Jul 87 Mousehole
Volume Number: 3
Issue Number: 7
Column Tag: Mousehole Report
Mousehole Report 
By Rusty Hodge, Mousehole BBS
1st MAC Clone
From: Julio Carneiro
As the MAC II is starting to be shipped, a MAC Clone is hitting the stores here.
This is a 512K MAC (64K ROM’s!!!). Can You guess the price for it (4-5K). Can you
imagine that??? The only difference is that it uses a 800K internal drive (running
MFS). Anyone interested in developping software to this machine (called MAC512)
“eh! eh! eh!”. They have changed the Apple menu to a butterfly menu (ugly), I think
to get rid of been sued (eh eh eh).... Their plans is to build (and sell) 300
MAC512/month??? THIS IS NOT A JOKE. I HAVE SEEN THE MACHINE. IT IS REAL.
MacApp Paint
From: Lsr
Well, MacApp Paint was mentioned in the November (or maybe December)
1986 issue of MacWorld. If any one has gone to a MacApp talk (at MacWorld Expo, for
example), the program is generally shown as a demo of MacApp. My purpose in
writing it was to demonstrate that writing a program using MacApp and
object-oriented programming doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice performance. For a
window that’s about the MacPaint size, the performance is very close to that of
MacPaint. If you make the window larger or draw large shapes then the performance
degrades proportionally.
The program implements the easiest features of MacPaint/FullPaint. You can
draw rectangles, ovals, lines; the paint brush, eraser, and spray paint works, the
marquee works (moving, copy, paste). The more recent versions have text and
scaling (1-16 times). Since the program is written using MacApp, it has
autoscrolling for all operations. Unlike FullPaint, you can draw a rectangle (or
anything) the size of the document. Also, the window can be expanded upto the size of
the document. You can also open as many windows are you have memory for. (To be
fair to FullPaint, their design center was a program that could edit 4 docs at once on a
512K machine; they also implement some complicated commands that require
multiple offscreen buffers, each of which has to be as large as the largest area you can
edit at once. To satisfy all these constraints, they limited the maximum edit area to the
size of the std Mac screen.)
There is also a version of the program that does color on a Mac II. (Same
sources, with conditional compilation.) This version works with 8-bit deep color
images; the speed is about the same as the balck and white version on a Mac Plus. As
Jim implied, MacApp Paint is a demo and it is not being distributed. The MacApp
product manager is tryingto get permission to distributed the application through the
MacApp Developers Association. The main problem is that the application has enough
features that developers might complain that Apple is doing application software.
Also, users might think that this was a pre-release of a new Apple product. (In
reality, there are no plans to make this into a product.)
If people are interested, I am willing to discuss some of the implementeatio
details. In particular, the way in which the objects are structures is fairly
interesting. (For example, there is a Bitmap object that manages the offscreen
bitmaps.) I don’t know if this should be the exact place, or if the discussion should
move to the MacApp section.
MacApp Paint palettes
From: Lsr
Jim also mentioned the MacApp Paint palettes on the Mac II (and other large
screens). On the std Mac screen the palettes are in the same place as with MacPaint.
If one were to position the palettes at the same place on a large screen, they would fall
in the middle of the screen. To counter this, I explicitly move the palettes down so
they are out of the way. I also make the default window size bigger, to take advantage
of the extra screen space. I think this arrangement works out best. Accessing the
palettes is not too bad, because the palettes are also available in custom menus. You
can zoom a drawing window to the full screen size (covering the palettes) and still
have full access to everything through the menus. On later versions of the program,
I implemented a hack in which Cmd-click in a palette allows you to move it. My
palettes are implemented as real windows, which never come to the front. So you can
click on a tool in the palette and immediately begin using it without having to change
windows too much.
New System 4.1
From: Jim Reekes
System 4.1 is a major revision. I may have been pessimistic about 4.0, but now
I feel more confident with the new release. 3.2 gave us meat, and 4.1 is the potatoes
and gravy. I do have a question regarding Apple’s documentation of the changes. RE:
‘DRVR’ (18,.Control Panel, Purgeable) [4612] The RAM cache arrows and size
indicators do not appear if the control panel is running under switcher or twitcher.
QUESTION: What’s a “twitcher”? [A new version of Switcher they’ve been juggling
with?- Rusty]
PRINTING
From: Power Hopeful
I have tried printing in draft from MPW w/ the the mentioned configuartion to
no avail. I noticed that of the 3 ‘PREC’ resources, two were identical save a 1 and a 0
at the offset where I figured the spool vs. draft offset to be. I assumed MPW was
always accessing the one w/ spool, so I changed the id’s around. TO NO AVAIL again.
I’ve noticed also that any app that offers a job dialog box prints only in Monaco when
draft is selected. This, as I’ve mentioned many times, is a major source of irritation
to me, and I’d appreciate ANY suggestions to be able to print accurately in draft mode.
By the way, does anyone want me to beta-test their Mac II??
Does it run?
From: Frank Henriquez
Tried several programs on the Mac II today. The first was Turbo Pascal. It loaded
fine (and even opened up the window to the edges of the Mac II screen - nice touch). I
compiled the standard MyDemo.pas (which compiled in 1 - 3 seconds) and then ran
Mydemo. That also worked. (The Sieve gave a time of 1.1 seconds, vs. a standard 512K
Mac time of 5.9 secs). The only problem (albeit a MAJOR one) was when I tried to quit
the demo and return to Turbo. It crashed the machine. After some thought, I figured it
had to do with lauching one program from within another.
Then, we tried LightSpeed Pascal, and it died a miserable death - the editor did
strange things to the menu bar, and in general Lightspeed acted in a very unfriendly
way. The last program I tested, for sentimental reasons (it being the first program I
bought for my Mac) was MacASM. As expected, it did not work, writing garbage to the
screen. It DID however, accept by typed command to quit to the Finder. Frank
Where’s the color pallet?
From: Jim Reekes
Hey man, I had used a pre-release Finder on the Mac II that allowed me to choose
my own colors. There was a ‘Color’ menu next to the ‘Special’ menu. Then by
selecting an icon or folder, I could then go to the menu and select a color for it. This
way I had all my folder in green, utilities in blue, applications in red, and documents
in yellow (or what ever). I could even ‘View by Color’, which was just like view by
name but the folder/files were sorted into groups according to their colors. Neat!
And where’s the Color Pallet? There is suppose to be a ‘cdev’ in the System Folder so
that when I open the control panel I could rearrange the color spectrum. As it is now,
all the colors at one end of the scale appear in a olive green (yuck).
TMON patch
From: Jim Reekes