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From: c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young (WHY))
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Safety Seal Reviews (sort of)
Message-ID: <5122@zen.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon, 30-Nov-87 00:12:04 EST
Article-I.D.: zen.5122
Posted: Mon Nov 30 00:12:04 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Dec-87 22:56:46 EST
Sender: news@zen.berkeley.edu
Reply-To: c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young (WHY))
Organization: Safety Seal Software (We bring you news!  Rain or Shine)
Lines: 67
Keywords: laser printer Word Perfect music pc ditto



More news tidbits!

	This past weekend (Thanksgiving), I talked to a friend of mine, who
is a dealer, and I found some things out.

	The new version of pc-Ditto, which works with monochrome, is out.  It
was shipped last week, and should hit the stores (and theatres near you) soon.

	This store where my friend works will be one of the first to receive
the Atari laser printer (should be next week).  They are going to be...
(get this)... $1900!  Wow!  What an economical price! :-)  This dealer told
me that the only good purpose for them will be to help persuade his customers
to buy the $1400 Epson laser printers he carries ($1900 with extra Meg and a
half, plus some other stuff).

	He also says that the $5000 repair kits have changed.  Now it depends
first on what type of dealer you are.  His plan with Atari is, they call him
every 60 days and ask him what parts, computers, printers, etc. he has in
the store for repair, and they send him complete hardware and swap the good
for the bad.

	Well, I bought Word Perfect!  In the first fifteen minutes, I found
two bugs.  First, I locked up the program when I loaded a non-ASCII file (at
least, I think that's what the problem was).  The second time, I found that
the text cursor in monochrome was always a line above the actual text.  My
dealer friend says that resizing the window a few times can also mess up WP's
idea of page margins.  Another dealer I know says that, apparently, WP Corp.
never tested WP in monochrome, so most of the bugs only show up then.  Accord-
ing to him, if you don't use the mouse at all in monochrome, you should be
okay.  It's great, I can use the documentation for weight-training. :-)

	Music Construction Set (by Richard Plom of Intersect Software) is
being distributed for the ST by Electronic Arts.  For once, I'm impressed.
This program has everything that Music Studio (ugh) had, and more.  It's
fully GEM-based, for one thing, as opposed to inventing its own interface.
The menus all make sense, and you can design waveforms with more flexibility
than on Music Studio.  MCS lets you put things like vibrato into the voices,
and supports MIDI as well.  It also comes with a little accessory which, when
activated, can load and play MCS songs in the background, while you're cheer-
fully trashing your GEM Desktop.  In fact, the music playing survives even
changing resolutions (it's really weird to see that blank screen while the
ST does that, and hear music all the time).  It does crash, though, if you
load a song while inside a program, or if you load one while it's still
playing another one.

	Alas!  that I do not have even one meg in my ST!  I got to see some
of the CyberMate demos and now I really would like to be able to run them.

	As an aside about pc-Ditto:  yes, you can use it on a 520, and it will
run Lotus 1-2-3, somewhat slowly.  It also runs dBase III rather well.

	I also got to see the blitter in action, finally.  Someone mentioned
that there was a demo similar to the flying bird one, but with 5 or 6 birds.
It really flies (ahem!) with a blitter.  Shiny Bubbles fairly zips along!

	Finally, not a news-bit, but a question.  Where are all the Spectrum
pictures coming from?  I mean, most of them seem to be digitized, but I don't
think any of the digitizers out for the ST so far have software to handle
that format.  Do the folks have an in-house one, or a good conversion program
from Amiga HAM pictures?

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