ALERT BOX

TROUBLESHOOTING TWISTER

Last issue, START presented several hard and floppy disk utilities by Dave Small and Dan Moore. One of these was Twister, a program enabling you to add another 40K per side of your standard 3.5 inch ST disks. Atari has even decided to adopt the Twister format, starting with the new TOS ROMs that will be available soon.

Well, a bug crept into our Twister at the last minute. The code on our last START disk will place the same serial number on each disk when you format the disk in Twister format. This causes your ST operating system to get confused, and lose track of which disk has been inserted, if you change disks in the middle of an editing session. Shortly before our last issue went to press, we received a phone call from Dave Small describing how he had inadvertently used a "serial number" parameter of -1 in the Protobt() call. Dave asked if we could simply replace the negative one with the value one million, which the documentation says should generate a new random serial number for each new disk. START Technical Editor Patrick Bass says, "When I opened the file and replaced the value, I should've double-checked to see if the value should be binary, decimal, octal, or hexadecimal."

START regrets any problems caused by this oversight. To correct it, change the value of 1000000L in the Protobt() function to 0x1000000L (hexadecimal one million).

HEY, THERE'S SOMETHING MISSING

We'd like to apologize to any of our subscribers who received the last issue of START minus their program disk. Our printer accidentally mailed out a batch of newsstand copies of the magazine, which should've been disk versions. They assure us this won't happen again. However, if you're a subscriber and you receive a copy of START without disk, contact us and well get a replacement disk out to you as quickly as possible.

WHERE'S MY DISK?

START is a magazine with programs on disk. Normally you will find the disk bound into the magazine and selling on the newstands for $14.95.

But some of you ST enthusiasts want to read START first, so we have provided a limited number of copies without disk for $4.00 each.

If this is your situation you can complete your copy of this issue of START by ordering the companion disk direct from us, for $10.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling. See the order form inserted into this issue.