MrFish

I've never used the Mac version, for the very reason that the Preview app seems to handle them well enough. In fact, for a reader, it allows you edit bookmarks, which you can't do with Adobe's Reader. Of course they want to encourage you to buy Acrobat. To be honest, in all the years I've been using Adobe Reader (used to be called Acrobat Reader), I've always thought is was poor performance-wise. And nothing was worse than trying to use it on the old PDA's and first gen smart phones. It seems to run fine for me on Windows these days though. I'm running Win7 64-bit with 6 GB of RAM, on an old (by today's standards) 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo. But I guess as in most situations, even when you're talking about 2-D graphics, it's the whole system that matters, not just the Gigahertz on your CPU. I have a pretty well balanced system when it comes to graphic cards, hard drives, and network setup. And they all play a part, especially with Windows 7's interface eating up processing power everywhere. To be honest though, it's hardly unexpected since I consider PDF's to be the Java apps of the document world. Having a quick look (with a couple of other fat apps open for comparison): with a 70 mb PDF, 300 pages, with page images over top of OCR'ed text with a 170 mb PDF, 358 pages, with page images over top of OCR'ed text Both these performed about the same, with maybe a slight slower response time for the 170mb PDF. The memory used seems to coincide as expected. PDF's can be much smaller than this though, especially when they are composed of text alone (or even text with embedded graphics), rather than images superimposed on OCR'ed text, like the PDF's I was testing. The 170mb PDF had more images, and a smaller font, which would justify it's size and performance, considering it only has 58 more pages. When it comes to these old books, manuals, and magazines though, I'd much rather see the original pages, because that's part of the character of the literature, or any literature for that matter. So I'd always rather see the bloated version rather than the re-cycled versions, as long as the scanning and alignment job is done well, as is the case with these two done by Thump-nugget. Plus, there aren't many people willing to translate OCR'ed text for 300+ page documents. I don't have any XP system up and running right now (screen died on my old laptop recently). I do have an installation of Server 2003 running though. I'll have to check it out on there and see what differences I can notice. Interesting. I have a Mac mini that I run 10.6.8 and Win 7 on (both 32-bit). I ought to check out PDF performance on both sides to get an equal comparison. Win 2000 is quite a bit faster than XP. A good OS for pre-1GHz machines.

Although... modern LCD's are not perfect either. I currently have 4 LCD's wired to a single machine (one which is KVM'ed to 2 other machines), and none of the 4 monitors -- two even being the exact same make and model -- have the same color or brightness/contrast characteristics. Granted they're all from slightly different periods (except the twins)... What kind of CRT set do you have -- out of curiosity?

I used a small color television for the whole time I ever used Ataris back in the day. It must have been a pretty good one, because I don't remember ever thinking that I needed to upgrade the video. The only thing I ever recall not being able to do was use programs with a soft 80-col display, as the combo of artifacting, RF, and smaller display pretty much rendered them useless. Disk drives were another matter. I only used the tape drive that came with it for a couple of months. After that I purchased a pair of 1050's for about $80, which also included a ton of software -- mostly pirated.

I don't think they were the norm in the U.S. either.

Untested equipment usually gets about 5% - 20% of the value of tested equipment -- of similar type and condition.

Can't. No way to gray out fonts that aren't bold (at least no way that we're comfortable with). Of course these things have been tested out several times. We do have a bold version of that small font though, which is smaller than the current system bold font. The space savings wouldn't be as great, but we're going to check it out and see what we think. You can see that smaller font in some of the mockups I recently did for some variations on the task manager (although not used in any menus there). This smaller font will most likely end up at least being an optional system font configurable/selectable by the user.

What was the game for $14.50?

Yeah, Preview keeps me from installing Adobe Reader on my Mac. The only thing I see that I don't like there is that all the standard PDF view options aren't supported, and thus I can't get "Zoom to Width", which I like. Also the bookmarks seem to be collapsed by default. But it's easy enough to expand them all, via menu command or key command.

They show up fine on my Mac. Make sure at the bottom of the sidebar of the Preview window you have selected "Table of Contents" -- otherwise you'd maybe just see thumbnails. And of course you need to have the sidebar open...

Yeah, I'm basically trying to make some of these PDF'ed books and manuals a little bit more useable. It's a lot easier to skip around and read the stuff you want/need to with a decent set of organized bookmarks. I went the extra mile with this one and even bookmarked each individual 6502 instruction from a section in the index, which is a rather extensive section that comprises over 60 pages of the book.

And I think FJC's GUI is answering a lot of questions about just how far a little machine like this can be taken in comparison to modern operating systems. It also show's what a waste of resources modern systems are.

As I said, I've bookmarked the entire manual (extensively -- it was sparsely bookmarked before). But there is one other annoyance I fixed too. The original would revert to "full page" view, no matter what you set the view to, every time you clicked on any of the bookmarks. Of course now it will always return to my view settings when you click on a bookmark. But I highly prefer "page width" view, since you can get a closer zoom, especially when used with a wide-screen monitor.

Bookmarked this puppy. Thanks to ThumpNugget -- who I believe did the original scan. Bon appétit! Assembly Language Programming for the Atari Computers

Yeah, I've often thought of the "old car" analogy. There is a beauty in simplicity. And there's something I find more interesting about programming to the "bare metal" rather than atop layers.

Alright, done... better! I forgot to put the covers on the first version. Old download is dead, new one below: Writer's Tool - Manual

I'm interesting in collecting ROM's for a lot of different reasons. I'd definitely like to see this one come to light some day, and I'd pay for a copy, even for just the file, if necessary. I haven't spent time with SynAssembler myself yet, so I'm not entirely hip to all it's features. But I've heard it said quite a few times that it's one of the best available for the system. That, if nothing else warrants at least having a look at it in my book. Here's one reason why someone might be interested to use it. Think about walking to the grocery store, picking out your groceries by hand, and cooking your own meal when you arrive back home, and then compare that to ordering a meal online and having it delivered. By ordering you'll probably be eating your meal much faster, maybe even have more choices available, and possibly have it prepared by someone who knows how to cook much better than yourself. But walking to the store can allow you to get some exercise, see some interesting sights (not sites) along the way, and, with the items you buy, experience all the steps involved in preparing a meal on your own. So it's not always a matter of whether there are distinct advantages in terms of features that provide speed and ease in development, but it can have more to do with the features that make it a unique experience. In that sense it can be entirely advantageous to use something like the SynAssembler over a PC based cross-compiler.

Yes, I saw those and bookmarked them as well. Thanks for adding them in. Here's the Quick Reference I mentioned: Writer's Tool - Quick Reference.pdf

Alright, done! Let me know if there are any errors. That was a lot of typing. Writer's Tool - Manual Thanks also to bob1200xl for loaning the documentation to be scanned.

Thanks for scanning Allan. Finally we have a full manual available. It looks like OSS put together a good manual for this (there is also the quick-ref, which was posted up by someone else a few years back). I think I'll go through and bookmark it. Is it alright if I post a link back up here, or would you prefer I link a copy to you and let you pass it over to be downloaded from Atarimania?

The guy didn't know what he was doing. My mistake though. I just looked up the transaction, and it looks like I paid $5.50 for the monitor and $30.00 to ship. It was a few years back, so... I think what I was remembering is that it cost him $45.00 to ship it. So essentially it cost him $10 to sell it to me. Being brand new and in the box, it was still a steal for $35 shipped. I think I actually set my bid to a max of something like $45; But nobody bid. The auction ended on Thanksgiving day. I imagined most people were too busy eating turkey and watching football to notice... I bid a couple of days earlier.

Atari800 Win PLus will convert XFD to ATR, if you want to add the header.

I'll give a recommendation for getting a studio monitor with an SMPTE-C phosphor tube. I've got a JVC BM-H1300SU. It does RGB, S-Video, Composite, and has outputs (pass through), which allow you to easily connect it to an external audio amplifier and/or other video-in devices, such as computer video encoding cards. Although the picture is a little less saturated, than say a C1702 or similar, it has a "Chroma" adjustment (similar to what's typically referred to as color or saturation on other sets), which allows you to dial in additional saturation, if desired. I haven't found the saturation levels to be a problem. The clarity of the set is awesome with the Ataris, especially when using S-Video. It works with PAL equipment, and has no problem doing so called "PAL-Blending" with an NTSC signal either. I got mine NIB on eBay for $5 shipped (from one side of the U.S. to the other). I wouldn't trade it for anything.

When does the voting finish? I thought it ended at the end of last month (yesterday)?

I like the idea. I tend to be more interested in the interviews to begin with. So this will make it easier getting to the content.

It doesn't "require" it.