ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MICROPENDIUM P.O. Box 1343 Round Rock TX 78680 Phone 512-255-1512 Internet jkoloen@io.com MICRO REVIEWS for July 1993 by Charles Good On rather short notice I have been asked by Micropenium to take over the Micro Reviews column and have agreed to give it a try, so let me introduce myself. Many of you already know of me from the articles I have written for the Lima newsletter and my efforts in organizing the Lima TI Conferences. I am 47 and have 3 children still living at home (who will help me with game and education software reviews). I teach botany and biology at Ohio State University and am an expert on certain types of fossil plants. Does any of this qualify me as a 99/4A computer expert? Certainly not! Like most of Micropendium's readers I am a mere mortal 99/4A USER, not a programmer or hardware developer. Like many of the rest of you I purchased my first /4A in 1983 and learned about computers by studying the books that came with the console and typing in program listings published in 99er Magazine. I now use my 99/4A for almost all my home and professional computing jobs including manuscript preparation, letter writing, creating exams for my students from a multiple choice question data base, personal finance, mail lists, and games. I have not written any fairware or commercial software and have no affiliation (other than "customer") with any of the companies or dealers that serve the TI community. I am thus an appropriately neutral reviewer. Please loan me your 99/4A software, books, video tapes, and hardware directly to me for review. I am not interested in acquiring a free collection of commercial products so it will be my policy to return commercial products after reviewing them. If I keep anything I will pay for it. My system includes an 80 column device. Please note that I do not own a Geneve and cannot evaluate Geneve specific products. Send your products for review to me at P.O. Box 647, Venedocia Ohio 45894. My evening phone is 419-667-3131 ---------- THE FUNNELWEB V5 40 COLUMN EDITOR The Funnelweb system is frequently updated as new features are added and problems are fixed. Unlike commercial software where users have to pay in advance for updates, Funnelweb users can try out the sharware updates for free. What I am describing is the second release of the v5 40 column editor released in mid June 1993. This supersedes the initial partial release of the v5 40 column editor at the May Lima MUG Conference. There is also a June update of the 80 column v5 editor. These v5 40 and 80 column editors are designed to run from the Funnelweb v4.4 environment. Put the v5 ED and EE files and any desired character set files on your Funnelweb v4.4 system disk. The 80 column v5 editor has already been reviewed in Micro Reviews, with the reviewer stating that it is the only TI word processor he considered superior to MY-WORD on a Geneve. Now 40 column users have access to the same neat new features. The Funnelweb v5 editors have 3 features that are, to the best of my knowledge, not found in any other TI word processor (RAG Writer, TI Writer, First Draft, Writerease, Harrison). 1- Complete multlingual capability. By holding down the space bar as the editor is loading into the computer's memory you are given your choice of the following languages; English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish. Selecting a language gives a command line written in the selected language with appropriate commands. Print File in French is "Imprimer Fiches", and the equivalent French is "IF". An appropriate foreign character set is loaded which allows you to display on screen and print (using your printer's foreign language character sets) accented vouls and other symbols specific to the specified language. There are several alternate ways of displaying and printing these foreign characters. 2- ALL CHARS graphics. If you look in your printer manual you will discover a wide variety of graphic shapes coded with ASCII numbers >127. These include foreign language characters, mathematical symbols, and line graphics. The lines are useful for drawing pictures, designing business forms, and creating borders. They resemble the "lines" created by the commercial software Page Pro or Form Shop. Normally these >127 graphics built into almost all printers are not accrssable directly from a 99/4A or Geneve keyboard, but with the v5 editor they are. CTRL/comma lets you switch back and forth between the normal ASCII <127 letters and ASCII >127 graphics. Everything is properly displayed on screen (WYSIWYG) and can be printed properly directly from the editor with PF (Print File). You don't need the formatter to print these graphics! As the car commercial says, "Now this changes everything." A whole new world of TI graphics has been opened up. 3-Both the June 40 and 80 column v5 editors have enhanced hard drive support. From a ShowDirectory display, if you move the cursor next to the name of a sub directory you can display the file names of that sub directory. Also, you can bring up a display of the root directory of the currently displayed directory from within ShowDirectory. This ability to display the entire hard drive tree structure is, I believe, not found in any other disk manager available to the TI community. (I don't have a TI hard drive, so I can't try this feature out for myself. The description above is based on the v5 editor's documentation.) Among the other nice features not found in previous versions of the Funnelweb editors are help screens dsplayed from the command line, wild card capability with Find/Replace String, the ability to scroll while in the command line, and the ability to goto a particular line number by typing that number and in command mode. I give the Funnelweb v5 editors my very highest recommendation. To obtain either or both of the v5 editors put $1 ($2 for both) in an envelope carefully wraped in a piece of paper with your return address written on it and send it to me at the address above. If you decide to use this software, you owe the authors a fairware donation over and above what you have already paid for other parts of the Funnelweb system. ---------- COLLECTING CARTRIDGES; a book length manuscript by Bill Gaskill. If you are interested in computer history and perhaps enjoyed reading THE ORPHAN CHRONICLES a few years ago then you will like this. Bill has one of the largest personal collections of TI cartridge software. What began as a newsletter article has now been expanded to over 100 printed pages, with additional material planned for future revisions. This scholarly work is based on Bill's personal cartridge collection plus a thorough study of computer magazines (Info World, Byte, Compute, 99er, Enthusiast 99, etc), third party and TI catalogs, and internal TI documents. Bill has found references to over 360 99/4A cartridges, of which he has actually seen 275 in cartridge format. The rest are known only from gram disk files or are products announced but never released. List price or all the 99/4A cartridges that were released exceeds $11000! For each cartridge Bill includes information, where known, on software author, manufacturer's product number, list price, release date, along with a physical description of the cartridge and its original packaging and documentation. The table of contents includes: Cartridge History, Collecting Guidelines, Cartridge Listings and Descriptions, Cartridge Names Sorted by Manufacturer, Cartridge Program References (from published literature), Cartridge Trivia, Command Module Simulator, Cartridge Newsbytes, Milton Bradley MBX System, Romox ECPCs and Software Centers, and The Other Cartridge Using Computers. Under this last heading Bill will in future revisions include descriptions of cartridges for other 1980's computers and game machines by Atari, Coleco, Commodore, Gemini, and Mattel. I recommend this manuscript to anyone wanting a single reference describing the cartridge software available for the 99/4A (much of which is still available from dealers) and anyone interested in computer history. COLLECTING CARTRIDGES is packed with neat historical trivia. A check for $15 sent to Bill Gaskill at 2310 Cypress Court, Grand Junction Colorado 81506 will get you a printed copy of the latest revision.