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Hissing Chris is innocent

Just a quick note to praise Chris at ASP for his help setting-up my CD-ROM with MetaDOS . Chris talked me into buying a CD-ROM a few weeks earlier and asked me what ID and Drive I wanted so when it arrived it was all set up - all I had to do was to copy the files over to my Auto folder and reboot.

I recently needed to change the ID from 5 to 4, so my ZIP drive could run on ID4, which was a two minute job with Chris's help. Well done Chris, keep up the good work, and to Atari Computing for keeping us all informed.

Karl Smith, by email

** CHRISASP.GIF here **
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Chris from ASP looking after his customers at SAMS'99
** /caption **   
Customer always right?

I have been buying your magazine for about a year now and I think it is the best of the magazines to date for the Atari platform. I find your product reviews and Q&A section very useful.

Your ads have helped me locate products that have satisfied my projects. I have found the manufacturers, programmers, and so on, very supportive of their products. I have recently purchased products from Line Audio and have had great support from Roger Jonsson. I recently purchased CD Recorder Pro2 from SoundPool and am happy with their product. The SoundPackage is a very nice simple D2D recording, editing program. The instructions cover all of one letter size page, and it works very well.

Roger Burrows from Anodyne in Canada has done a great job of improving Extendos to the Gold version. It installs itself in a flash and recognises almost every brand of CD-ROM reader. Extendos Gold now has a recorder function that will allow you to copy, tracks or whole Audio CD's to a hard drive. CD Writer then will allow you to burn a new Audio CD. It works very well and on any system from an Atari ST upwards.

Dave Leippe, Sacramento, CA, via the ataricomputing web pages

Colour blind?

If you're still using a colour monitor with your ST this just will NOT do! I've recently made the change and am here to dispel some of the common misconceptions.

Mono is boring - this is complete rubbish, there are plenty of games which run in mono resolutions. My favourite mono games include GEM NetHack, all the Ishar games and Oxyd. If you really miss colour games you can always hook up the telly for a session or run on of the various colour emulators kicking about. Decent new games are a little thin on the ground anyway so why not purchase a games console and play on that, leaving your Atari free to do proper things!

I found using a colour monitor to write text would often give me a headache and the mono image is sooo much sharper. With 640x400 you get a four times the workspace, compared with ST low resolution and you get a much better idea what you're doing.

Attempting to display web pages in colour on an a ST is a challenge! Displayed in mono, they're a lot easier to read - although the images don't look very good thanks to CAB's poor (but fast) dithering routines.

You can always display images in a dedicated file viewer. Check out Stuart Denman's excellent Speed-Of-Light GIF/JPEG viewer which does a wonderful job dithering colour images to mono.
	
You can even save memory running in mono. You won't need a virtual screen program and you can replace colour desktop icons with mono equivalents using a RSC file editor. Most new releases expect at least 640x400 resolution anyway so you won't be stuck with out of date software.

Track down a SM124 monitor from the AC classified page or pick up any standard PC S/VGA monitor and buy one of ASP's VGA monitor adapters - I doubt you'll regret it.

** VGA adapter piccie nicked from Mario's ad in AC13 p16 here? **
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The ASP VGA monitor adapters, designed by Mario Becroft, enables most (S)VGA monitors to be connected to any Atari
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Matt Burton, Derbyshire

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Before we used to bang on about getting on-line, switching from using a colour TV to using a proper monitor was one of our favourite themes so it's nice to get back to our roots - it's a straightforward black and white decision!
** /B **