At our July meeting we had a very brief formal meeting, then it was a nice time to gather and tell stories over pizza. It was great to see everyone there! Later, we held what I felt was a very successful auction, at least in terms of moving materials out the door.
I hope we can engage ourselves once more on the revamped bylaws proposal soon, and get that project behind us once and for all.
Maybe I'll take this space to thank Glen for the great DOMs the last couple months, we're all brushing up on our German!
Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting, Friday, August 11!
It was nice to be back after having to miss my first Club meeting in over five years last month. We had ten members show up for the SPACE Birthday Party and we had all the pizza we could eat. Everyone there had a good time and the auction was a lot of fun too.
I received the bill for the room rental after I finally called the Falcon Heights City Hall and asked why they hadn't billed us since the first of the year. They got a bill out in the mail the very next day for the first five months of 2000. I also paid Mike for the first six months of the newsletter so we are now pretty much caught up on our old expenses.
We received the bill for the P. O. Box we use for our mail and I brought up the point that maybe we could do without the $57.00 semi-annual expense in the future. We sure aren't getting much mail these days. This is a topic we could talk about next month.
Here is the breakdown for our treasury as it now stands:
Beginning balance for June 1, 2000 $1,334.20 Expenses: Newsletter for Jan. thru June 48.51 Room rental for Jan. thru May 325.00 P.O. Box fee for June thru Dec. 57.00 BBS phone for July 10.00 Pizza for Birthday Party 75.00 ________________________ ________ Total Expenses Paid 515.51 Income: Dom's 45.00 Memberships 60.00 Net Auction Sales 76.00 _________________________ __________ Total Income Received 181.00 Balance in SPACE account for July 31, 2000 $999.69
As you can see we paid out much more than our income can offset, but the Club is still very solvent and we will be for a long time down the road. We still need those memberships renewed and it was good to see a couple members renew again for another year.
The auctions are going great and are always a lot of fun and we plan to have another auction next month so be there and you won't miss out. We are still auctioning off a lot of SPACE items and next month we will have more magazines and a few other goodies for you. Please come to the August meeting and join in the fun.
Since Mike Weiss couldn't make the July SPACE meeting he asked me to take over for him. I wasn't at the June meeting so I won't quote anyone in this article about the June meeting.
We started the July meeting right on schedule at 7:30 pm and since I had the pizzas on order to be delivered at 7:45 we really had to rush the meeting.
I started out by giving the treasury news and letting everyone present know that we finally got the bills for the newsletters and the room rental and our treasury was still at about $1,000.00.
Glen gave his report on the membership and he said with four membership renewals we now are at 14 paid up members. He also brought in another dom for all to purchase.
The pizza arrived and the meeting was cut short and we agreed to put everything else on hold until next month.
I just want to say one thing about the P.O. Box fee that we pay twice a year at $57.00 each six months. I was ready to suggest that we could probably do without the box since all we are getting these days are the Pacesetter newsletters and an occassional letter. Then I brought home the last two months of the Pacesetter that Glen had copied for us and I was paging through one of them and came accross an article the dealt with ST computer which is really rare these days since the Pacesetter is more 8-bit than anything. Anyway, I read the article and it was about a problem this guy discovered concerning a failure of the ST's power supply. I knew from talking to Rich Mier that the problem I was having with my Mega power supply was a solder problem but nobody could find the culprit. This article talked about the exact problem I was having (sometimes the computer would just power down for what seemed like no reason). This guy had the same problem and had seen the problem many times over and wrote this article to help others like me solve our problems also. He included a diagram that showed exactly what solder points to look for and sure enough with a magnifying glass I could actually see one on my Mega computer. I re-soldered the point and voila, problem solved. I might have discarded my Mega computer because I was getting so frustrated with the power supply problem but thanks to the Pacesetter article I now have my 4-meg Mega 2 computer up and running again. So what I am trying to say is that if we had removed our P.O. Box I may have never found this valuable article to help solve my problem and I have now changed my mind about the box and would definitley vote to keep it going so that we could still have our link to the outside world.
Now For Some Email Forwarded to Me by the President:
Subj: New Atari 8-Bit BBS in Minnesota!
Date: 00-07-28 16:13:17 EDT
From: mcurrent@carleton.edu (Michael Current)
From: friednw@tcfreenet.org
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 07:25:44 GMT
New Atari 8-Bit BBS online now in the testing phase. Submit your bug
reports and suggestions to the sysop. Thanks for calling!
763-691-0626
300 to 19200 bps
Open 24 hours
**************************************************
Subj: Nolan's Nest & Official BBS home of SPACE is back online!
Date: 00-07-28 16:15:47 EDT
From: mcurrent@carleton.edu (Michael Current)
From: friednw@tcfreenet.org
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 17:33:55 GMT
The official home of SPACE, St. Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts
(Minnesota), is now back online. The new phone number is (763)
691-0567, 300-19200 baud, Open 24 Hours. Supporting ANSI and ATASCII
callers. I anticipate bugs because this BBS is being worked on from the
ground up. Improvements and additions will be implemented constantly. I
will also be working with Lance at Video 61 & Atari Sales testing the
BBS on a regular basis. Feel free to call the BBS and look around and
post in the message bases. Don't hesitate to email the Sysop with any
comments, suggestions, or bug reports. Regular updates will be made to
the newsgroup as changes occur. Let's make this a great BBS. Long live
Atari!
**************************************************
Subj: Announcement: cc65 v2.5 released
Date: 00-07-28 16:33:00 EDT
From: mcurrent@carleton.edu (Michael Current)
From: uz@musoftware.de (Ullrich von Bassewitz)
Date: 21 Jul 2000 16:18:18 GMT
I'm proud to announce version 2.5 of CC65, a C crosscompiler
/crossassembler combo for 6502 systems.
CC65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502
machines. The libraries are fairly portable, so creating a version for
other 6502s shouldn't be too much work.
Here is a list of the compiler features:
* Includes a C compiler, macro assembler, archiver, linker,
GEOS resource compiler and a frontend (compile & link)
utility. The assembler generates relocatable object files, the
linker is very configurable and allows overlays, ROMable
code, split output and much more.
* The compiler is not quite ISO compatible, however, a large
subset is supported.
* Supported target systems are:
- C64
- C128
- C16, C116, Plus/4
- CBM 600/700 family (programs run in bank 1)
- Newer PET machines (not 2001)
- The Apple ][ (thanks to Kevin Ruland
)
- The Atari 8 bit machines
- GEOS for the C64 and C128
For all these systems a precompiled runtime and C library is
available. Supporting more targets is not very difficult since
the C library was written with portability in mind.
* Several system specific support routines like a conio library
or modules for joystick access are available.
* The assembler and linker do also support the 65816 as a
target, however, the compiler is not able to generate code
for this CPU and there is no RTL support.
* Lots of docs and a few sample programs included.
* Easy interfacing between C code and assembler.
* Fullscreen debugger for most machines as a linkable
module.
* Full sourcecode available as well as binaries for
- Linux (several RedHat RPMs)
- DOS
- Windows 95/98/NT
What is new in this version:
* As usual many bugs fixed (and new ones introduced, so it
does not get boring:-).
* New -j switch to make the default character signed. New
#pragma to do the same.
* Slightly better code in some situations.
* A lot of new features for the assembler:
- Unnamed labels
- Several emulation features
- Listing support
- New builtin functions
- Include file search path support
* The linker generates an imports list in the map file.
* Completely rewritten symbol table handling for the
compiler.
* Lots of code cleanups. One result of this is that the -T
option does now work without clobbering the output in
some cases as it was before.
* Much more code is now shared between the tools.
* Experimental 65C02 support for the compiler.
* Support for the Atari 8 bit machines was contributed by the
Atari team:
Christian Groessler
Mark Keates
Freddy Offenga
David Lloyd
* It is now possible to write GEOS programs for the C64 and
C128 using cc65, thanks to the GEOSLib library
contributed by Maciej Witkowiak (YTM/Elysium)
* Documentation updates.
* More minor changes.
Support for some features is still missing. To name a few:
* No floats, no bit fields.
* No file routines on most systems. The 8 bit Ataris are the
first machines that do have full file I/O support (besides the
ACE port which was dropped some time ago). Please note
that the complete CBM family doesn't have file I/O support!
* The 80 column mode on the C128 is not supported by the
conio library.
More information:
For your convenience, I've put all doc files also on the web server:
http://www.von-bassewitz.de/uz/cc65/doc/
The cc65 main page: http://www.von-bassewitz.de/uz/cc65/
will get updated to reflect the new version in the next few days.
There is also a cc65 mailing list. To subscribe, send a mail to
majordomo@musoftware.de with the command subscribe cc65
in the body of the mail.
Available packages:
As usual I will provide the complete sources and several binary
packages. There are some binary RPMs for different versions of RedHat
Linux, which is probably one of the fastest ways to get going. Since
Linux is also my development platform, new features and bug fixes are
first available for Linux.
Binaries for DOS and and Windows will follow or may already be available
at the time you read this. While the sources do still compile under
OS/2, I have dropped support for OS/2 binaries, since were almost no
downloads of the OS/2 version.
Download:
For more information and links to the FTP server, see
http://www.von-bassewitz.de/uz/cc65/
For direct download, use
ftp://ftp.musoftware.de/pub/uz/cc65/
Thanks to all who sent feedback and suggestions!
Ullrich von Bassewitz
uz@musoftware.de
Published by the Saint Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts (SPACE), an independent organization with no business affiliation with ATARI Corporation. Permission is granted to any similar organization with which SPACE exchanges newsletters to reprint material from this newsletter. We do however ask that credit be given to the authors and to SPACE. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of SPACE, the club officers, club members or ATARI Corporation.