By Steve Ticehurst

Emulated Accounts and Boot Disks Last time I was here I was talking about my travels throughout the numerous freeware/shareware Atari ST emulators that there seem to be around the Internet. Since then I have played around a bit more and this time managed to put it into some good use. It all follows on about my sister having my Atari STe for the last two years in order to do her accounts and advertising. My sister, you see, runs her own business and for the last three or four years she has been doing the accounts on paper and asking me to produce advertising using Timeworks. This arrangement was quite a good one as she got all her publishing done and I got my name about as someone who could produce such work. However, when I moved down to Brighton we started to run into problems as instead of both of us being able to discuss layouts and fonts with each other, she had to post what she wanted all the way from windy Norfolk to metropolitan Brighton, wait until I did the work, I had to post it back, then she had to reject it, repeat the process a number of times! So as I have no doubt told you countless times before (and one of the main reasons for this column) I gave her my Atari when I did the strange thing of buying a PC. Now things are different. I want my Atari back (more on this in a minute) and my sister would like to be able to do more a lot faster and is asking about PCs. To be honest, I must agree that a PC would be better for her as she would like to do some scanning and retouching of photos, as well as look at Web pages and all the other stuff people like to do on PCs. I know that an Atari setup would probably do most of this for her, but unfortunately today people want to use computers, they don't want to know how to use computers. The two are very different, one presents the user with things like Wizards and Applets while the other waits for the user to tweak configuration files and cables. Nothing anyone can do to change the world, so we have to life with it. Sorry to talk about PCs for a while, but I did manage to pick a little P75 for her and I've just finished setting it up for her and she has it back to Norfolk with a happy grin on her face. This is where the emulation comes in because during the time that she was using my Atari she decided to start doing the accounts on it. I set her up with the accounts program Double Sentry and she has been using that for quite sometime now. She did have a bit of a setback at one time when she tried to print a complete list of all accounts and the printer would suddenly change font and width and print all over the place. I soon tracked it down to one of the account names having an Escape character embedded within it and as soon as the printer came across this it thought the next characters were control codes which just so happened to change the font and width! I guess it must had been the case that when she entered the account name she made a mistake and not knowing what to do she pressed the Esc key in a hope that it would get her out of trouble - little did she know. With all this in mind, and with Mr. Tax Man wanting accounts records for the last 100 years of any business, she had to have this old data available on her new PC. As I had sorted her out with Quicken 95 Deluxe I didn't think this would be too hard as I could simply write a program to convert the Double Sentry files into a text format that Quicken would understand. Unfortunately such a task suddenly did not look so simple when I realised that both accounts programs used completely different methods for accounting. All that, plus the time it always takes me to write a piece of software at home (I'm still working on an accounts program for my Psion S3a which I have been writing for the last six years - it started life on my old S3 Classic!) I decided that maybe I would not do this. We finally get to the point, because this is where I thought I would try to setup an Atari emulator which would load the accounts program and allow her to shift through the old accounts at a click of a mouse button. So onto the computer I installed Pacifist which from my travels through emulation-land before had seemed to be the most stable and useable together. I must admit that I thought TOSBOX was the best one for serious work as you could mess about with the resolution and colours meaning that you were no longer restricted to the three Atari resolutions, but I found it seemed to crash quite often. Thinking about it now, it was around the first part of this year when I was messing about with the emulators so a newer more stable version may be out now. But saying all that, I've had no serious stability problems with Pacifist and all-in-all I think it is quite bullet proof and seems to cope with all most everything. Once installed I drove up to Norfolk and presented the new computer to my sister who like it very much. When it came to how she was going to look through the old accounts I told her not to worry and double-clicked on the icon in the shape of a Mount Fuji which was on the desktop. Upon doing this, the Pacifist screen came up in its own window and a little message at the bottom telling me that it could not find an operating system. Would you believe it, I had setup the computer, driven hundreds of miles , and I had forgotten to put a version of TOS on the harddisk. The whole thing was setup but without TOS you could not do anything! After that slight problem I finally managed to install TOS a month later when she came down to Brighton and this time I was able to show her what happened when you double-clicked on the Fuji. Upon doing this, the Pacifist screen came up and then the familiar screen of TOS1.62 booting up, finally loading Double Sentry and before you knew it you were using a good old Atari STe and had access to your accounts. As far as my sister was concerned she didn't really know that you were infact running an emulation of an Atari in order to run the old accounts program, she simply knew that by using the Fuji icon you could use what you were used to. As it was, she was running an emulation of a computer ontop of another computer in order to run an everyday application. PowerMac users do the same thing with a lot of the operating system running on an emulated 680x0 chip without knowing about it most of the time, and finally I had the opportunity to do it with this. After I had sorted my sister out with her new PC and her emulated accounts it meant that I could finally start work on my Atari. Ever since I got it back from my sister it had been standing up against the wall of the "official" Moleville computer room (although I must admit that me and my girlfriend haven't quite sorted out the name of this room yet, but computer room is looking good - especially as it does seem to be collecting a number of computers in it!) gathering dust. I tell a lie, I did turn it up the other way so that the disk drive was facing downwards. As I had spent a couple of weeks sanding the skirting-board in the bedroom next door there was a thick layer of dust settling on everything in the whole house and so it seemed like a good idea to save the disk drive! The other week I did actually get time to setup the Atari. I put the boot disk in the drive and turned the Atari on. This I had done thousands of times before in the past and it certainly brought back memories of spending evenings at the computer after school programming and writing music. I have always thought that the boot disk was a very personal thing and no one had the same configuration as someone else. I remember basing a whole article about my own particular boot disk, but do keep reading as I won't force it upon you now. My own boot disk had changed a lot over the years. Starting as a disk with a couple of desk accessories to a fully multi-tasking system with a replacement desktop and nearly everything else possible to replace. I must had used this disk a lot of times as over the years I had got through around 10 different disks as each one had ended up having so many bad tracks that they failed to work. All of this remembering made me forget the main part of the boot up which was that it did not simply require one boot disk, but it required a second "data disk" in drive B which would be used to fill up the 2Meg RAM disk that was created. This reset-proof RAM disk held software such as a simple text editor and a command line interface. I suppose it presented me with a system where I had everything I needed without having to hunt around for floppy disks, the nearest I could get to a harddisk and certainly the cheapest. But the unfortunate thing was that I could not for the life of me find this data disk and it seems to happen that it was the one disk that I failed to make a backup of. Infact, if I remember correctly, I always used to think that I should make a backup as if the disk ever went wrong I would loose a lot of work. Pity really, although I do have a lot of boxes after my recent house move which are still not opened. That does leave me however with only half a system and it gets worse. One of the things I used my Atari for was to record music from a MIDI keyboard and this is what I had in mind as my main use of it now. I haven't been able to play for a number of years now due to lack of time but now I want to start playing and recording again. However, not only is the data disk missing but so are my MIDI leads, and they are simply not any normal leads. They are very long leads that I bought when I first got my Atari and although I did not mean to buy cables of such a length I have been happy eversince as all other leads I have seen have been about two meters in length which means you have to play the keyboard nearly sitting ontop of the Atari! I liked my leads because you could play the keyboard in one town while having the Atari 10 miles in the next town and still have plenty of length to play with! All issues minor points, silly and certainly sad that I should be a bit upset about them, but bear with me as I simply wanted to be everything the same as I remembered. The last point is a bit most serious however and that is that the mouse does not work. I don't know about you but I have got through so many of these things both on the Atari, the PC, and even my Commodore-64 had slight mouse problems would you believe. It got so worse last year that I decided I had had enough and bought a trackball thinking that it should last a lot longer. No luck, a year later and I am looking for something new, I have event considered voice recognition but I think I will have to wait a couple more years and mouses until that will work. But sorry, as I have been talking all about pretty pointless things this month and I still have not done anything worth while with the Atari. I did actually download some Atari software over the weekend which was quite an adventure. The last time I did this was at University when web pages were something everyone thought were a waste of time as gopher did everything we wanted it to do. Computers with Atari archives seemed to be all over the place and I fondly remember ftping loads of software via a VT100 terminal and then skipping lectures while I watched as Kermit transferred 20K of files from the UNIX server to my floppy disk on a dodgy old PC AT. I won't forget when I did this one time for an 80K file that took nearly two hours to download onto the floppy. Last weekend I had small problems though as it took me longer to find an Atari archive than it did to download it. I finally managed to track down a mirror of the Umich archive, located GhostLink and waited the 10 seconds while it downloaded all 20K of it. Sorry, I have been using the PC too long, I'm more used to downloading Megs worth of software and waiting hours, not 20K. All this is a different story though and I just starting to mess about with it. For those who do not know, GhostLink allows you to access your PC drives on the Atari desktop using a serial cable. So far I have been very impressed, but more on that another month I think as I have only just got it all working and it is a bit hard when you are using the keyboard to drive the mouse! Next time I hope to have got everything setup so that I can use my PC as a fileserver to my Atari and work on the computer as normal saving files in one location regardless what computer. It will also mean I will have full access to my parallel Zip drive and CD drive which may open up a whole load of new types of files that I can access.