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BRMUG BRMUG August 1998 Newsletter This is the index of the August 1998 BRMUG Newsletter: Features: Faxing on the Macintosh by Douglas Szot VMac by Richard Johnson Regular Columns: Front Page News by Isaac Traxler August Meeting July Meeting iMac is Coming! BRMUG Picnic! Brewbachers after the meeting Graphic Utility of the Month (Deneba Canvas 5.0) by Glenn Matherne Nonessentials (Bernie II) by Glenn Matherne AAPL by Don Ballard Cartoon by Pete Steinfeld Return to BRMUG Newsletter Index Front Page News August Meeting The August meeting will be held at the Bluebonnet Library on August 20th, the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 6:30 P.M. This month's meeting will be lighter than usual. Apple has recently recommitted itself to the Game Market. BRMUG is taking this opportunity to explore the world of Macintosh Games with an emphasis on the past. Glenn Matherne will demonstarte a couple of Apple II games running on an Apple II emulator for the Macintosh. Isaac Traxler will demonstrate MacMame. Mame is an arcade emulator. MacMame is a Macintosh port of Mame.MacMame and ROM images allow many of the old arcade games to be played on the Macintosh. The meeting will start at 6:30 P.M. with the presentation starting shortly afterward. At 7:30 P.M., we will begin the Question and Answer session. Meeting will end at 8:30 P.M. so that we can clean up and leave prior to the 9:00 P.M. closing time. We will also be giving away a software package as a door prize at the August meeting! Be there and you may win! Don't forget the get together at Brewbacher's after the meeting! The July Meeting went a little different than planned. The OCR presentation was deferred by technical difficulties, but was replaced by a lively discussion of the iMac. Isaac Traxler did present the Compression & Segmentation topic. This talk included a little history of compression on the Macintosh, a demonstration of making an archive, compressing an archive, extracting from an archive, segmenting and joining. Thanks all for attending! The iMac is coming! August 15-16 is the official debut of the iMac. CompUSA will be hosting an iMac extravaganza on those days. Drop by and see an iMac. Learn all about it. G3 prices have also been lowered. Newer faster models are coming. Apple - Macintosh - CompUSA - G3 - BRMUG - Come see them all on August 15-16. BRMUG Picnic! It's time to start planning the BRMUG Annual Picnic and Volleyball Exhibition. For the last several years, BRMUG has had a pinic in the early fall. We hope to do so again. The menu is usually barbeque chicken, hotdogs, rolls, potato salad, baked beans, and colas. Anticipated price per person will be $3.50 ($2.00 per child). We will also have a volleyball net and ball to work off all the good food. Everyone is invited (bring the family). The picnic is tenatively set for September 19 (the Saturday right after our September Meeting) at the shaded area NorthEast of South Stadium Drive and Highland Road (LSU Campus). We already have volunteers to make potato salad, and baked beans. We have one charcoal grill. We need a second grill and at least two cooks to volunteer. Other help could also be used. If you would like to volunteer to help with the picnic, please send e-mail to volunteer@brmug.org. If you are planning to attend the picnic please send e-mail to picnic@brmug.org. Return to Top of Page Faxing on the Macintosh by Douglas Szot My experience has been fairly pleasant. I run system 7.5 something with a external practical pheriphical 14.4 modem with MacComCenter software (I finally did order a new USRobotics 33.6 last week) the two were very easy to set up and test out after you load the software which didn't take much more than inserting the disk and highlighting a few simple choices. Then you plug in the modem to a power source and a telephone line. To test things out there's a pull down window that opens which gives you a keypad choice and looks something like the keypad on a phone set. As soon as you open this window you'll hear the dial tone. If you don't you forgot to plug in the phone line or somebody is on your line already. Next step just dial a number any number this will then give you the key tones and the connection ringing of course somewhere after that you'll need to hang up. Which is under the same pull down menu that the key pad was found if all goes well, and it most likely will with this combination, you just need to start working with it. You may set up there standard fax cover page by entering your name or company's name. Also if you have graphics to be used on your cover such as logo then it can easily be put in as well or just skip over this and do as we do and create a special file in Filemaker Pro this is a template we us to just fill in the blocks so to speak that has our Company letter head, automatically dates the document, then I enter the TO and ATTN portions plus a small text area to explain what we need or are offering etc. Once this is set under the file menu drag down to the word Fax and release this automatically activates Mac-ComCenter weather the program is already open or not. Now enter your fax number or choose from your preset up list of fax numbers, which may be updated on the fly as I like to say in other words if you just entered a new fax name and number which is not already on your list just hit the add icon and you'll have a addition to your list of numbers, press the send Icon and away it goes if at first it does not succeed say the line is busy it'll automatically re dial in three minutes under the default setting. Which can be adjusted to your preferences. There is also a import feature where you can import fax numbers I haven't used it though. There are several others options such as FAXing to multiple numbers although it's not a demon dialer. Upon start up of your Mac MacComCenter is activated automatically through a extension if your not plug in to a phone line or it does not hear a dial tone it'll advise you, at that point you can just ignore it or correct it by plunging it in to a phone line. Now on as for receiving it works pretty cool as well. I leave my 7100 on all the time because we receive FAXes at all times of the day and on the weekends as well. We let it do it automatically all the time. A little window opens up in the lower left hand corner which tells you the area code and telephone number of the incoming fax none of which interrups what your currently working on. After it completes receiving there is a little message left in the center of your screen stating you have received a fax and how many pages are involved. With opening a window you may now review the document then file it away ,trash it or print it out. I use this a lot for keeping track of things on a per project folder, weekly folder, quarterly, etc. basis less paperwork. You may receive fax's on a manual basis if you choose but you do need to understand there is several different types of ways fax machines connect and don't connect. What I'm trying to point out is most will stop trying to connect after x number of rings then there is a limited number of connect attempts they make after the other end picks up. Its only takes highlighting and releasing on the manual connect button as far as the software goes but these other factors play in so it just works best for us to let it do it automatically. The down falls I have come across with our particular situation was since I didn't have a dedicated phone line for the fax alone and we have a multi line phone system it took a good amount of understanding of how to hook in a switcher box on the line we use for the fax but overall another thing because the fax is run off one of the Mac's in the office it needs to stay on 24 hours a day which was not a problem just that if we have a power surg that shuts off the mac then it does not come back on automatically and were not ready to receive FAXes until the next morning when we reboot the machine. Third I do have some problems with the connection not closing or something of the sort. Some situations where say a wrong number comes in and the caller hangs up but the software doesn't recognize it as completion or termination of a call this then builds a small file of 9k of course there's nothing in it and if I don't look at the get info before opening the file I'll get lock up. This is a somewhat common problem but not as long as I review the file size first anything with only 9k goes to the trash. But hey I need to reboot once in awhile anyways. Return to Top of Page VMac by Richard Johnson VMac The VMac is a cross platform emulator that emulates a Mac Plus. It runs on Power Macs, Linux,OS/2, Windows and Dos. All versions require a copy of the Mac Plus ROM, which one gets by using a special program to extract a ROM image from the Mac Plus one owns. It is obvious, why a non-Mac user might want to emulate a Mac, even a slow one like a Plus, but why would a Mac user wish to emulate an older Mac. The main reason is to run older software that will not run under newer systems or machines. For example, I can run MacPascal and Dinner at Eight (a recipe program). Both of these programs will not run under system 7.0 or later. Return to Top of Page Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherne This month's graphic utility is not exactly a graphic program and not exactly a desktop publishing program. It's a bit of Adobe Photoshop, a bit of Adobe Illustrator, a bit of Adobe PageMaker and a bit of an old paint program. Amazingly, it all seems to work together in one product. This product is Deneba Canvas 5.0, an inexpensive all-in-one publishing suite. Canvas is more or less a lite version of these products in one package. The drawing tools are fairly basic. They include features such as bezier curves, pencils, circles, rectangles and an eraser. The painting tools are fairly basic, also. They include brushes, spray paint and the paint bucket tool. The paint palette is about average, but you can customize the colors. The graphics editing tools are a little more primitive than PhotoDeluxe, but synchronize with modern 4 color printing equipment software such as colorsync and panitone. It also accepts some of the Photoshop plug-in filters for special effects. The desktop publishing functions are similar to PageMaker, but it prints in full color as well as Quark Express. Unfortunately, none of Quarks famous filters work with it. In testing the program, I found it worked on a slow PowerPC Macintosh with 8 megs of ram. Of course, it worked better with 32 megs of ram. Like most professional desktop programs allocating more ram and using a faster computer were definite advantages. I was amazed it worked so well in older computers. One of the most impressive features of Canvas 5.0 is the set of fonts. There are over one hundred font families. This means that you could add several hundred fonts to use on your Macintosh. Most desktop programs give far fewer choices of fonts. Adobe in particular charges a lot of money for a fonts on its CD of nearly 5,000 fonts. You buy them in groups of 75 and pay to unlock a section of the CD. Desktop publishing was a snap with Canvas 5.0. However, drawing was a rather cumbersome matter. Instead of having separate palettes for each graphic section, they all shared space on the same palette. You select options on the palette by holding down on a function. It was awkward to select fonts from the palette. The pop-up palette kept disappearing even in System 8.1. I really liked the importing and exporting features of Canvas 5.0. I've never seen a program that imports this many graphic formats and text formats. The exporting feature is really cool. You can export a published text as any number of graphic files or you can translate it into a different text format. It exported to HTML without a flaw. Of course, the best feature of Deneba Canvas 5.0 is its price, $149. This is comparable to Corel Draw Suite 8. However, Canvas is a far less clunky product than Corel Draw Suite. So, if you're looking for an inexpensive program to do a newspaper or a pamphlet, you could do worse than Deneba Canvas 5.0. If you want to do it like the pros, you may want to look for a sale on Adobe Pagemaker or Quark Express. This program is not a substitute for real drawing programs like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand not does it replace painting programs like Metacreation Painter or image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop. However, it has the unique ability to export and import documents to text or graphic formats. For now, I'm still debating about returning it to the store. The problem is that everytime I use it I like it a little bit more. In 30 days, it'll probably be a keeper. Return to Top of Page Nonessentials by Glenn Matherne This month's non-essential is for those who are still proudly proclain Apple II forever. Thi sentiment is especially non-essential considering Apple's recent memo which states that Apple Computers will no longer support obsolete models. This means that all users of Apple IIs and Macintoshes below the Quadra series are no longer supported by Apple. This translates to no more parts and no more software. However, fear no more, your Apple II software is still usable, if you can only get it to work on your Macintosh. There are a few groups of developers making software to emulate the Apple II on your Macintosh. The one, I chose is Bernie II, The Rescue 1.3 because I use an Apple IIGS at work. Bernie II is the only Apple IIGS emulator that works with the rom 1 and rom 3 versions. It is available for $30 from F.E. Systems at http://www.magnet.ch/emutech/Bernie Bernie II is the only Apple IIGS emulator that supports Apple ImageWriter printers, midi interfaces, modems and networking. It is also the only full featured Apple II GS emulator available. Performance wise, I found F.E. Systems' claims that Bernie II worked faster than a real Apple IIGS to be true. It even makes the Classic Apple II disk drive sounds. For those who aren't aware, the Apple IIGS had an Ensonic synthesizer chip built inside of it. It also featured a video out port for use with a vcr. This was unique for its time on an Apple II. Bernie II requires that you get a rom either from the internet or from a real Apple IIGS. Luckily, F.E. Systems provides you with instructions to do both. They also provide you with a copy of Diversi-Tune, a midi sequencer program that works with the Ensonic Synthesizer. You can also download a working version of the popular Apple II video game, Wolfenstein 3D. You can run your Apple II software from Bernie II by either using the old 800K disks or using disk images made with Diskcopy 4.2 and 6.1.3. I found that it worked well with Dos 3.3 and ProDos formated disks. However, some disks using ProDos did not work well. I'm not sure if it was that the disks were 10 years old or that they required rom 3. The Apple Computers website was not too helpful as they are in the process of removing all of their Apple II software from the site. So, the next time that you consider tossing out your old Apple II video games or those dusty AppleWorks disks, try thinking nostalgic for the good old days when everything fit on a floppy disk, when everything worked at a slower gentler pace, when kids spent hours trying to impress their friends with their score on BoulderDash. Yeah, like dig that cool lo-tech sound and eight bit graphics. Best of all when your Apple IIGS dies, you can use Bernie II, The Rescue 1.3 to go back to that magical time. Or you can always leave it to your children as a family heirloom. Don't even consider turning your old computer into an aquarium. by Glenn Matherne Return to Top of Page