NEWSLETTER December, 2000

President's Corner
by Michael Current
December, 2000

It's time for the annual SPACE club Christmas Party!! Plans seem to be coming together nicely as usual. If you didn't sign up to bring something (ahem, like me), feel free to surprise us! The sign-up list should be appearing elsewhere in this issue.

We had another great meeting last month. In election news, all of the Officers were re-elected (no re-counts), and each of the volunteer positions have been secured with the same people as well. We really ought to pat ourselves on the back for this. Most every other Atari club around the country and world has disappeared because they run out of volunteers; SPACE, thanks to those people who continue to contribute their time to our club, just keeps on going.

Which brings us to the important discussion started last month by Lance. Sure, our treasury is incredibly healthy right now, but that's largely due to our auctions held most months the last couple years. The auction material has been the stuff owned by the Club. There's still a fair amount left, but the supply will end, maybe within a year. What happens to our treasury then? Can our membership dues and DOM sales keep up with our expenses? We will need Greg to watch over our finances carefully.

Lance brought up the value of our very large DOM software collections--both 8-bit and ST. If these were sorted, cataloged, and published onto CD-ROMs, they would very possibly generate some substantial income for the club. It could be done, and it would be very exciting, but coming up with the people who could realistically put in that kind of time for such a labor of love may prove difficult. Even though I personally doubt we could find the interest among us to pull something like this off, I also hope Lance doesn't let the idea die completely, because I'd love to see it happen somehow. I'd be the first person to buy the finished product!

Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your annual SPACE Christmas Party, Friday December 8, 2000.

Treasurer's Report
by Greg Leitner
For November, 2000

NEWS FLASH!!! The election is over, I repeat , the election is over. All votes are in and they have been recounted and recounted until the all parties have been totally satisfied with the results. Since we don't believe in exit polling and we don't believe in bribing voters to vote one way or the other, we can honestly give you the final results from this years election. Unless this vote is contested in the courts within the next 30 days these results as reported are final.

President-Mike Current
Vice-President-Greg Leitner
Secretary-Mike Weist
Treasurer-Greg Leitner

This just came in: It seems that we might have used an illegal ballot system for voting. Some members did not have their hands fully extended when it came for voting on some or all the candidates. We are now looking at possible video taping of this election to see if we can determine the will and intentions of the members. We will use an old law on the books that says that if an arm is extended all the way or three-fourths of the way or one-third of the way, then this should constitute a valid vote of yes for a candidate. But if the arm was extended less than one-third of the way then this is not a vote and it will be disallowed. We are already receiving flak from some of the voters who say that they intended to vote yes for a candidate but because they were so tired from such a long day that the just couldn't get it up. (Their arm that is).

What will eventually happen is that this fruitless attempt to circumvent the vote will be thrown out and the election will stand as called. I have passed cigarettes to all the voting members and they have assured me that they all intended to vote yes to elect the same officers that were in place for 2000 and so the story should now just fade away. The morale this story is (YOUR VOTE DOES COUNT). Only seven members were present to cast their votes and represented less than 50% of Space's total membership. You must take responsibility for your rights to belong to this group. We need your participation if we want to make this Club survive at least another year in 2001.

Now on to the news of our treasury:

Beginning balance as of Nov 1, 2000           1,273.27

Room Rental fee for June thru Sept.'00          260.00
Copies of third-party newsletters                 6.90
                                           --------------
Total expenses for November 2000                266.90

Doom sales                                       18.00
Auction sales                                    51.00
                                          ----------------
Total revenue for November 2000                  69.00

Balance as of November 30, 2000               1,075.37

We are still sitting pretty good, but their is already talk about what the Club will do after we have exhausted our auction materials. That is another reason for all our members to be involved with our meetings.

Another reason for coming to the December meeting is that we are having our annual Christmas party and it was decided that the Club would buy the main course(subs) and the members would supply the rest. We have already had members volunteer the pop, chips, plates, napkins, desserts, potato salad & utensils so if you want to bring something you know what we already have.

We are going to hold off the auctions for one month so that we can all relax and enjoy the party. I have sent in the changes to the ComputerUser to update our listing and I hope the change is made in time for the December issue. We have other issues to discuss in December so I hope all our members can be there and be able to share a Christmas party and SPACE meeting with everyone. If not, here's wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Secretary's Report
by Mike Weist
For November, 2000

Space meeting opened at 7:40 PM. Space club president, Michael Current, welcomed members to meeting.

Michael asked for a secretary report. Mike Weist, club secretary, recapped the minutes printed in the Space November newsletter.

Michael asked for a treasurer report. Greg Leitner, club treasurer, gave a report. Greg stated the club still has a hefty balance.

Last month the club took in $124.

13 DOM sales                   $39
2 membership renewals          $30
Auction                        $55

TOTAL                         $124

Expenses were $10 for BBS expenses.
Net income was $114
The treasury now stands at $1273,27.

Greg noted that a bill for room rent for $260 came in and was paid and will show up on the November statement.

Michael asked for DOM report. Glenn Kirschenmann, DOM chair, gave a report. Glenn said the DOM has two full sides of German programs.

Michael asked for a membership report. Glen Kirschenmann, club membership chair, gave a report. Glen said there is 15 paid up members.

Michael asked for a BBS report. There was none.

OLD BUSINESS

Greg Leitner reported that the Hamfest show at the River Center was bad. Lance Ringquist noted that E-BAY is taking all the Hamfest's business.

Voting took place for club officers tonight. It was voted on that the current officers serve another year.

Volunteer positions will be filled as follows

newsletter editor- Mike Schmidt
BBS SYSOP- Nolan Friedland
WEB Master-Michael Current
Disk of month -Glenn Kirschenmann
Membership-Glenn Kirschenmann

The Christmas party will be held at the December meeting. Below is a list of stuff members are going to bring. SUBS from CUB will be the main course.

Ice cold pop- Greg Leitner
Plates & Napkins- Mike Weist
Cookies-Bryan
Chips-Lance Ringquist
Deserts-Glen Kirschenmann
MYSTERY ITEM- Michael Current

Any member not present at meeting, planning to come to party is asked to bring a potluck item.

NEW BUSINESS

George Viita, club member, brought up a issue of the Space club ad in the computer user. George stated that more information is needed in ad. Michael Current, club president asked the membership for suggestions for ad. Lance Ringquist said the club can use his phone no for club contact. Greg Leitner said he will call computer user to make changes to ad.

Lance Ringquist brought up the discussion about the Space club's future. Lance asked what the club was going to do to stay alive as a club . Lance asked how the club was going to have income after auction sales. There was a lengthy discussion on this. Michael Current said these will continue on.

Michael talked about making old Space newsletters available to members to take home. These Space newsletter go back to the early '80. Further discussion will take place in future.

Meeting adjourned at 8:45 PM.

Mike Weist
Club Secretary

E-mail from Club President:

Date: Mon, Nov 6, 2000 5:27 PM +0000
From: "Raphael J. Espino"

After a couple of weeks worth of work, here it is! You can now view your favorite jpegs on your Atari 8-bit. This version has been ported over to the Atari from the C=64 Juddpeg source code jpy1223-8, by Stephen Judd, posted here a few weeks back. At the moment it can display images in greyscale (no color yet) in 3 different resolutions. This is just a beta version, but should work with most images on any 48K or more Atari.

So watcha waiting for? Go take a look at it and let me know how you get on with it: http://www.geocities.com/rjespino/atari.html

Currently the Atari viewer can do 320x192 2 levels of gray (GR.8), 160x192 4 levels of gray (GR.15) and 80x192 16 levels of gray (GR.9). However the jpeg decoder and the image viewer are 2 separate pieces of code, and the decoder itself can output images at 320 pixels wide and 256 levels of gray (8 bit luminance). This opens the door for people to write their own viewers displaying the images in any format they want. The one drawback is that there is only about 12K of free RAM left (out of the 48K of main RAM) for the screen RAM and the viewer after DOS and the decoder have used their share, so doing an embedded HIP viewer on a 48K machine looks to be out of the question. It might be possible on 64K or more machines though.

I'll very probably add an option to dump the raw image data out to a file which could then be loaded by a separate image viewer or converted into another format. That would allow people to write separate viewers for these images and use all 48K (or whatever) to display them. I'd guess that the best format for displaying these images on the Atari is going to be HIP, so does anyone feel like writing a HIP viewer/converter? =)

I'll be posting the Atari version of the source code soon, once I've had a chance to optimize it, tidy it up a bit, and add a few comments.

Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 16:25:43 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Raphael J. Espino"

I've uploaded the latest version of the jpeg viewer to my webpage now:

http://www.geocities.com/rjespino/atari.html

This version is faster, adds new display modes, and fixes a few bugs. It is a big improvement over the previous version. The source code for both the decoder and the viewer are also available, this makes it possible for others to write their own viewers.

BTW Stephen L. Judd's pup.jpg image looks a lot better now =)

DISCLAIMER

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.