SEAL Meeting Reports from January to March 2001

2nd March 2001

Paul Mounsey had bought a BVision, BMon, scan doubler and a set 3.1 ROMs from Jeff Martin who brought them along to the meeting to be fitted. After everything was in place there were some power problems which Mick Sutton spotted were due to a terminal pushing back through one of the power connectors. Even with this fixed the scan doubler still wouldn't work on Paul's machine (although it was fine on Rob's A3000, strange!) but Paul also had his trusty Philips 8833MkII so we had a two monitor set-up to get the BVision working. Eventually we could get on with installing CyberGraphX for the BVision and after a bit of tweaking on CGXMode we had a beautiful 1024x768 display on Paul's 19" monitor. Paul also had OS3.9 to install but unfortunately his CD-ROM was playing up (he's been having problems with it for some time) so he'll be doing that once he's got a new CD-ROM.
Robert Williams had downloaded Battle Duel, a very slick version of the classic artillery game which had just been made freeware. Although it's a very simple game it's fun and addictive to play and this version has loads of features including Internet play!

Rob had also brought the full version of Payback with him and several members had a go at this excellent game.

16th February 2001

Members chat while waiting for the OS3.9 demo to start,
the projector used for the demo is in the foreground.

At the begining of the meeting Robert distributed the new issue of SEAL's Clubbed magazine to members. The new issue seemed to go down well, members who were not at the meeting should receive their copy in the post in the next few days. For more details of the mag vist the Clubbed page.

Mick showed off the demo of Payback, Apex Design's new "drive-em-up" game. This looks really fantastic and the full game is available now from their website.
The main attraction was a demonstration of AmigaOS 3.9, released in December by Amiga and Haage and Partner. Robert showed the major features and new utilities included with the new OS version, with particular emphasis on what a great upgrade it is from OS 3.0 or 3.1. Several other members chipped in with their comments and experiences with the the new version. To suppliment the demo Robert and Mick had produced a fact sheet listing the new features, system requirements and where 3.9 and the 3.1 ROMs it requires can be purchased.

2nd February 2001

A fairly quiet meeting, for once no one had any major problems! We had some useful discussions on the structure of the club for the forth coming AGM.

Robert Williams had just received Earth 2140 (the new Real Time Strategy game from Pagan and Epic Interactive) so some members we able to give it a go on his A3000.

19th January 2001

Mick Sutton and Robert Williams demonstrated the recently released ArtEffect 4 from Haage and Partner. To show off the program's layer capabilities they worked through the process of creating the "usual suspects" mug shots from our Members page. They used the image of Jeff as an example, this is made up of 5 layers: the background, height chart, Jeff's image, the black board and finally the text. Generally members seemed impressed with the power and ease of use of this package. A full review and tutorial will be in the new issue of Clubbed.

Elliott Bird brought along his A1200 which suddenly (I didn't touch it, honest) refused to work. After taking it apart and removing all the expansions to try and find the problem Elliott revealed that he had tried a novel approach to networking... by connecting the A1200's parallel port to the serial port of another Amiga... Doh! Oh well we all make mistakes and at least the other Amiga (an A4000) survived the ordeal!

5th January 2001

Paul Mountsey had just installed a BlizzardPPC '040 in his towered A1200 but was having problems with SetPatch crashing in the startup. We first tried updating the 680x0 libraries (which are loaded by SetPatch) to the latest version but this didn't cure the problem. Remembering similar problems Mick Sutton had when he first got his PPC we added Run >NIL: in front of SetPatch in Paul's startup-sequence and then the machine booted reliably. We were unable to update the PPC's flash ROM at the meeting but we hope doing so in the future will give a permanent cure.

Alf Whitfield brought his A4000 along again now with OS3.9 sucessfully installed. At the meeting two problems came to light that could possibly be due to OS3.9. Firstly Alf could not get DrawStudio (the excellent structured drawing program now available from Kickstart) to run, the loading window appeared and then nothing. He tried re-installing but still had no joy. Alf suspected that it might be a disk related problem so he tried using QuarterBackTools to repair the drive, loads of errors appeared and eventually he had to cancel leaving the disk "BAD". After reformating we tried the QBT Analyse function and even that caused the drive to go bad so it looks like QBT may disagree with the OS3.9 version of FastFileSystem. Robert now has OS3.9 so he will be trying DrawStudio with it tomorrow.

Update - 7th January 2001

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