Might be cool, part II

September 17, 1996

Is Emplant 1200 punishment from God?

Urgh. My copy of Emplant A1200 arrived in the box from Software Hut - just the disk, no documentation, no package, just a loose disk with a printed Utilities Unlimited label and a handwritten serial number. Nice - how professional. Already I'm glad I didn't spend more than $60 on this thing.

Anyway. I run the installer, it unpacks its stuff to RAM:, copies it back to the hard drive, and does some things to my startup-sequence. (Gee, wonder if that'll conflict with any of the other hacks I have in there?) Then it warns me that I MUST power down the Amiga after using the emulation. I'm scared now.

I reboot once to try the emulator - I didn't yet have the ROM - it reboots itself once, then reboots again and locks up on a black screen with a flashing power light. Ctrl-amigamiga doesn't work at this point - when it said I have to power down, it ain't kidding.

Cool - power up with both mouse buttons down, get in there and look at what it did to my startup-sequence. And yep - some kind of memory reserver, kinda similar to PrepareEmul, I guess. And it seems to conflict with my Microbotics AutoXA util - which I need, or else I'm back to 2MB. (Good luck running a Mac emulator in 2MB!)

Didn't anyone at Utilities Unlimited consider the possibility that someone might have an A1200 with non-autoconfig RAM? Seems to me like _any_ A1200 accelerator with RAM will map that RAM into the 32-bit space...

OK. First thing I did was to build a startup-sequence swapper and make a "real" startup-sequence that doesn't run RSRVMEM, so I can actually use my Amiga while I sort all this out. Then I went to Aminet and got one of those "addmem" hacks - went into SysInfo (it was handy) and figured out where my sixteen meg SIMM started and ended, and put _that_ into the "Emplant" startup-sequence - thus replacing the AutoXA with something that doesn't reboot.

The next day I had my Mac ROM - fired up the emulator startup, popped my homebrew Mac boot disk (I wasn't yet ready to try a "real" system install), and got a happy Mac.

OK, now my Mac needs a hard drive. So I open the hardfile utility that came with Emplant - and it complains that it doesn't have a certain font. Well, of course you don't have that font - your damned installer didn't install it! So I open a shell and type:
copy fonts:thinpaz.font fonts:scaiv.font
mkdir font:scaiv
copy fonts:thinpaz/#? fonts:sciav/#?
and "make" this font that Emplant wants.

I run the utility again and it flashes a black-and-yellow screen demanding (in all caps) JAM.LIBRARY. Uhh... this library DOES NOT exist in the Emplant drawer, it DOES NOT exist on the disk, and I've never heard of it before in my life. How kind of Mr. Drew to include it for me... NOT.

So back to Aminet I go, this time getting a util called "filemount." I make a nifty little 10MB "virtual" partition on my hard drive, then bring up Emplant and tell it to use that. I boot my Mac IIxi (a nonexistent combination of letters - had Apple used this name, it would have meant a fast Mac II with built-in video) and use it to "erase disk" on the virtual drive - which it happily does. So I copy System and Finder over to it, and reboot.

It happily reboots from the "hard drive." Cool - I pop in the disk onto which I dropped a few control panels, and tried a few. Memory does not let me turn on virtual memory or a RAM disk - wonder if that's to do with the Mac IIcx (32-bit unclean) ROM I used. Monitors just pops up "This control panel cannot be used with this Macintosh." Nice - I'm forever stuck on a black-and-white Mac.

I tried some Internet software - I installed MacTCP and ConfigPPP, and tried that, using the Amiga's serial port - "unable to communicate with modem," my serial cable is apparently lacking some wires. (of course the programmers probably were too...) I tried a different approach - I started AmiTCP, told Emplant to use ppp.device as my network, and configured MacTCP as best I could considering again, I'm flying blind. As expected, nothing.

Well, I figured all this could be fixed with a fresh System install. So I make a second, larger hardfile and tell the "Mac" to erase _that_ one. It pops up the "Initializing" box, the hard drive activity light comes on for a few seconds... then the hard drive light goes out, my mouse still works, but the Mac doesn't appear to be doing anything.

I tried this four or five times, the last time was last night at about 10PM - I just started it and left it, figuring maybe it's just taking awhile. I woke up this morning and it was STILL there, with the "Initializing" box there but not doing a damned thing.

And again, the Guide file is next to worthless - and there's no REAL documentation. I've seen next to NOTHING on the Net about Emplant A1200 - apparently everyone prefers Shapeshifter, and after this experience, I don't blame them - if only CB could make Shapeshifter work with a 256K Mac ROM, life would be glorious.

(I take that back - when I ask questions on IRC, everyone says "My Emplant 1200 works fine" or "Shapeshifter works fine" or "Jim Drew sucks"... and EVERY time I mention Mac emulation on IRC, at least two people offer to DCC me a Mac rom... which I already have through more legal means.)

So here's my questions:

• Where do I get this nonexistent "jam.library" which the hardfile generator so desperately wants but which wasn't included?
• What would cause the "Monitors" control panel to not work?
• Can I assume either the serial port emulation or network emulation are not yet completely implemented?
• Why would my emulated Mac format the first hardfile I made, but not any of the subsequent ones of any size? (from 1MB to 60MB)
• If Emplant A1200 is beta software, and it certainly seems to act like it, shouldn't Utilities Unlimited at least have the common human decency to indicate this somewhere?
• Is Utilities Unlimited allergic to documentation?

Each of the reports began "When I click Net Search..."

So off I go: Directory, Net Search, View Source. A-HA! So THAT's it... the bastards.

Netscape's Net Search page got redesigned sometime last week, rearranged and generally restyled and recoded. Apparently while redesigning, they thought it would be cool to put a table inside a table for cosmetic effect. And a table inside a table for page layout reasons. Now, I do this occasionally - most browsers today except NCSA Mosaic handle nested tables, as long as you remember to take into account that nested tables eat memory.

Netscape forgot this part. The Net Search page has nested tables four levels deep.

It gets better - when people call and ask us about this, we tell them they need to upgrade their browser. Fine... which browser? Any guesses which one's the better choice? Like the Microsoft ad said, "Netscape used to be free - Internet Explorer still is."

This really drove home for me the stark fact that Netscape Communications Corporation is losing the battle and quickly. They're still playing the game the way they did a year ago - complete with Apple-like arrogance and the notion that they will win simply because they're Netscape.

The problem is this: their competition is Microsoft, who will probably win simply because they're Microsoft.

I'm of the opinion now that Netscape needs a swift kick in the ass. Just two problems there: first off, where exactly in their corporation would one expect to find their ass? Second, they barely noticed Microsoft - how hard would one have to kick Netscape to get them to notice?

So... off the Squid goes to make a bunghole of himself. I called Netscape.

Now, here's the challenge: "Give Netscape a swift kick in the ass" is not an option in their phone menu. This is a customer complaint, really - from a handful of potential customers - and a complaint for which I don't know what has to be done to resolve it. Who at Netscape do you talk to?

Without going into details, I successfully made a bunghole of myself... and finally said "This car ain't going nowhere" and hung up. I don't like myself when I do things so obviously half-baked - this is called acting on the spur of the moment. It always gets me in trouble. This time, I embarassed the hell out of myself - and could probably have embarassed the whole company had I continued.

But Netscape is losing! I have to do SOMETHING... I don't want to live under the Microsoft flag for the rest of my life and I know the Squidheads out there don't either.

So what will it take? I'm an artist, which means I'm horribly idealistic - I believe this world isn't quite fucked up enough yet that an individual can't make a difference. Hell, even Bill Gates is an individual. An individual - or group of individuals can bring him down. I have no way of knowing my phone call didn't do some good anyway - maybe the woman at Netscape said "What? Net Search is crashing browsers?" and called to let someone know what was going on - unfortunately, fixing HTML code is easier than fixing a company.

Anyway. Way back when, when E. W. Dijkstra (is that spelled right?) wrote his legendary letter to a computer science magazine, in which he stated that the GOTO command in Basic was "harmful" - he starteda revolution. The whole structured-programming thing (and by extension, object-oriented programming) was born in the ink of that letter... there is not a computer programmer alive today who has not felt the effects of that revolution. One person CAN make a difference.

In 1985, Creative Computing Magazine's John Anderson had an episode similar to mine today in which he reviewed Lotus' Jazz for the Macintosh, and was utterly outraged both at the product and at the Macintosh itself - both of which could have been so much but weren't. The Apple was overpriced and underpowered - for a machine with a sixteen megabyte memory space, 512K was a ripoff. The next page after his Jazz review, he had an article in which he explained why he blasted Jazz as bad as he did - and explained what Apple must do to keep disasters like Jazz from happening again. (Jazz, btw, was sorta like Microsoft Office - a combination spreadsheet and word processor and database and a few other things - with a shared clipboard, which the Mac did not yet have. The individual modules sucked, and the program cost $600.) In this article he described what the Macintosh SHOULD have been, and how it SHOULD look - he came up with an expandable Mac design with an expansion bus, a color option, unlimited RAM, a mandatory hard drive, a program-switching Finder with a shared clipboard, and a few other goodies. He closed the article by saying "If you agree with me, photocopy this article and send it to John Sculley."

Two years later, Apple released the Macintosh II - a desktop Mac with six expansion slots, an internal hard drive, a RAM limit in the 128MB range, MultiFinder, and a color video card option. Nine years later, the Macintosh is still using those ideas... and even Apple's poor marketing could not stop people from loving these machines.

Again, an individual can change an industry.

Netscape can win. The latest PC Computing has an article by Dvorak (who admittedly is right about as often as I am, which ain't real often) outlines some things Netscape can do to win against Microsoft. Some things were outlandish (Netscape hiring PC hobbyists to write a Windows-compatible operating system?) and some things were so horribly obvious it's sad (Netscape actually have customer relations? What a concept!) But the point is, Netscape isn't so much being beaten, as they're failing to fight back... and even Dvorak (who forgot the Amiga existed several times, while describing similar systems he thought would be cool for hobbyists to have) spotted that much.

Everyone knows Netscape is dying, and unlike the Amiga market, we pretty much all agree why Netscape is dying and what they'd have to do to survive - they have to be ready to fight Microsoft. Their product needs to improve. Their customer support needs to improve. They need to learn how to react to anything Microsoft does. Their financial status these days isn't that great - but all they have to do is kick one good time, and the money will roll in.

But first, someone at Netscape has to stop vegetating long enough to kick. Everyone knows what's wrong with Netscape except one critical person at Netscape... someone has to tell them.

What do you think? Is a letter-writing campaign a possibility? How about a Netscape Day, in which everyone who supports Netscape sticks a big N on their homepage to get their attention? (or for that matter, organize a No Explorer Day - for one day, nobody use Internet Explorer) Are any of these ideas workable? Suggestions and opinions are welcome.

That's all for today. Next time: I finish the "Might Be Cool" trilogy with my story of what it took to use those CD-ROMs I got!

Till next time... don't let the Microsoft bugs bite.

Just some goodies that might be cool.

September 13, 1996

Well, I shelled out money for some Amiga goodies this past week: Aminet Set 3 (the one with Imagine and XIPaint), Emplant A1200, and the Deathbed Vigil tape and shirt. I have not yet played with Emplant or worn the shirt, and I had a helluva time with the Aminet stuff (more on this later) but I did watch the Deathbed Vigil.

So a quick review? Well, first off, keep in mind that April 29 and 30, 1994, were two of the most intense days of my life. Here's what happened: I had tickets for a Sarah McLachlan concert in Chicago on April 30 - Saturday night. So that Friday night, April 29, I'm scrounging around for goodies to take - cameras, etc. - and found some goodies I didn't know I had, like an autographed Sarah postcard. So while I'm at the 500 (which was then Kickstart 1.3, two floppies, 1MB RAM) typing up a thank-you to Nettwerk, I hear from the television in the other room, Mike Ahern say "...Commodore Electronics is going out of business."

I did 104 miles an hour from my bedroom to the living room.

April 30, the extent of my conversation was Sarah and Commodore. The combination of being depressed over Commodore's passing and being overwhelmed by seeing Sarah in concert the first time made the concert that much more intense and enjoyable... never mind the people I went to the show with were ready to kill me.

So it's kinda unique for me watching Deathbed Vigil to remember where i was at the exact moment some of those scenes were filmed.

I can't get over how depressing the start of the tape is - Dave carrying his 8mm camcorder up the leaf-littered, abandoned-looking Commodore headquarters front steps, into a dead and deserted building, and through hallway after hallway past empty production lines and empty warehouses. In a real sense, Commodore was already long since dead by the time April 29 rolled around.

But anyway. For me the highlight of the video is the telling of war stories at the end - the speed bumps (Apple's idea of a speed bump is increasing the processor speed of a Mac model - Commodore's idea of a speed bump is a mountain of asphalt designed to destroy sportscars.), the practical jokes (I WANT a Kickstart 2 that looks like 1.3!), the Lemmings at DevCon thing, the property passes for ridiculous items (donuts, 747s, "electronic items")...

Although the best was the AAA prototype board on Dave's desk - which Dave introduces by saying "I read on the Net that this doesn't exist." Ah, the Internet. Too bad we never got to see the unit turned on - but then, Workbench never booted on a AAA system anyway...

On to the point of this entry: listing off some nifty ideas for Amiga products that I think ought to exist. I've already described my dream Amiga web browser - HAM superbit autoscroll. But here's a couple more cool ideas:

• An RTG driver for a second Amiga. You'd have a monitor file and a screenmode option for "remote" - and when selected, all your graphics.library calls would be redirected over a network to a second "receiver" Amiga. This would be horrendously cool for ParNet systems - especially if one Amiga has the 24-bit card but the other Amiga has the fast processor and RAM. The second Amiga would be just a "custom graphics card" to the system - you just select it like any other screenmode.
• An RTG driver for screen-in-window. Similar to the above, but would allow you to do cool things like run full-screen apps in a Workbench window.
• A window menu. When you right-click on a window's depth gadget, you get a popup menu of all the open windows - and when you select one, it goes to it.
• Another window menu. When you right-click on the zoom gadget, you get a popup menu of options like maximize, minimize, iconify, menufy, close, to front, to back, etc.
• A way to move windows from one screen to another - would be cool for multimonitor systems. MUI allows a framework within which to do this - it can close application windows on a screen and reopen them on another screen without quitting the application. An icon in the title bar (like the current settings and iconify buttons) would bring a drop-down menu of available screens.
• A replacement string-gadget that supports drag-select and cut/copy/paste/delete just like the Mac and Windows.
• A textfield.gadget that WORKS.
• WindowShade - a way to "roll up" a application into just its title bar. Many Preferences programs already support this through the zoom gadget. I wonder if there's a way to support double- or triple-click the title bar to roll it off.
• A way to change the fonts on a per-window basis: font promotion. This would have various cosmetic uses, but would really be most useful for supporting old-goodies-but-unupgraded programs that draw right over the titlebar with anything bigger than Topaz/8.
• True drag-and-drop on the Workbench - not just Appicons and drawers, but drag a file onto a program and have the program open the file, not just move the file into the same drawer as the program.
• Pointer promotion - a commodity that sits and waits for the pointer image to change, and replaces it with one you've defined as a replacement. This would let you edit DPaint's pointer, among others - and hopefully allow you to switch to a hi-res pointer in programs that don't support it.
• Datatypes that don't need Chip RAM. This one's self-explanatory.
• Datatypes/Multiview that work in HAM modes - would be SO cool for a HAM workbench!
• And best of all, a Mac emulator that runs Mac software "through" the Amiga interface. A Mac program would open up with an Amiga title bar, all text in Helvetica or whatever, proportional scrollbars, and GadTools (or MUI, more flexible but lots of people hate it) buttons and gadgetry, not to mention right-button menus... all in a window on the Workbench or public screen, just like a native Amiga app... preemptively. (A similar system could run Mac apps "natively" on a BeBox - and thus render Copland unnecessary.)

• The Scarab card. This was Dave Haynie's last project at Commodore - an Amiga graphics card using a standard PC chipset with a custom controller that could convert native "oddball" Amiga graphics modes to PC on the fly, scan rates and all - it could emulate HAM8, it could deinterlace NTSC modes, it could remap the system so the Amiga itself and its software never knew it wasn't using real Amiga hardware, yet your display would be in Super VGA.
• A mouse that is neither optical nor mechanical. Optical mice have trouble doing diagonal lines - the LEDs shine between the dots in the grid, and you get a jerky diagonal motion - and mechanical (ball) mice get dirty. Is there another option? How about a system like those 3-D digitizers? A radio transceiver detects the exact position of the mouse, wherever it is, and maps it to X and Y coordinates. This would be expensive but VERY cool - especially for graphics artists. You could even make a conversion kit, a transmitter sits inside the ball cavity and you reroute the wires back inside the unit to the transmitter, put batteries in it, and your old favorite mouse becomes a wireless.
• This is something I actually built: a Rat. I started with a Commodore A500 mouse with a dying left button, took a momentary pushbutton switch and grafted it onto the left side using hot glue, and ran wires inside to where the left button connected. End result: a mouse with a thumb button. It's the most comfortable mouse I've ever used - and I'd still use it except it's an inch wider than a normal mouse (and those old Amiga mice were too wide anyway). I think it would be cool to put units like that into production - some PC vendors tried a somewhat similar design awhile back, but I think my design is better.
• A middle mouse button for mice that don't have it. It's a microswitch that clamps onto the front of a mouse, hangs over the crack between the two buttons, and has a long, thin cable that fastens onto the existing mouse cable, runs all the way back to the computer, and has a special two-way connector at the other end - you plug the existing mouse cable into one end, and the other end goes into the computer. Voila - instant third mouse button.
• An Amiga 1200-like machine with no processor. It's be a simplified A1200 motherboard with no processor and no hard drive controller - it would ship with a Blizzard or similar belly-board accelerator with a SCSI module. The part count on the motherboard would be way down, saving a few bucks which could then go towards including the accelerator. The finished machine would be an accelerated 1200 with a SIMM socket and a SCSI controller... the perfect machine.
• An A1200 with a ZIP drive. Redesign the 1200 case with a "riser" on the right - say, five inches worth of the back part of the case would be level with the keyboard and contain a ZIP drive, complete with window, facing out the right side of the machine instead of a floppy drive.
• An A1200 with a built-in 15-pin VGA connector, right above the 23-pin. There's room back there - trust me.
• An A1200 with a longer keyboard ribbon cable.
• An Amiga Television. The coolest Macintosh I ever saw was the Macintosh TV, a jet-black Performa-like Mac with a TV tuner card and a Trinitron color tube... and a remote control. A similar Amiga would have sold like hotcakes - the Amiga is perfect for the job, it's built for television from the ground up. Picture an Amiga in a jet-black Maclike case, inbuilt multiscan monitor, a TV tuner card and video capture, a cheap genlock, and a sound digitizer - a full set of audio/video ins and outs on the back, an inbuilt CD-ROM drive, a remote control... the perfect home computer. Hey Viscorp - you listening?
• An Amiga card for Macintosh. Think about it: Quadras are ultra-cheap now, with decently fast 68040 processors and plenty of RAM. Put Paula, Lisa, and Denise on a card with two 8520s and a Kickstart ROM set, put a nine-pin mouse port and a 23-pin floppy port on the back, slap it all on a NuBus card, and stick it in a Quadra 950. Set it up to boot natively from the Kickstart, it'll use the Amiga chipset for Amiga stuff and the Mac's video as RTG-like additional video modes (16- and 24-bit) and the Mac's sound as 16-bit custom sound. The best of both worlds - and you can even run the aforementioned Mac emulator to run Mac apps preemptively.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be redesigning the Rumor Mill in the near future - a whole new look, same old Squid, plus more info and lots more goodies! So stay tuned!