Ted Skrecky
Member
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2025
- Messages
- 22
Available at Internet Archive:
In this issue:
Atari News and Rumours by Rowland Grant:
The rumours are spreading that Atari plans to discontinue its Jaguar game system, but this has been vigorously denied by Ted Hoff, Atari USA’s President. In addition to the Jaguar, Ted Hoff has confirmed that Atari Interactive has been formed to develop games for PC, Macintosh, PlayStation, and Saturn platforms. Twenty game titles will be released for the Jaguar in 1996, and Atari will be allocating the bulk of its funds to Jaguar development. / With respect to the recent layoffs at Atari, Ted Hoff says only a dozen positions were terminated. / Hoff has also confirmed there will be no further development of the virtual reality headset, especially since some users have reported it made them feel “woozy.” / Some game developers have reported that Atari is uninterested in new game proposals for the Jaguar. / There are reports that Atari is recruiting more staff for the Jaguar-2 project. / The negative rumours about Atari resulted in the stock price dropping to $1.08, but the price rebounded to $2 with Ted Hoff’s positive statements about Atari Interactive. / On December 1st, 1995, Goldstar dropped the price of its 3DO system to $199 and added two extra games. Atari responded by dropping the price of the Jaguar to $99 US. / From mid-November, the following Jaguar games became available: Ruiner Pinball, Dragon’s Lair CD, Atari Karts, Fever Pitch Soccer, Supercross 3D, Missile Command, I-War, Battlemorph CD, Primal Rage CD, Myst CD, Space Ace CD, and Baldies CD. / There are 2,000 Walmart stores in the United States, and 400 of them are now selling the Jaguar. / Radio Shack has advertised a package deal of a Jaguar console with Cybermorph and Iron Soldier for $200. / The experimental Jaguar mall store outsold all other game platforms in the same mall by 20 to 1. / Atari has an estimated 9,000 outlets for the Jaguar in North America. / In Canada, most stores have dropped the Jaguar because Beamscope has not been shipping any products. / The Electronic Boutique stores in Vancouver receive their products directly from EB, so they are selling the latest Jaguar games and the Jaguar consoles at the new lower price. / In Germany, there are rumours that the Atari distributor, ABC Spielspass/Rushware, received only 180 Jaguar CD-ROM units from Atari, and has now dropped Atari support after Atari could not fill an order for 10,000 Jaguar consoles. Germany has an estimated user-base of 500,000 Atari ST owners, but only 15,000 for the Atari Jaguar. / All manufacturing for the Jaguar is located in the United States. / Sony is rumoured to have spent $500 million to launch its PlayStation game system.
PEEKing Around (Gossip Column) by Gordon F. Hooper:
Mike Harrison, a former club member, has donated a large collection of Atari 8-bit hardware and software, which has been distributed among the 8-bit club members. Have you heard about the Windows 95 programmer named Gary, who died? If not, you will want to read Gord’s PEEKing Around column in this issue.
Game Machine Review by Douglas Skrecky
A Very Short Story by an Unknown Author:
This is a humorous article, originally published in the October 1994 issue of News Journal, the newsletter of the Lake Country Area Computer Enthusiasts, Waukegan, Illinois.
GCACE Meetings by Rowland Grant:
The November 1995 meeting featured word processors, with John Towler demonstrating Word Writer ST, Gordon Hooper demonstrating Marcel, a shareware word processor, and Ted Skrecky demonstrating Everest, a shareware text editor from Germany. / Bob Lussier, our correspondent in Vancouver, sent us several disks of ST software as follows: Star Wars (pictures and sounds), Observer (document and picture displayer), the Duplicator, Personal Golf Database, Wilkinson Enterprises Collection (databases, etc), Ponds and Watergardens, and Astro 22 (astrology). / A holiday greeting card has been received from NWPAC. The card is printed in colour on both sides of the jacket of NWPAC’s 1995 Christmas Disk. / A collection of newsletters has arrived from the Nova Scotia Atari Computer User Group (NSACUG) in Halifax. / John Picken has received a package from ABBUC (Atari Bit Byter User Club) in Germany. ABBUC produces a regular newsletter every three months and a special newsletter every six months.
ST News by Rowland Grant:
The ProTOS show was held in Hennef, Germany, on November 25 and 26, 1995. The Medusa TT clones were on display at this show, but not the rival Eagle ST/TT clone. Medusa has introduced the Hades, a 68040 system with a PCI-type bus containing card sockets, allowing for the use of standard PC video cards and other devices. The Hades will be priced at 3,000 Deutsche Marks (DM) and the Medusa T40 at 5,000 DM, with one German Mark equal to one Canadian Dollar. / C-Lab’s new Falcon Mk X computer was shown at ProTOS, which uses a separate AT-type keyboard and has a large case, providing room for internal expansion. / Computer Direct in Edmonton is selling the Afterburner040 at $1,300 (Canadian) for the Falcon 030 computer, giving it a speed increase of 14X. / The Panther hardware upgrade from Germany, priced at 200 DM, is an adapter for standard ISA bus video cards, allowing TOS computers to use VGA or SVGA monitors. / Several ST users have reported that a ZIP drive can be used as a SCSI device, allowing the computer to boot from it. / Priced at 40 pounds sterling, System Solutions in the UK is selling RSVE, a hardware modification so Atari TOS computers can use high-speed modems with the addition of the HSMODEM software patch. / Darek Mihocka’s Gemulator 4.1, an Atari ST emulator, will now run under Windows 95 and Windows NT. / The latest version of David Small’s MagicMac Atari ST emulator will now run on PowerPC Macs. / Magic 4.0, an alternate multi-tasking ST operating system for the Atari Falcon 030 and TT computers, was premiered at the ProTOS show. / Arabesque 2, priced at $300, is a colour vector graphics program similar to CorelDRAW on the PC.
8-bit Affairs by Rowland Grant:
Atari produced several Atari 8-bit cartridge games that were never released. B&C ComputerVisions has listed the following six prototype games for sale: Tower Toppler, Deflector, Berserk, Super Pac-Man, Superman III, and Kangaroo. It is rumoured that they have the rights to manufacture additional copies of these cartridge games. Best Electronics also has these games. (Update: The Best Electronics website lists these games as still available for purchase, with Deflektor and Tower Toppler priced at $36.95 each.) / In 1982, Scott Ludwig wrote two games, Quarxon and Caterpiggle, a Pac-Man style of game where you eat caterpillars while trying to avoid hostile enemies. Both games were distributed by the Atari Program Exchange (APX). Scott now works for Microsoft and has released his games into the public domain. / The copyright to Alternate Reality: The City and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon have reverted to Philip Price’s Paradise Programming development company. (Update: Both games are rated as “classics” on the Atari 8-bit. AR: The City was ported to the Atari ST, but it really doesn’t measure up to the original. Alternate Reality X is a modern remake, which I assume is for the PC, but it has not progressed beyond the development stage, with the last mention of an update in 2016. / There are rumours that Mike Hohman’s Mars-8 board will be ready by early 1996. / Jacek Zuk and Konrad Kokoszkiewicz of Poland are working on an IDE interface for the Atari 8-bit. / Nelson Nieves is developing a collection of utilities for SpartaDOS. One of them is vUnErase, allowing for the restoration of deleted files and directories. / Steven Tucker has released version 1.07 of Atari Peripheral Emulator (APE). The new version can create PRO image files directly from an Atari 1050 disk drive. / The latest version of Darek Mihocka’s PC Xformer has the option to boot from a 1050 disk drive, so it should be possible to run copy-protected disks. / Darek Mihocka highly recommends the POOLDISK CD-ROM, produced by Ernest Schreurs. There are several hundred megabytes of Atari 8-bit software in XFD disk image format. The POOLDISK contains programs for converting XFD files to ATR format. / Ben Poehland, “the 8-bit alchemist” in Current Notes, founder and past editor of Atari Classics, has sold his Atari 8-bit collection and will buy a PC clone. / Dale Wooster, president of NWPAC, has decided to return to Texas, to be nearer to his family. NWPAC plans to continue operating, but will shut down the PAUGS BBS. / Clay Halliwell has spent the last five months in the US Air Force, but now plans to continue development of Flickerterm 80, an 80-column terminal program.
RAM/ROM Control on XL/XE by John Picken:
This is a continuation of John’s technical 8-bit article from the last issue of XIO3.
A Fan For Your ST! By Alex Chamberlain:
This is a detailed article about installing a fan in your 1040 ST or 1040 STe case. The reason for doing this is to provide internal cooling, helping to prolong the life of your ST computer.
BONUS: Version 2.3.4 of the Marcel word processor has been uploaded to this XIO3 newsletter archive (MARCEL_A.LZH and MRCEL234.LZH). Run UNLZH172.PRG on an Atari ST computer to extract the LZH files. Combining the Marcel word processor and the dictionary on a single floppy disk will require 757479 bytes of storage space. You can run FCOPY_3.PRG on your ST and select 10 sectors per track before formatting a disk, which will give you enough disk capacity.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: The Everest text editor for the ST is available in the September / October 1992 XIO3 Newsletter archive.
XIO3 Garden City Atari Computer Enthusiasts Newsletter January / February 1996 : Garden City Atari Computer Enthusiasts : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
In this issue: Atari News and Rumours by Rowland Grant: The rumours are spreading that Atari plans to discontinue its Jaguar game system, but this has...
archive.org
Atari News and Rumours by Rowland Grant:
The rumours are spreading that Atari plans to discontinue its Jaguar game system, but this has been vigorously denied by Ted Hoff, Atari USA’s President. In addition to the Jaguar, Ted Hoff has confirmed that Atari Interactive has been formed to develop games for PC, Macintosh, PlayStation, and Saturn platforms. Twenty game titles will be released for the Jaguar in 1996, and Atari will be allocating the bulk of its funds to Jaguar development. / With respect to the recent layoffs at Atari, Ted Hoff says only a dozen positions were terminated. / Hoff has also confirmed there will be no further development of the virtual reality headset, especially since some users have reported it made them feel “woozy.” / Some game developers have reported that Atari is uninterested in new game proposals for the Jaguar. / There are reports that Atari is recruiting more staff for the Jaguar-2 project. / The negative rumours about Atari resulted in the stock price dropping to $1.08, but the price rebounded to $2 with Ted Hoff’s positive statements about Atari Interactive. / On December 1st, 1995, Goldstar dropped the price of its 3DO system to $199 and added two extra games. Atari responded by dropping the price of the Jaguar to $99 US. / From mid-November, the following Jaguar games became available: Ruiner Pinball, Dragon’s Lair CD, Atari Karts, Fever Pitch Soccer, Supercross 3D, Missile Command, I-War, Battlemorph CD, Primal Rage CD, Myst CD, Space Ace CD, and Baldies CD. / There are 2,000 Walmart stores in the United States, and 400 of them are now selling the Jaguar. / Radio Shack has advertised a package deal of a Jaguar console with Cybermorph and Iron Soldier for $200. / The experimental Jaguar mall store outsold all other game platforms in the same mall by 20 to 1. / Atari has an estimated 9,000 outlets for the Jaguar in North America. / In Canada, most stores have dropped the Jaguar because Beamscope has not been shipping any products. / The Electronic Boutique stores in Vancouver receive their products directly from EB, so they are selling the latest Jaguar games and the Jaguar consoles at the new lower price. / In Germany, there are rumours that the Atari distributor, ABC Spielspass/Rushware, received only 180 Jaguar CD-ROM units from Atari, and has now dropped Atari support after Atari could not fill an order for 10,000 Jaguar consoles. Germany has an estimated user-base of 500,000 Atari ST owners, but only 15,000 for the Atari Jaguar. / All manufacturing for the Jaguar is located in the United States. / Sony is rumoured to have spent $500 million to launch its PlayStation game system.
PEEKing Around (Gossip Column) by Gordon F. Hooper:
Mike Harrison, a former club member, has donated a large collection of Atari 8-bit hardware and software, which has been distributed among the 8-bit club members. Have you heard about the Windows 95 programmer named Gary, who died? If not, you will want to read Gord’s PEEKing Around column in this issue.
Game Machine Review by Douglas Skrecky
A Very Short Story by an Unknown Author:
This is a humorous article, originally published in the October 1994 issue of News Journal, the newsletter of the Lake Country Area Computer Enthusiasts, Waukegan, Illinois.
GCACE Meetings by Rowland Grant:
The November 1995 meeting featured word processors, with John Towler demonstrating Word Writer ST, Gordon Hooper demonstrating Marcel, a shareware word processor, and Ted Skrecky demonstrating Everest, a shareware text editor from Germany. / Bob Lussier, our correspondent in Vancouver, sent us several disks of ST software as follows: Star Wars (pictures and sounds), Observer (document and picture displayer), the Duplicator, Personal Golf Database, Wilkinson Enterprises Collection (databases, etc), Ponds and Watergardens, and Astro 22 (astrology). / A holiday greeting card has been received from NWPAC. The card is printed in colour on both sides of the jacket of NWPAC’s 1995 Christmas Disk. / A collection of newsletters has arrived from the Nova Scotia Atari Computer User Group (NSACUG) in Halifax. / John Picken has received a package from ABBUC (Atari Bit Byter User Club) in Germany. ABBUC produces a regular newsletter every three months and a special newsletter every six months.
ST News by Rowland Grant:
The ProTOS show was held in Hennef, Germany, on November 25 and 26, 1995. The Medusa TT clones were on display at this show, but not the rival Eagle ST/TT clone. Medusa has introduced the Hades, a 68040 system with a PCI-type bus containing card sockets, allowing for the use of standard PC video cards and other devices. The Hades will be priced at 3,000 Deutsche Marks (DM) and the Medusa T40 at 5,000 DM, with one German Mark equal to one Canadian Dollar. / C-Lab’s new Falcon Mk X computer was shown at ProTOS, which uses a separate AT-type keyboard and has a large case, providing room for internal expansion. / Computer Direct in Edmonton is selling the Afterburner040 at $1,300 (Canadian) for the Falcon 030 computer, giving it a speed increase of 14X. / The Panther hardware upgrade from Germany, priced at 200 DM, is an adapter for standard ISA bus video cards, allowing TOS computers to use VGA or SVGA monitors. / Several ST users have reported that a ZIP drive can be used as a SCSI device, allowing the computer to boot from it. / Priced at 40 pounds sterling, System Solutions in the UK is selling RSVE, a hardware modification so Atari TOS computers can use high-speed modems with the addition of the HSMODEM software patch. / Darek Mihocka’s Gemulator 4.1, an Atari ST emulator, will now run under Windows 95 and Windows NT. / The latest version of David Small’s MagicMac Atari ST emulator will now run on PowerPC Macs. / Magic 4.0, an alternate multi-tasking ST operating system for the Atari Falcon 030 and TT computers, was premiered at the ProTOS show. / Arabesque 2, priced at $300, is a colour vector graphics program similar to CorelDRAW on the PC.
8-bit Affairs by Rowland Grant:
Atari produced several Atari 8-bit cartridge games that were never released. B&C ComputerVisions has listed the following six prototype games for sale: Tower Toppler, Deflector, Berserk, Super Pac-Man, Superman III, and Kangaroo. It is rumoured that they have the rights to manufacture additional copies of these cartridge games. Best Electronics also has these games. (Update: The Best Electronics website lists these games as still available for purchase, with Deflektor and Tower Toppler priced at $36.95 each.) / In 1982, Scott Ludwig wrote two games, Quarxon and Caterpiggle, a Pac-Man style of game where you eat caterpillars while trying to avoid hostile enemies. Both games were distributed by the Atari Program Exchange (APX). Scott now works for Microsoft and has released his games into the public domain. / The copyright to Alternate Reality: The City and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon have reverted to Philip Price’s Paradise Programming development company. (Update: Both games are rated as “classics” on the Atari 8-bit. AR: The City was ported to the Atari ST, but it really doesn’t measure up to the original. Alternate Reality X is a modern remake, which I assume is for the PC, but it has not progressed beyond the development stage, with the last mention of an update in 2016. / There are rumours that Mike Hohman’s Mars-8 board will be ready by early 1996. / Jacek Zuk and Konrad Kokoszkiewicz of Poland are working on an IDE interface for the Atari 8-bit. / Nelson Nieves is developing a collection of utilities for SpartaDOS. One of them is vUnErase, allowing for the restoration of deleted files and directories. / Steven Tucker has released version 1.07 of Atari Peripheral Emulator (APE). The new version can create PRO image files directly from an Atari 1050 disk drive. / The latest version of Darek Mihocka’s PC Xformer has the option to boot from a 1050 disk drive, so it should be possible to run copy-protected disks. / Darek Mihocka highly recommends the POOLDISK CD-ROM, produced by Ernest Schreurs. There are several hundred megabytes of Atari 8-bit software in XFD disk image format. The POOLDISK contains programs for converting XFD files to ATR format. / Ben Poehland, “the 8-bit alchemist” in Current Notes, founder and past editor of Atari Classics, has sold his Atari 8-bit collection and will buy a PC clone. / Dale Wooster, president of NWPAC, has decided to return to Texas, to be nearer to his family. NWPAC plans to continue operating, but will shut down the PAUGS BBS. / Clay Halliwell has spent the last five months in the US Air Force, but now plans to continue development of Flickerterm 80, an 80-column terminal program.
RAM/ROM Control on XL/XE by John Picken:
This is a continuation of John’s technical 8-bit article from the last issue of XIO3.
A Fan For Your ST! By Alex Chamberlain:
This is a detailed article about installing a fan in your 1040 ST or 1040 STe case. The reason for doing this is to provide internal cooling, helping to prolong the life of your ST computer.
BONUS: Version 2.3.4 of the Marcel word processor has been uploaded to this XIO3 newsletter archive (MARCEL_A.LZH and MRCEL234.LZH). Run UNLZH172.PRG on an Atari ST computer to extract the LZH files. Combining the Marcel word processor and the dictionary on a single floppy disk will require 757479 bytes of storage space. You can run FCOPY_3.PRG on your ST and select 10 sectors per track before formatting a disk, which will give you enough disk capacity.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: The Everest text editor for the ST is available in the September / October 1992 XIO3 Newsletter archive.