an Apple Tle And yes that includes all of the final camera ready art work as well Even the initial drop cap continued from page 11 5 arithmetic modulo 300 So while there are zillions of screen options you can call for only a small handfull will end up unique Figure two shows us our first improved halftone It is called a 100 DPI 45 degree screen and gives you nine gray levels The actual resol ution turns out to be 106 DPI This is four times grayer than the stock tones and sure looks better This screen would seem to be one excellent choice for printing of photographs and video images You would do this by digitizing an image so there are around 100 gray dots per inch in both the X and Y directions Then you would reduce the resolution of your digitized gray image to nine levels These digitized levels are next converted to hex ASCII pairs and grabbed by Apple writer as part of your text file From there the image command in Postscript takes
402. ter helped along with a few of my whiz bang utilities Every business large or small needs their share of letterheads envelopes bus iness cards and such The traiditonal suppliers of these often require very large min imum quantities have long setup and delivery times do not give you exactly what you want and leave you with a staggering bill There are two different ways the Laserwriter can solve these hassles once and for all You can use the Laserwriter just for pre press or you can actually print the letterheads on demand when and as they are needed The on demand method will appeal to most small business technical venture or craft needs No _ letterheads ever need to be pre printed ahead of their actual use Small quantities are a snap Any changes or adjust ments however major can be made at any time You can even print custom letterheads instantly at a fair swap meet yard sale mall or trade show and sell as few as a dozen of each at a profit Thanks to the magic of Postscript you can put the letterhead image the body of the letter and even your signature directly into the Laserwriter You have to do this only once Then you simply erase and rewrite each new name and address letting your fully custom letters pour out at maximum speed If you are very careful about your choice of paper and your artwork images the quality will be more than acceptable for all but the most critical of bus
403. ter link that should now communicate up to seven times faster than Appletalk Naturally you will have to use the game paddle connec tor when you do this Just when you thought you were going to get out of it it is now advetorial time Some of my current best sellers do include the newly revised Ask the Guru reprints the Postscript Show and Tell and the Postscript Technical Illustrations now available for ag H KAO A Y s A cece ANAS y most computers along with my Introduction to Postscript VHS video Write or call for more info Offward and downward Can An Apple IIc and an IBM PC Exchange Their Text Files You can exchange text files from most any computer to most any other by using serial communication ports and then sending the characters from one machine to another Figure one shows you a simple adaptor I built to let you get between an IBM PC and an Apple Ic Ile or IIgs You build this adaptor from 5 worth of parts from Radio Shack It plugs directly into the COM 1 port of your IBM machine Be sure to use two female G aH Fig 2 A 5 manual folder for index stock 31 2 DB25 connectors A pair of soldered 12 wire loops can be used to hold the two con nectors together At the IBM end you need a card that gives you COM 1 serial interface You will also usually need some sort of a telecommunications software packag
404. th some practice it takes around 20 minutes to enter a signature using nothing but a surprisingly few stabs from a safety pin No scanners or John s Signature Postscript 1 setlinecap tension 2 8 def showtick false def 87 82 100 8013085 931580 94 122 105 69 5 76 135 58 69 160 60 8165 115 120 0 curvetrace 115 120 160 106 110 105 1111000 118 103 45 120 120 160 curvetrace 120 120 30 144132 70 146 152 180 140 142 110 128 100 110 128 100 75 13811835 145 116 75 147 1000 15511060 1651200 160 100 120 curvetrace 160 100 55 1771200 1761000 188 110 45 curvetrace 50 100 translate 300 300 moveto 2 setlinewidth stroke Fig 4 John s Signature 23 4 ASK THE GURU digitizers of any type are needed As you can see the final results are absolutely exceptional If you wanted to you could easily add pen skips and variable line weights ink spatters etc to the signature grabbing process Are Applewriter Graphics Really That Good They sure are I ve seen the publisher of the leading Mac magazine state in his industry newsletter that if you want good graphics you should definitely be making use of Applewriter At a recent trade show a minicomputer company was introducing a high end new laser printer so they plastered their entire booth with Apple writer graphics printed of course on a Laserwriter And it sure packed their booth full of customers But I guess I will have t
405. the ET watching if you expect to be treated seriously and get behind the scenes Magdalena lies within the greater Datil Pietown Que mado metropolitan area Take that outer loop expressway through the theater and the industrial district Then turn left at the fifth cow New Mexico All visitors are definitely welcome but play PRINT PRINT D BSAVE IIEMON D A 8000 L 1000 REM E000 EFFF GRAB POKE 60 00 POKE 61 224 POKE 62 255 POKE 63 239 POKE 66 00 POKE 67 128 CALL 32763 REM MOVE D000 SDFFF PRINT PRINT D BSAVE IIEMON E A 8000 L 1000 REM F000 FFFF GRAB POKE 60 00 POKE 61 240 POKE 62 255 POKE 63 255 POKE 66 00 POKE 67 128 CALL 32763 REM MOVE F000 FFFF PRINT PRINT D BSAVE IIEMON F A 8000 L 1000 TEXT HOME CLEAR FOR N 1 TO 30 2Z PEEK 49200 PEEK 49200 NEXT N REM BRACK PEEK 49200 RINT MONITOR SNATCH COMPLETE PRINT END REM TUROTIAL AND PROMPT POKE 49167 0 REM ALTSET ON VTAB 1 HTAB 12 FOR NN 1 TO 15 PRINT CHRS 127 NEXT NN PRINT HTAB 12 PRINT CHRS 127 CHRS 127 HTAB 12 FOR NN 1 TO 15 PRINT CHRS 127 NEXT NN PRINT PRINT PRINT RINT This program captures the Apple IIe s monitor ROM into four 4Kx8 binary files named IEROM C thru IIEROM F PRINT POKE 1677 162 POKE 1686 162 REM REAL QUOTES WITHOUT TEARS PRINT Default use address is 8000 as needed by the MPC ap ep EPROM burner PRINT PRINT PRINT
406. the card Thus on a I you ended up with Applesloth in RAM On a II you instead got Integer BASIC in RAM Unfortunately when they went to the disk the INTBAS Fig 3 EPROM Monitor adaptor for the Apple Il code image was changed to have that autostart monitor code thus eliminating any absolute reset access You also lost the single step and the trace debugging You do retain the sweet 16 and the mini assembler with the new INTBAS disk image as these are part of the Integer FO ROM from FO00 F7FF A third route to an absolute reset is to customize either INTBAS or FPBAS so they hold the old absolute reset image Some software pack ages can defeat the use of a RAM card for monitor access though In fact many of them do The kicker is that the 2316 ROM is NOT directly inter changeable with a standard 2716 EPROM since there are problems involving three pins that must be gotten around The clones and Hong Kong knockoffs beat this compat ibility problem by designing for 2716 EPROMs in the first place Thus on a clone or a knockoff all you usually have to do is program your own EPROM picking up any type of monitor you like any way you like Back to the 2316 A 2316 has three programmable chip select lines Apple chose
407. them I ll also gladly give a free SAMS book to anyone who can show me ANY way at all to do these on a Mac that is even remotely as cheap as easy as pow erful and as convenient as using Applewriter on a Ile Figure one shows us a typical image This was done on a He under Applewriter Once you know exactly what you are doing and have built a library of goodies up this complex an image should take you around ten minutes to program and seventeen sec onds to print Materials cost is under four cents One neat thing that is not at all obvious is that it does not matter what order you put the image onto the Laserwriter s bitmap You are free to say do your backgrounds first the artwork second your head lines third and your fine print last More importantly you do a form letter by putting the letter in the printer and then changing only the name and address for each repeated pass A He again with Apple writer can simply and easily process hundreds of letters at a whack Watching customized form letters quietly pour out of a machine at an eight letter per minute rate is a joy to behold Yes I do have automatic soft ware for both form letters and envelopes Just call or write There are some problems The quality is not quite what a printer would call typeset since the resolution is only 300 dots per inch A printer might call this tabloid quality One route to beat this is to work double or triple
408. ther higher continued from page 24 4 and any drum defects are then noted To provide an emptying hole in the holding tank turn the cartridge upside down and find the area shown in figure seven Then melt a 1 4 inch hole as pictured This hole edge can be sanded smooth without major problems Finally go outside and shake the used toner out of this hole Since there are some baffles in the holding tank you will have to rock the cartridge back and forth a few times to get rid of all the spent toner When finished tape the hole shut with scotch transparent tape For successive refills just untape the toner holding tank empty and retape Then un tape the fresh toner tank fill and retape You should also now use the special tool to clean the corona wire Instead of replacing your fusion wiper pad just remove the wiper portion of it and lay a new wiper in place The wipers cost around fifty cents density Postscript machine Finally if your paper can handle it and if six somewhat darker grays are all you need then try out a 135 line 25 degree screen This will give you grays that look like an india ink wash and can even make the Laserwriter output rival the Linotron 100 Show me a Postscript Utility I will even do you one better Starting in this issue we ll run at least one most needed Postscript utility each month I ll even be careful to make sure most of these will run on virtually any Postscrip
409. these cards trying vaporlocks of their own It is very hard to trouble shoot over the phone but what seems to be happening is that the i d patch in the HIRES screen holes is some how getting trashed UPDATE Dec 85 How Can I Do An Isometric Drawing Why with Applewriter on a Ile of course How else could you prossibly do an isometric drawing Figure three shows us some details Isometric drawing is one standard way of showing three dimensional objects on a flat sheet of paper The original X axis leans up by 30 degrees to the right The orig inal Y axis leans up to the left by 30 degrees The original Z axis still goes straight up and down You can measure the actual scale lengths along all of the three axes I have put together some Postscript routines that easily Fig 3 An Applewriter isometric tech illustration let you do the Laserwriter graphics directly out of Ap plewriter My cl cr and ct commands handle the circles as ellipses slanted just the right way for left right and top faces My al ar and at do the same thing for arcs The im irm id and ird commands handle left moves and left draws both relative and ab solute Similar commands do exist for the other two axes while the im irm id and ird commands do a triple isomet ric move or draw all in one single command These are needed for positioning or for slanting lines that go in two or three dimenions at once The dashes are don
410. ting in very tiny and almost totally useless segments This programmer simply could not believe that the single fundamental most im portant task of a personal computer the ability to very quickly and conveniently list appears to be totally un available on the Mac If you know how please send me any workable way to disassemble a Mac disk file onto paper Oh yes the file is 68000 code but is not Mac code I have a hunch this will be far and away the hardest contest we have ever run As usual an Incredible Secret Money Machine to the first dozen entrants and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the best overall reply Help How does Appleworks Virtual Memory Work Suppose you had some free RAM available in several different locations in your computer Say further that you wanted to put lots of different work files into these areas How would you do it If you decided to do the obvious and start placing files where they would fit in memory things might be ok for a while But then say that one of your earlier files got longer This might happen because you have added a few new paragraphs to a word processor text file What now To make room for the new stuff you either have to rearrange everything that is already in memory or else split up the longer file into two or more disjoined pieces To get around having to continuously rearrange what is already in memory and to
411. tion 5 div erts resources from useful tasks 6 costs money and inevitably 7 loses sales If you are writing com mercial software there s two key secrets to coping with bootlegging and piracy The first is to not sweat it since actual cash lost out of your pocket is much smaller than you might first imagine Consider the average software collector or trader who has say a mere 10 000 bootleg programs in their primary trading stack Even if he stopped trading for a while and actually used one of his stolen programs the chances are overwhelming it wouldn t be yours anyway The second big anti piracy measure is to include as much personal value added in your software products as possible At the very least this must include a free and courteous unlimited helpline service a no questions asked return policy and a 5 no hassle exchange for blown or broken disks You should also concen trate on those parts of your package that are not on disk such as tutorials guides man uals reference cards user aides and anything else that puts the perceived value of your product on the overall package rather than on disk For lots more on personal value added check into my The Incredible Secret Money Machine book Turning to other news I keep hearing persistent rum ors that future Apple products might not be compatible with devices that plug into that existing slot zero Ile mem ory expansion slot Thu
412. to 10 On pass four interchange bin 4 with one picked at random from 4 to 10 and so on Note that any object can end up in any bin A few objects might end up back in the same bins just as you would expect if you shuffled the objects by hand for hours and hours You could even end up with all the objects back in the same bin where they started The odds of this ever happening are of course quite remote As most people know there is a fatal and unfixable flaw in that Applesloth random number generator Instead you will get the best and the fastest results through use of a machine language pseudo random integer generator In fact on the Apple a machine language card shuf fle happens so fast that you purposely have to slow it down by using a sound effect that sounds just like a deck of cards being shuffled Other wise nobody will believe it really happened You can even redeal from the same shuffled deck for replays repeat student drills or for industrial noise that repeats Complete details on this including source code the object code and working programs appears as Ripoff Modules 7 and 8 of my Assembly Cookbook SAMS 22331 See you there And for heavy background theory check into Knuth s The Art of Computer Pro gramming volume II chapter three Addison Wesley pub lishes it and it is a classic in every sense of the word The Knuth algorithm sim ply swaps each of the bins with any othe
413. to gain 4 to 5 seconds a day This seems a tad high How do the Appleworks Screen Macros Work Much of the Appleworks fancy text screen filing card manipulation is done using 17 screen macros These macro commands are passed on to the screen routines just as if they were ordinary printing characters Since control commands do not appear on the screen anyway the codes for the initial 17 ASCII control com mands were usurped and re placed with these new custom screen macros Figure one shows us these commands Some of these are obvious Clears are available to clear line rest of line win dow and rest of window Macro 05 is particularly interesting since it converts a window relative horizontal and vertical position into a screen absolute one To use this macro command start with an 05 and then follow it with the in window horiz ontal and vertical cursor pos itions for the screen For instance an 05 03 04 will automatically move you four characters in and five lines down regardless of where the window is on the screen Note that a zero horiz ontal value is the leftmost and a zero vertical value is the topmost Continuing down the list there s both a frontspace and backspace followed by upline and downline commands These later two will scroll in the proper direction when they reach the top or bottom of the window The next two macros set normal and inverse text They are followed by four wi
414. tore def film gsave 5 filmclip 65 0 translate repeat grestore def pixelproc film def pixelprocwidth 325 def pixelprocheight 100 def mappingproc clear 200 300 translate scanlinenumber 7 522 div cos dup 0 eq pop 0 001 if short exch def 0 1 short sub pixelprocheight mul 0 5 mul translate 1 short scale def pixellineremap showpage Fig 5 Postscript code for the twisted film As I may have mentioned a time or two before I do all of my laser printing work dir ectly in Postscript by using nothing but the Applewriter word processor on a IIe or IIgs l ve found that this route consistently gives me a much higher quality a vastly more flexible and a faster printing output than by going to any of those fancier canned appli cations packages You can get ribbons for the Imagewriter and for other dot matrix printers that can create a full color thermal transfer image that can be ironed into a T shirt These often take a long time to print The rib bons are quite expensive and get used at an alarming rate One source for thermal ribbons is I O Designs There is an interesting new material called Transfer Ma gic that you will find at your local sewing or notion store What you do is create a black and white or color original in toner or ink Then you stick the transfer magic to it You next soak your original in water and dissolve all of the paper out from under the ink or toner The transfer
415. tore 2 setlinewidth stroke 253 535 40 262 524 50 ct1 right eye tension 3 def 256 625 30 280 609 60 281 579 150 258 596 120 256 625 30 curvetrace gsave clip newpath 260 610 20 273 597 70 268 582 160 257 592 110 260 610 20 curvetrace fill grestore 1 setlinewidth stroke tension 2 6 def eyebrows 229 636 100 240 648 20 ct1 273 656 65 287 656 45 ct1 appendage 168 369 120 130 354 160 86 322 135 86 322 45 131 351 20 172 367 55 curvetrace fill chin detail 224 530 80 260 507 0 302 532 60 ct2 main bod 230 516 30 260 508 0 300 530 60 300 530 10 394 557 20 394 557 100 398 528 50 398 528 160 330 508 160 330 508 60 350 465 90 300 440 180 215 490 90 230 516 30 curvetrace fill left leg 275 328 50 300 320 30 300 320 70 324 380 70 290 370 115 275 328 110 curvetrace fill right leg 210 319 60 234 308 15 23431060 270 36560 241 370 125 210 320 125 curvetrace fill Ypants 320 460 10 350 475 30 350 475 70 355 440 95 326 384 150 326 384 30 344 401 65 344 401 100 345 375 60 345 372 150 275 370 150 curvetrace closepath gsave 0 4 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke 316 379 150 285 370 180 ct2 buttons tension 3 def 342 462 10 347 444 100 337 431 170 332 447 80 342 462 10 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 1 5 setlinewidth stroke 319 445 20 323 429 110 312 420 160 306 434 70 319 440 30 curvetrace gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 1 5 setlin
416. tors One really neat trick would be to use a pair of 27512 s instead whose eight 64K banks are selected by an eight way selector switch This would let you have an old monitor a new monitor a word processor a spread sheet a graphics program and three other programs all resident in your machine for instant access A different adaptor scheme would be needed and each program would have to tow along its own needed monitor routines Be sure to keep me posted on all of your multi monitor activities Are Their Bugs in The Vaporlock There didn t used to be The Vaporlock is a fast software only way of locking the Apple II IIc or Ie screen to the CPU timing Among its other abilities this lets you mix and match text HIRES and LORES graphics any place on the screen in most any combination You can also do windows glitch free animation software based color killing and fancy wipes between display pages that require no remapping plus lots of other largely unex plored new possibilities Full details appear in my some autographed copies on book Enhancing your Apple II hand here for you and IIe volume II and pub That vaporlock had been lished by SAMS I do have thoroughly alpha tested over 4 Carefully roughen one side of the SPDT slide switch and the bottom of the 28 pin DIP socket between pins 14 and 15 Use very fine sandpaper or steel wool GLUE SWITCH IN POSITION SHOWN Glue the switch
417. ts at this writing you ll find excellent tutorial and technical articles on ProDOS scattered through out various issues of CALL A P P LE On Applewriter there s All About Applewriter again by CALL A P P L E the 16 disk side Applewriter Toolkit pack ages by Synergetics and my Don Lancaster s Applewriter Cookbook I do stock all of these here Turning now to all of those on line resources the MAUG Micronetworked Apple Users Group on Compuserve seems to be the center of the action There is a bewildering and mind blowing collection of goodies here The MAUG is currently moving over to the Delphi network as well Now for the real insider stuff You are not supposed to know this but if you are an Apple developer a dealer or a manufacturer of Apple re lated products you qualify for access to the AppleLink network This is where all of the inside stuff comes down And since this is the first place dealers go for info if you can get your material into the network you have first dibs on zillions of customers that otherwise would never hear about you AppleLink is reasonably open but since it is primarily a dealer service they don t want it jammed up forever with end user requests The dealers have been told that they may give out the access number and the password to a few select customers Please if you access this resource as a user do so after hours and preferably very late at night There i
418. tscript are now download able from this new board Please note that while the board is free advertisers and sponsors are urgently needed For this month s contest just send me the best recipe for coconut anchovy pizza Or almost anything else that would be palatable only to a gonzo computer hacker that is well beyond the point of taking his Dr Pepper intra veneously Other acceptable entries would be knockwurst ala king butterscotch pudding au jus or road kill de jour The absolute worst of these may someday appear in Marcia Swampfelders latest book As usual an all expense paid tinaja quest FOB Thatcher AZ for two to the overall winner and a copy of my The Incredible Secret Money Ma chine to the ten best entries I was hoping to get into binding systems this month but there just isn t any room So for your next homework assignment write or call Ron Leonard over at Lonards Distributing for info on the Unibind system Then call the people at Velo Bind and get info on the Personal Velo Binder and their Cold knife Velo Binder systems These are definitely the big winners to date Time for our usual bleep commercial Bound sets of Ask the Guru reprints are available as is the brand new Introduction to Postscript VHS videotape and the Post script Show and Tell for the IIc Ile IIgs Mac PC and ST And now instead of raising the curtain let s lower the stage instead Which is Faster
419. tself All of these vm memory segment addresses are related to real RAM areas as shown in figure one Segment 0000 November 1986 actually 0001 starts off the main memory piece at 8700 actually 8702 Segment 3400 starts off the auxiliary memory piece at 0800 Virtual memory is used in two major ways by Apple works The desktop files are purgeable or removable only if you decide to remove them Meanwhile as the 42 working code modules are loaded from disk copies of them are made and stuffed into vm on a purgeable basis What this does is let you go to RAM instead of to disk the next time you need a module This is much faster As each new module is added to vm the priority of all previous code modules is upped a notch Should the vm manager need more memory for a desktop file addition or extension it flushes as many of the oldest code modules as it has to The Appleworks disk file formats are available free of charge from Elizabeth Geb hardt who is the Appleworks product manager over at Apple Computer Copies of this should also be available on MAUG or AppleLink Show me another ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 patch Figure two shows us another ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 patch This one is called the Scrunchifier It does several things First it short ens up the DOS options menu to four lines leaving much more of your previous listing on the screen This is quite handy whenever you are renaming locking
420. tunning Not only is the 80 column color text fully legible but it is actually pleasant to use with your full choice of text background and border color This is the first time I have ever seen a 80 column color text display that I would actually be wil ling to use 01 Clear rest of line 02 Clear entire line 03 Clear rest of window 04 Clear entire window 05 Relative to absolute cursor 06 Backspace 07 Frontspace 08 Cursor up scroll down at top 09 Cursor down scroll up at bottom 0A 0B 0C 0D Set inverse text Set normal text Set bottom right of window Move cursor to left of window 0E Set upper left of window 0F Open window to full screen 10 Blork the speaker 11 Do a horizontal scroll Fig 1 Appleworks screen macro commands 22 1 ASK THE GURU There is also a new plug in SCSI interface card all ready to go This can remove once and for all the paltry IIgs limit of a mere 128 disk drives of a pitiful five giga bytes each The IIgs bugs are starting to pour in Naturally any new machine will have at least a few teething problems and the IIgs is no exception That 90 percent compati bility claim is a pipe dream Even Applewriter and Apple works have major problems Version 1 3 of Appleworks will not let you use an ex pansion RAM card on the IIgs so you are stuck with 55K It also gives you a garish tweet instead of the usual buzz in the
421. tus you might inquire ahead of time whether a character can be written or read Thus you can stay in complete control at all times The highest level is done by using the tools in the toolbox These offer such sophisticated capabilities as buffering and background printing and a standard access from high level code On the other hand that toolbox is rather slow I often wonder if the main purpose of the toolbox isn t really to prevent the IIgs from out performing the Macintosh More information on the serial toolbox routines does appear in the Print Manager stuff in chapter fourteen of volume II of The Apple IIgs Toolbox Reference APDA stocks it Any More Applewriter Patches for the IIgs I had hoped to have solved the big Applewriter modem problem for the IIgs by now but I m not quite there yet Hopefully next month If you must have modem access right now just temporarily keep using your Super Serial Card Fig 3 Typical step and repeat videotape labels 29 3 ASK THE GURU stepnrptparams 40 dict def stepnrptparams begin admitonetick 6 5 9 150 60 25 25 true 10 true true def babybumper 1 2 10 270 72 40 30 false 20 true false def badgeaminit 1 2 3 220 220 90 60 false 250 true false def bigbumpstick 1 1 3 792 205 0 0 true 40 true false def businesscard 1 3 4 256 143 12 20 true 20 true false def decaapus 1 2 5 306 158 0 0 false 50 true false def hexsplit 1 2 3
422. ub setscreen 40 720 translate 0 0 moveto 0 setlinewidth 533 0 rlineto stroke newpath 0 0 moveto Bookman Demiltalic findfont 34 0 0 34 0 0 makefont setfont kernstuff 1 def Synergetics gsave 13 0 translate dup ggg exch def workstring def char exch def workstring 0 char put chardist workstring stringwidth pop def workstring false charpath gsave 1 setgray 3 setlinewidth stroke grestore gsave 0 99 setgray fill grestore 0 5 setlinewidth stroke chardist kernstuff add ggg 114 eq 1 sub if 0 translate 0 3 moveto forall grestore Helvetica findfont 12 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont 450 10 moveto 0 15 0 602 428 4073 ashow 285 4 moveto 0 15 0 746 First Street Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 ashow snap restore def letterhead showpage Fig 6 The POSTSCRIPT letterhead listing 20 5 and use a WPL routine to semi automate the envelope feeding process All you have to do is hold the envelope in place and flip the bail back and forth The WPL routine and some time delays take care of all the feeding and ejection And it is consid erably faster than a manual feed laser printer I once used continuous form tip in envelopes but they cost too much took far too long to get looked awful had lousy glue and often jammed Another thing I tried was to use transparent matte labels with the Laserwriter The toner turns ultra black and very sharp on acetate You can quickly and very quietly run a dozen of th
423. ull gray scale I ll be using this exciting new system to directly print photographs using Applewriter along of course with the Laserwriter One obvious use is for real estate people who can print a photograph directly on their home listings HIGH LEVEL ENTRY C500 Initialize Ramcard C50A Memory test entry point C551 ProDOS device driver entry C54E Protocol converter entry C5DB DOS RWTS entry C5F7 Turn on card ROM CFFF Turn off card ROM MID LEVEL ENTRY C800 Command interpreter C8F9 Read RAM block C964 Write RAM lock CAB2 Find installed RAM CAEF Format Ramcard as diskette CCFO Memory test routines LOW LEVEL ENTRY COCO Address low byte COC1 Address mid byte COC2 Address high byte COC3 Data read write Figure One Here s the entry points to Apple s Ramcard Slot 5 values are shown 14 1 But we will have to save details on this mind blower for a future column On with this goodies What is the Word on the New 6502 I just ran into one really exciting new microprocessor chip that should be ideal for most any small controller trainer or data gathering use Its the Mitsubishi M50734 and sells for 12 in singles dealer stock It is built in CMOS and speaks 6502 so it should be quite easy to use with any Apple Commodore Atari or the rest of the 6502 gang Internal bank switching is used to create
424. upts 10 4 Video image printing 11 5 New 50734 control computer 14 1 VIP computer 13 2 VIP user applications 13 3 Omnicrom and Omnicolor 22 4 25 2 Option picking 3 3 WPL and Q C 14 3 ORCA M 26 1 WPL version dependence 16 2 Paper folders 31 5 Your own tech venture 2 3 Password horror stories 21 1 Pneumatic actuators 2 2 Postscript BBS 26 2 Postscript BBS other system 31 1 Postscript circular text 16 4 Postscript curve tracing 8 5 Postscript developer guidelines 27 1 Postscript fontpath utility 26 5 Postscript Journal 26 2 Postscript label maker 28 6 Postscript lockwasher contest 31 5 Postscript pixel line remapping 32 6 Postscript rubber grid 25 5 Postscript ruler 27 5 Postscript schematic drawing 14 4 Postscript signatures 23 4 Postscript speedup techniques 28 6 Postscript step and repeat 29 4 Postscript surface mapping 19 5 Postscript typesetting 12 5 Postscript window decals 18 5 Post processing techniques 11 3 ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 1 2 ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 12 2 ProDOS disk space 9 1 ProDOS TYPE command 6 1 Programming an EPROM 1 4 Random number generator 1 1 Really bad legislation 31 1 Repairing blown disks 19 2 Solar energy breakthrough 22 3 Shuffling algorithm 5 2 Softalk replacement 4 5 Technical consultants list 18 1 Toner cartr
425. urce for all Apple technical information What is New in Mass Teleportation The rate at which science and technological fact out paces science fiction does continue to utterly astound me Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging field of mass teleportaion The exciting center of all that has recently been hap pening is the outstanding International Journal of Tele portation and Mass Transfer In particular do check out Barfoot and Gentry s tutorial material way back in Volume XVIII pages 1146 1198 along with their outstanding bib liography And for lots of hands on construction details check out Chediski Colcord and Elden s medium budget project on pages 1245 1277 of the same issue This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS initially ran only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile The patch improves the prompting tones when in the fast mode on a llgs It works by lowering the pitch and lengthening the duration of each tone in the pair 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to get into the monitor BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 TSYS D2 Verify 2260 80 Change 2260 DO Verify 2265 AO Change 2265 FF Verify 2267 80 Change 2267 FF BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 TSYS Fig 3 ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 tweedleifier patch 2
426. ure if this product also handles baseband video Show me another ProDOS AppleWriter 2 1 patch In continuing our ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 patch series figure five is the Creepifier patch that can eliminate one form of page creep that will lower headers on successive pages This bug is infuriatingly subtle It appears that an extra space used to be added at the end of any header or footer Big deal right But as countless of you seem to be doing if you set your Applewriter right margin to 80 and if you leave your printer interface card set to 80 then you get page creep because of this bug Other obvious solutions to the page creep bug include A use an Applewriter right margin of 78 or less while using a printer card 80 col umn width or B use any old Hgs RS423 mini DIN 8 male DTR DSR TXD RXD DCD SG February 1987 ligs RS423 mini DIN 8 male DTR DSR TXD RXD DCD SG Fig 4 A Ilgs serial cable for MACHINE use This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS only AWD SYS runs only on the 80 column lic or the 128K Ile It eliminates one form of page creep caused when the right margin and the interface card column width are both set to 80 The patch works by eliminating an extra space that inadvertently got printed at the end of any header or footer Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 using the filer utilities Get into
427. us the position on the vm page But note that we can only reach 256 addresses with a low 8 byte word Thus this particular vm address can only hit every second byte since there are two bytes needed to describe 1 256th of a 512 byte page When a memory card is used the number of vm pages stays the same while the page position byte can only reach certain locations For instance an unused 512K RAM is set up so it has 256 vm pages of 4096 bytes each Each value of the low 8 bit address can only hit a mul tiple of sixteen RAM bytes since 4096 16 256 So how does Appleworks vm work Figure one can get us started A vm address space of 128K is used if there is no expansion RAM available The starting vm address of 0000 is reserved since a vm link of 0000 means that we are at the end of the linked list Thus vm address 0001 is the first useable address The relationship of vm address to real RAM can be arbitrary so long as it is known There are usually two RAM areas that are available for the Appleworks desktop These are addresses 8700 BFOO in main RAM a 10K space and addresses 0800 BFFF A 45K space over in auxiliary RAM The actual desktop size will change with the machine and the RAM card A 64K short Ie can thus only use the main 10K An available RAM card does not use any desktop space in the machine the desktop is all handled by direct machine access to a fake ProDOS file on the RAM card i
428. ute a _ control underline for a NULL _ also goes by the names of a US user seperator or as a CHR 31 Anytime you need a NULL in either one of these programs all you have to do is verbatim insert a _ Unfortunately many high performance printers demand a US or a CHR 31 to activate certain special features For instance the HMI commands on daisywheel printers and some extended text modes in dot matrix printers require this ASCII control character as part of a command string So some of you may need a way to undo the stock auto matic substitution of _ for a NULL The solution for the ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 appears as Patch B 12 in my Applewriter Cookbook The gist of the 2 0 patch is to change 4C37 of AWD SYS to match your desired substitution character Use 1F for default operation is an Apple Il is an Apple Il is an Apple lle is an emulating Apple IlI is an Apple llc is a 48K machine is a 64K machine is a 128K machine has no 80 column card has an 80 column card has no compatible clock has a compatible clock Fig 2 Using the ProDOS BF98 i d byte 20 2 ASK THE GURU Use a 00 if you want no NULL substitution at all And for version 2 1 we ll have to go clear on to the next question Tell me about the ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 patches ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 is a variation on the older 2 0 version Its main difference is that certain older third party dot matrix
429. uter consultant whoever is hiring you must now treat you as a full time employee and you are now expressly forbidden from de ducting any of your costs incurred while doing any of their consulting work This travesty is currently known as the Section 1706 code Want another travesty My pleasure Congress has now decided to outright eliminate all mail order and telephone order businesses They are propos ing a national law that would require any mail order outfit to charge all the sales taxes collectable from the point of origin Thus an automatic 6 or so penalty would be built into any direct mail sales Your paperwork would also get 500 times worse At the same time the VISA and Mastercharge people are both compounding the direct mail hassles In many parts of the country it is now virtual ly impossible to get both of the TO Telephone Order and MO Mail Order authoriza tions for any new merchant accounts Let s lighten up a bit with something that is hilarious except for the sad fact it has prevented you from getting a super cheap and very reliable 1 3 gigabit tape backup sys tem for well over a year now Certain of those Hollywood congress people have man aged to now create a de facto moratium on all those Digital Audio Tape or DAT systems It seems they are afraid that someone with a tape recorder might horror of unspeakable horrors actually go out and record something They also are n
430. vail able some free some not so free so call or write if you need more details First Use a Super Serial Card This card supports the XON XOFF handshaking that is needed by the Laserwriter Use an uncrossed or straight through printer cable and set your SSC switches to S1 4 6 7 on S2 1 4 on Use the terminal mode with the arrow down Second enable the hand shaking On any file that will be 5000 characters or longer prefix that file with I X E I Z Third change the daisy wheels To get both propor tional spacing and wall to wall microjustification you have to use a Helvetica or a Times daisywheel Surely nobody but nobody would still use klunky old fixed pitch Courier in this day and age except for key portions of those very few technical listings that abso lutely must be fixed pitch Figure three shows you the Postscript code needed to change daisywheels I also have an WPL routine that does this automatically with full promtping Run this in the Postscript 9600 mode be fore you move over to the Diablo mode You can have two different wheels in use at any one time One very big gotcha The ppr no justify beyond marker f Isr2 p p fi esc M a f Isr2 y p pes B Y pgof pes B y pgof pgoh fp ppr increasing legibility p g f lt gt lt gt esc Q A lt a psy1 psz A psz 1 p psz 1 pgoi _ pat i ppr psrl psz 1 pgoj pat jppr saving margi
431. vetrace 1 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ct2 curvetrace 2 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ct3 curvetrace 3 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ears 107 614 35 165 605 45 162 544 135 100 550 135 107 614 35 curvetrace fill 150 720 40 220 710 60 200 655 135 135 660 125 150 720 40 curvetrace fill face oval 230 516 165 170 600 90 245 673 0 320 612 80 curvetrace gsave clip newpath 80 560 30 202 529 145 195 580 50 230 585 25 230 585 145 208 655 45 267 646 45 267 646 120 258 668 35 285 662 150 310 770 80 curvetrace closepath 0 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke tension 3 4 def left eye 290 640 30 310 622 70 310 598 150 294 613 120 290 640 30 curvetrace gsave clip newpath 295 627 20 306 612 80 304 597 150 290 610 120 295 627 20 curvetrace fill grestore 1 setlinewidth stroke tension 2 6 def main nose 297 580 80 338 6170 354 595 90 290533 180 229 564 120 curvetrace gsave closepath 1 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth stroke 221 558 60 240 567 0 ct2 nose knob 338 600 0 350 620 75 345 645 135 325 645 135 325 615 60 338 600 0 curvetrace fill tension 3 2 def 330 640 45 341 641 45 338 630 150 330 630 135 330 640 45 curvetrace 1 setgray fill 0 setgray tension 2 6 def mouth 229 564 80 260 518 10 290 532 35 290 532 180 229 564 125 curvetrace fill 238 537 45 257 530 60 257 530 45 275 522 70 275 522 220 238 537 110 curvetrace gsave 0 9 setgray fill gres
432. w code is purportedly much faster particularly with regard to character imaging and in the handlng of down loaded bitmaps and similar images Presumably the new About your Enhanced Ile 030 1141 Apple Color RGB Monitor Manual 030 3106 Apple II Dot Matrix Printer Manual 030 0739 Apple Il Memory Expansion Card Man 030 1209 Apple II Monitor Users Manual 030 0598 Apple II Mouse Users Manual 030 0243 Apple Il Numeric Keypad Manual 030 0463 Apple Il System Utilities Manual 030 2028 Apple II Utilities guide 030 1264 Apple Ilc Memory Expansion Card Man 030 1330 Apple Ilc Owners Manual A2L4038 Apple Ilc Owners Man amp System Util 030 1030 Apple llc Scribe Users Manual Part 2 030 0993 Apple Ile Enhanced Owners Manual A2L4073 Apple lle llc Color Monitor Manual 030 1224 Apple lic Mouse Manual 030 0961 Apple llc Reference Manual part 030 081 4 Apple llc Reference Manual part II 030 1022 Apple llc Technical Reference Manual 17728 5 Apple Ile Guide to the New Features 030 0622 Apple Ile Hand Controller Manual 030 0200 Apple lle Joystick Manual 030 0563 Apple Ile Numeric Keypad Manual 030 0564 Apple Ile Technical Reference Manual 17720 Apple Ilgs Manual 030 1292 Apple Ilgs Setup Guide 030 1294 Apple Il Vital Importance Manual 030 0209 Apple Ill Dot Matrix Printer Manual 030 0740 Apple Ill Monitor Manual 030 0193 Apple Ill Read Me Manual 030 0662 Apple Monochro
433. w ruler you need These data points can consist of the X position the Y position and the angle at which the curve is to pass through this particular point Note that zero degrees goes to the right 90 is straight up and 90 points straight down As many triads as you want may be grouped together to form one continuous curve For most uses the data set is suprisingly sparse and an astonishingly few points are usually needed The triads are arranged inside a matrix For instance a simple wire might be coded 100 200 10 300 240 20 curvetrace Note that curve tracing only generates a path You have to stroke clip or fill it afterwards For a wire or pipe gsave stroke it a fat black grestore and then re stroke it as a thin white To do a cusp use two triads that have identical X and Y values but differ in their entry and exit angles For a variable width line as in fine calligraphy use a pair of curves and then fill in between them For any Bezier cubic spline freaks in the audience yes we do preserve the first order continuity and make a reas onably fast and fairly good stab at preserving the second order continuity There s zero interaction involving remote points Sneaky Eh what If you want to get real artsy craftsy there is a par ameter called the tension The optimum tension value is 2 8 Higher values will flatten the curve with ridiculously high values simply connecting the dots with st
434. w side but it is most definitely available How About Another Contest As usual an Incredible Secret Money Machine to the best ten responses along with an all expense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher AZ to the overall winner The new operating system for the Apple IIgs has the ability to select up to 128 disk drives each of which can now address up to 4 gigabytes of on line data Combined together you now have the ability to place half a terabyte of data on line The contest is simple Show the best concept for a HUNT THE WUMPUS game using half a terabyte of memory Only to be completely fair about this UNIX program mers are not allowed to enter How can I Sign my Name Why with Applewriter on a IIc He or IIgs of course Driving a Laserwriter And as is usual helped along a tad by a utility or two of my own How else could you possibly sign your own name In fact the International Brotherhood of Forgers and Embezzelers Local 106 has voted Applewriter to be the January 1987 Than again CU Oe Don Lancaster SYNERGETICS Fig 3 An AppleWriter signature greatest invention since blank counter checks Figure three shows you a sample signature while figure four shows you the simple Postscript code needed for the first name John and a sample printout Oh yes you will also need a free copy of my new curvetracing routine which you can get by calling or writing Wi
435. when they find out their older third party mem ory cards will not fit the IIgs At least you can move 3 4 of the chips from your old card to the new one Pm still not fully happy with Omnicrom full color performance on the Laser writer both because of its reliability and the wrinkling problems Seems I was at a auction and lucked into an old beastie called a Viewfax Model six The cost was 6 which is some 1294 cheaper than the Omnicrom fusion machine I don t have the slightest idea what this mac hine was intended for but I intend to try and modify it for use as an Omnicrom fuser The message here is that there are probably all sorts of obsolete office machines and worn out copiers scunging around that could be easily converted into suitable Omni crom fusers What you need is two powered rollers and a temperatare of 170 degrees C Let me know if you can beat the 6 price on this Where are the Appleworks Low Core Entry Points As part of its booting process Appleworks loads a module called APLWORKS SYSTEM This module is first loaded at the usual 2000 in main RAM and then is moved down to 1000 where much of it stays for the rest of the Ap pleworks work session The part that stays can be called the low core utilities The low core utilities do provide around half of the fundamental low level sub routines needed by Apple works There are 51 low core utilities Included here are the screen macro comm
436. where you see the solder side of the circuit board holding the output jack you can often solder the new resistor on the foil side of the board eliminating a need for the full disassembly After soldering make sure you can still plug an output jack in and out and make sure that the case will still fit over the circuit board without stressing the board or the resistor Where can I get an EPROM burned Any old line electronics distributor will be happy to program an EPROM for you All it requires is 300 and either an exact working and debugged EPROM for them to copy or else the code submit ted on punched paper tape They will alternately accept your duodecimal code written Continued from page 2 4 few moments if at all Note also that the Ile and Ic man uals are normally ordered through dealers while the Macintosh stuff must be or dered directly Rumor has it that the Mc Graw Hill Bookstore is one good mail order source that normally stocks and quickly ships the Ile and Ic manuals There is another rumor that Addison Weseley will shortly republish the manuals as a stock bookstore item UPDATE Those A P D A people now stock all these books along with most other Apple technical info More volumes have been added to the Mac book series in cuneiform on fired clay tablets Provided of course that you sort them properly and then pack them with a 0 03 cubit spacing of papyrus reeds Arrgh Pro
437. with any field reading the trade journals magazines and reference books are the best place to start And won der of wonders many of the personal publishing inform ation sources are absolutely free of charge Let s see First you should start off with my free laser printing demo pack which you can get by either calling or writing After that there are two must have books No I did not write them but I hope to contribute to the same series in a big sort of way These two are called the Postscript Reference Manual and the Postscript Tutorial and Cookbook We do try to keep both of these Addison Weseley titles in stock at all times As we saw in the previous question important examples of Postscript printers are the Laserwriter Plus and the Al lied Linotron 300 A typical example of a non Postscript speaking printer would be the Model 28 Teletype Back to the literature The July 1986 Meowwrrr the Postscript puss de resistance initgraphics 1 setlinecap 1 setlinejoin tension 2 8 def ctf curvetrace gsave 0 95 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ctfd curvetrace gsave 0 4 setgray fill grestore 2 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke def ct curvetrace stroke def showtick false def tail 310 262 10 360 330 100 308 368 170 308 368 45 330 380 0 392 285 100 340 210 160 curvetrace gsave clip newpath 340 200 25 390 290 90 350 350 170 300 260 0 340 200 70 curvetrace gsave 0 95 set
438. ws in the program must completely and totally mask all of the fundamental design flaws TINAJA QUESTING S I G Fig 1 Club shoulder patch done with Applewriter And of course all of the superficial bugs must com pletely and totally mask all of the fundamental bugs If you check all of the ed ucational software available today you will find all of the best sellers strictly and ab solutely follow the triple B and the total masking rules What s the real word On the Laserwriter I have had mine only for a week or so My oh my what a machine You know all those slide rule manufacturers mechan ical adding machine people the alarm clock builders and such Well they are about to be joined by a great heaping bunch of ad agencies sign painters printers quick copy centers author s agents van ity publishers graphics arts suppliers and the zillions of others who will not have the slightest idea what hit them or why Kiddies the price of type setting with full graphics has just dropped below a dollar a page Not one red cent more Changes and revisions are now of course free Where to even begin The Laserwriter sets ANY size type you like mixed in with ANY style of graphics in ANY size you can imagine in ANY configuration You can easily handle such things as homecoming posters and side walk sized centenial banners Signs of any size and shape are trivial There is even a neat n
439. y color monitor that s available anywhere that can attractively display 80 column text from a NTSC coded composite color video input The reason for this of course is that there is not enough bandwidth avail able in that NTSC encoding to allow display of more than 45 or so characters maximum ac ross the screen This is why you go RGB in the first place This set does work with all stock horizontal frequencies near 15 735 Hz Thus some IBM EGA modes that require a multisyncing monitor prob ably cannot be used here So yes you can use this monitor receiver with a IIc or a Ile But your 80 column text will only be legible when you have added either a digital or linear RGB card to either of the machines That smallish speaker in the KV 1311 CR does sound bunches better than the tiny Apple speaker but it is not in the least suitable for serious music synthesis use A fairly simple way to get the audio back for hi fi amplification is to use the earphone jack and a suitable cable It is quite nice to have a real volume control handy in addition to your usual front panel firmware settings A pair of snap on feet allow you to angle the display for use as Fig 3 Part of the great lockwasher contest 31 3 ASK THE GURU requires curvetrace routine from july ATG hside srad 6 282 mul def xside hside dup mul pitch dup mul sub sqrt def fudge1 pitch abs xside atan pitch 0 It neg if def fudge2
440. y are vastly lower on a video screen than they are on the printed page The image size depends on the halftone screen For instance a 100 line halftone screen gives you a full res olution picture that is 2 1 2 inches on a side The smaller pictures lose details larger ones have redundant dots So What Good is the ImageWorks Card Well first I will tell you Then you can tell me in two seperate contests Here s a dozen good uses for the ImageWorks card 1 By loading a HIRES image and doing a low pass filtering you can anti alias eliminating practically all of the jaggies from your existing screen pictures 2 Realtors can now print custom pictures of houses on their multiple listings These can be sent over phone lines with ordinary modems 3 Art Instructors can now show you actual paintings along with overlays that em phasize both the form and the composition 4 Adventure games can have both the map as well as a full screen text description present at the same time 5 Gray or white block out areas can be added to help in filling out a form or to hiding answers in student quizzes and drills 6 CD disks can now hold both digitized photo graphs and program materials The potential here is utterly awesome 7 Blink Comparison can be used to find out if two pictures are nearly identical Important uses would include both astronomy and quality control 8 Fancy video wipes can easily be d
441. y expensive solutions to bar code scanning and reading including their HBCR1000 series component bar code readers their HBCS 4300 industrial code wands and their HEDS 1000 reflec tive sensors Check out their Optoelectronics Designer s Catalog for more details One company that I have found has bar code compon ent parts at fairly low prices is Scan A Matic For a complete list of all major bar code manufacturers and suppliers contact the AIM Automatic Identification Manufacturers trade group Their free membership dir ectory lists dozens of major bar code outfits NAME HGR2 HGR HCLR BKGND LOC F3D8 F3E2 F3F2 F3F6 HPOSN HPLOT HLIN HFIND F411 F457 F53A F5CB DRAW F601 XDRAW F65D SETHCOL F6EC SHLOAD F775 What s Different Between Laserwriter and Laserjet Comparing these two is like comparing a skateboard against a Porsche Yes the skateboard is cheaper You can also argue that the skate board corners better and has more headroom But outside of that Missus Lincoln how was the play Very briefly the Laserwrit er has enough memory to hold an internal bitmap of an entire printed page at full resolution This lets you mix and match any sized graphics and any size text in most any combination anywhere you want on the page The Laserjet does not The Laserwriter lets you magnify or enlarge any image through an enormously wide range You can even magnify or reduce an
442. y similar Among other differences the IIc has to provide for serial port settings and control What happened in this new Ile upgrade was that some new monitor features were added to the Ile These features are some what similar to some of those on the IIc Under no circumstances should you try using a IIc monitor code image in a Ile or vice versa The complete listings of all three monitors can be seperately found in the IIe Reference Manual old Ile A2L2005 in the Apple IIe Enhancement Programmer Guide or in the Ie Enhanced Owners Manual new Ile A2L2072 and A2L2073 or the IIc Reference Manual IIc A2L4030 Regardless that new Ile monitor patch is almost the same as the old He monitor patch It is in a slightly dif ferent location is just a tad longer and has a different checksum As with the old Ile a tad of C006 00 black magic has to be invoked following an absolute reset Only the CD 2764 EPROM needs changed The IIc has all of its mon itor placed in a single and electrically larger type 27128 EPROM The patch will not quite fit in one piece so three individual patches have to be made Note that these patches are made to the F area of the ROM on the IIc compared to the C area patches used for the old or new IIe With the IIc that C006 00 black magic is not needed after an absolute reset although doing so will not hurt anything It seemed necessary to steal four bytes from the
443. you in on the fun as well A free SAMS book to the best ten uses for the M50734 The overall winner gets an all ex pense paid tinaja quest for two FOB Thatcher Arizona One suggestion Several of the local Mitsubishi reps seem to be suffering from acute recto cranial inversion prob lems so go directly to their main office and plant for data sheets ap notes and further information Any Further Details on Apple s Ram Expansion Card I ve only played with this new memory expansion card for a week or two and I am convinced it is far and away the best route to adding extra memory to your Apple Ile Let us get several of the gotchas out of the way right off There are at least nine bugs in the 2732 firmware on the card Locations C15E C25E and C75E should all be CPY CO rather than the CMP C9 commands For tunately this code is only needed to trap an input error plusbugfix April 1986 that the operating system should already have flushed The error at CFF2 is so embarrasing that we cannot even talk about it in a family magazine such as Computer Shopper There are two extremely important use rules The ad dresses must be set in low byte mid byte and high byte order to prevent overflows from trashing those address bytes you have already set And that data word access must be done using absolute addressing Since the data access will auto increment the addresses indexed addressing or i

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