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See the article that Steven Folberg wrote up about this meeting for the U.K. magazine Amiga Active. Fit that meeting to a T.
After the meeting we headed further south to Kerbey Lane for our PigSig.
Attending were Steve, George, Don, Rodney. Charlie caught the extreme tail end of things!
BetaScan supported quite a few scanners, and is the newest offering, but the least developed, having very few options. It does save to ILBM and JPG.
ScanTek is shareware, $20, and has all the options one is used to seeing in scanning software, including ICS by Wolf Faust.
ImageFX, among the long list of utilities, supports Epson and HP scanners. You still have to buy the whole ball of wax to get that though. It means you can apply effects to your image straight away. ImageFX is extendable and Steve had one such extension for ICS.
Last was FXScan, free to Steve because he reviewed the product awhile back, and $50 to the rest of us. It is visually unusual for not having any pop down menus like all other GUI applications I've ever seen for the Amiga. Nearly everything is one click on a top bar icon. This product has a hook for ICS (but it acted peculiar) that Steve showed off. It was unique among the products in that it offered OCR, optical character recognition. Steve showed that it did work but was yet another piece of software that could use some work. Its error rate for the one page magazine sheet that you could have typed it in the same amount of time and probably done better. Still, it did "work".
Our Mardi Gras pig sig was at Kerbey Lane where our old pre 29th Conans, Conans was. Confused? Carol & George Wyche, Steven Folberg, Charlie Boas, and Don Kassebaum made the event. Everyone is looking forward to the Amiga Convention coming in March.
Attending were Charlie Boas, Don Kassebaum, George Wyche, and Bo Zimmerman -- a new member! Bo not only uses an Amiga, he collects all hardware that is Commodore and Amiga. His command of what passed through Commodore's hand was impressive and even suprised Don. After a suitable wait for laggards we moved down to the multimedia room to view the view the St.Louis video, Vol. 2, No. 1.
This was about 45 minutes long, having some information about the new Amiga from 3 interviews with Bill McEwen. That man is a salesman! Early in the video the St.Louis, MO Amiga Club, valiant producers of these free videos, recorded a meeting where they detailed elements of OS3.9 and also the new features in "Amiga Forever" by Colantro. For $50 there is an Amiga emulator for the MacIntosh. Don left a little early to catch the best bus back home. He was quite excited about going to the St. Louis convention this weekend.
We finished up at 8:30 and in the misting rain made our separate ways to Conan's Pizza at 29th & Guadalupe. All of us "dotcom"ers had a fine chat about work (and its uncertain future).
You can see Bo's website at http://www.zimmers.net
Attending were Charlies Boas, Steven Folberg, Don Kassebaum, George Wyche, and Bo Zimmerman. Steve and Don handed to show goodies like amiga bumper stickers, lapel pins, button covers and the like. We listened to an interview that Steve got from EyeTech's Alan Redhouse, maker of the AmigaOne to arrive this summer. Steve also got an interview with Amiga Inc.'s Bill McEwen.
Then we moved to the History Center's media center where Steve fed the output of his digital camera into a VCR. He had to memory sticks worth of images from the convention.
You can view the 1st 36 thumbnails (about 2 minutes with a 14.4K modem) of
Steve's collection: [Click!] at
http:/www.main.org/ctacs/history/2001/stlouis/stlouis2001_1.html
where clicking on a thumbnail retrieves the huge original
from Steve's homepage.
Afterwards all but Steve retired to Conan's Pizza. Note the tire mark burned into the floor from an accident a few weeks ago! Conan's has a whole new, replacement front.
Steve did the program, again. He brought his A1200 in a tower system and went through the motions of installing OS3.9 as a fresh install up to the point of partitioning this 18 Gig disk and a warning message put us off. After that we viewed OS3.9 through the CD, but with a 060 and graphic's card.
I have OS3.9 on my A1200 and only after watching Steve put it through it hoops am I excited again about OS3.9. I had a lack lustre install and pieces did not work rightaway. So I shrugged. With an unheralded FBlit commodity and Steve's show I am now putting the new features to work for me. Amiga Inc. would do well to issue a short tutorial for the new features. I am sure many routine Amiga users are in the same boat as I was (am) and need a friendly help.
We had to be urged out to stop playing with the thing. We retired to Conan's, caught up on Skipper's and Mark's lives for the last few months while Charlie and I downed a large Savage white, thin WITH anchovies and jalapenos.
There was no official program and it is summer, hence the low turnout we think. Amiga Inc. has just finished a $100 Party Pack offer and some of us bit the hook. The offer entails understanding Amiga's marketing strategy so it has been educational.
Shortly after 8pm we headed off to Conan's Pizza with everyone coming along.
We helped Keith get his setup out of the car. We disassembled it to a bare(ish) system and after thoroughly reseating cards (thanks Mark) got it to boot. Then we added back his graphics board video and were off and running.
Joseph took the picture of (left to right) Charlie, Bo, John, Mark, Keith, George and Don.
Our biggest suprise was the Dvorak keyboard! We proceeded getting the iomega zip250 drive to work. The biggest problem was doing things in a sensible order. We went on to other things after setting the unit from 6 to 5 (why was it wrong?) and starting the Amiga formatting the Zip100 disk.
We settled a few of Keith's queries: his external floppy was indeed DF2:, the internal, uppermost drive is DF0: and PC0:. The lower one is DF1:. It would not perform as PC1:, though we tried. CompuQuick had warned Keith of this.
The zip kept giving us an error 254. What is that? INFO reported that the failed format left the disk as NOT DOS. We have to fight that one again some other time. Sigh.
Printing also failed. We might have been able to overcome that, but we just ran out of time. Roger Clark had emailed offering help at a time they could both agree on. Roger knows alot about TurboPrint.
Keith donated $15 to the club for all the help (so far). We hauled his equipment back to his car, but he did not come along to the PigSIG at Conan's with the rest of us. Charlie and Bo are still looking for high tech jobs. Mark's employer got an infusion of life by being bought out by a big fish with oodles of cash in the bank, so he's OK. Steven Folberg was absent to attend the final birthing class for the upcoming event. Don is still without a vehicle.
Steven Folberg bought the party pack for Windows and brought a Windows setup here for us to see what the Amiga DE Software Development Kit looks like. With Mark Thomas' help we were able to compile a helloWorld.c program and get it to run. Many *nix commands worked as expected. We watched a number of demos (all running simultaneously). Continuous, smooth scrolling and the like.
We retired to Conan's as usual. Good news to report!
Click on the image for a tour of 11 pictures I took at the meeting.
We met at the home of Bo Zimmerman because of all the Commodore computers he has collected. Attending were John Berry, Charlie Boas, George Wyche and our host Bo. Bo showed us 10 different computers, all functional (one was on the fritz). Bo showed off software running on several of them. He stories to go with each one, including one about Commodore employees using Timex Sinclair computers for doorstops.
Eventually we began to get worried that nearby eating places would be closing, so we headed over to a Cajun food place that worked just fine (though certainly no Conan's).
| Oct 23 | Keith Sterzing PPP trouble | Click here for meeting minutes |
| Nov 27 | Keith Sterzing email trouble, cont'd |
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| Dec 12 | J&J bar-b-que |
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