nstall the new OS/2 Warp that supports symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), but it hasn't happened yet.
Even so,
as a result of our experience with the Diamond Flower dual-Pentium Doubleshot 133 running Windows NT 4.0, I currently recommend a dual-processor system as the upgrade of choice for everyone not running Windows 95 (Win 95) games. Don't try to speed up your old machine; get a new one and network your old one to it.
Dual-processor systems change the way artists think about graphics. David Em, one of the first fine artists to use computer graphics, had some problems with his machine, so we lent him the Doubleshot 133. He's been experimenting, watching the CPU usage meters while he manipulates large graphics images.
David finds that as soon as you have Adobe Photoshop render a large image, both processors are used 100 percent. This isn't so surprising; the astonishing thing is that you can do that kind of graphics on a desktop machine. Not long ago, you either used a Silicon Graphics workstation or learned to have lots of patience. David says that he experiments more: he's no longer intimidated by the long
delays between concept and picture.
Even if games are a primary interest, you may be better off getting a good medium-speed dual-Pentium system rather than a very fast single-processor system. While NT 4.0 doesn't support Win 95 games, it does run a surprisingly large number of DOS and Windows 3.1 games. Moreover, monster hard drives are cheap, and with the aid of System Commander and Partition Magic, you can set up a dual-processor system to boot in Win 95 or DOS for games such as Crusader: No Regret, which just can't stand any kind of Windows. Any Pentium system you're likely to get will be fast enough for most of those games; and if you can get modem games running under NT (some do, some don't), the dual processors can give you a decided speed edge.
While I recommend upgrading by getting a dual-Pentium system and networking it to your old system, there is another possibility: abandoning Intel for Digital Equipment RISC-chip systems. These systems run NT just fine, and you can add as many processor
s as you need. I recently was the keynote speaker at a computer fair in Albuquerque, where I spent some time with Fred Feagin of Thor Computers. I remember Fred as a spacecraft designer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He's now doing computer systems design.
Thor takes Digital RISC machines and adds some engineering improvements. The result is reliable and incredibly fast. I don't yet know enough about these marvels, but I will soon. The cost is now down in the high-end desktop class, meaning that systems based on Digital rather than Intel architecture are an option worth considering.
Back in 1976, I paid $12,000 for Ezekial, a 2-MHz Z80 with 64 KB of RAM, a 16-row by 64-column video board, a monochrome monitor, two 8-inch floppy drives, and a 30-cps Diablo daisy-wheel printer. That machine's on display in the Smithsonian's History of Communications and Computing exhibit. It's astonishing what that much money will buy today.
The
Los Angeles Times
bemoans the lack of trained
graphic artists
in the U.S. The entertainment industry is forced to import talent from overseas. What with the Internet, theme parks, TV commercials, as well as films and TV shows, there's a big demand for digital artists -- and the schools aren't producing them.
The problem isn't computer literacy; it's artistic training. Apparently, we no longer teach any kind of artistic creativity in the schools.
The
Times
wants school reform. Perhaps that's needed, although I wonder what artistic training kids will get from a system that fails to teach a quarter of them to read; but however effective school reform can be, it's going to take a while. I asked David what someone interested in a position in graphic arts might do in the meantime.
"Learn to draw," David said. "Don't worry about technique; pay attention to what you see. Once you learn to see things properly, the drawing will take care of itself." We then went on a hike up my favorite hill, where I realized I wasn't seeing 10 perce
nt of what he saw even though we were looking at the same scene.
As for tools, anyone with a Pentium system and a reasonable graphics board has most of what's required. You should learn to use a drawing pad; Wacom makes a good one for a reasonable price. For software, Caligari's trueSpace is a good beginner's program. By the time you run up against its limits, you'll know whether this is something you really want to do. For that matter, everyone has a pencil and some paper, which is not only a good way to start, but a medium you'll have to learn to work with.
The computer graphics field changes like dreams; you can now do things with desktop systems that two years ago you couldn't do with any equipment in the world. That's going to continue; and as David is fond of pointing out, it's all new. There's no 2000 years of traditional ways of doing things to weigh you down.
I've often said you don't need formal instruction to become a writer: you need to write a lot and finish what you write. Apparently
, it's also that way with art. Sure, training helps, but mostly you just need to do a lot of it. I'm sure the schools need reforming, but meanwhile, there are a lot of wonderful programs out there, like Broderbund's Kid Pix Studio, to give young people an early start.
I recently said rather flippantly that "SCSI has a mind of its own."
Several readers have taken me to task for that. Perhaps they're right. What I should have said is there are a number of SCSI BIOSes out there, and they can behave rather differently, so one person's experience may not apply to another's problems.
Case in point: my trials with installing Syquest EZ135 and Iomega SCSI Zip cartridge drives and the consequent shifting of drive-letter assignments. On Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86-P166 system, once you install the drive, you can go into Win 95's Device Manager and assign that drive a letter. My Zip drive wanted to be drive E, displacing the CD-ROM drive that resided there. Using Device Manager to assign E to the CD-R
OM drive does no good whatever.
However, once you install the Zip drive, you can go into Device Manager and reserve F for the Zip drive (even though the CD-ROM drive has that letter); reboot the system; and Bob's your uncle. The Zip drive will be F whether there's a cartridge in the drive on boot-up or not.
Alas, it doesn't work that way with Pentafluge, which is my older Pentium P-60 system. I can assign the Zip drive to be G (there's a Maxoptix T3-1300 optical drive at E, and the CD-ROM drive is F), and if I boot up with no cartridge in the Zip drive, all's well; but if I boot up with a cartridge in the system, it's a horrible mess. Drives are displaced, and the Device Manager becomes very confused. I am definitely better off not assigning the drive letter and letting SCSI plus Plug and Play do their things.
The worst of it is that Win 95 doesn't have to assign drive letters to let you access a drive. Network Neighborhood lets you copy to and from a networked drive by name, no drive letter wante
d. Unfortunately, most software can't access a drive that way.
The bottom line is that different systems behave in different ways. Mac users are fond of pointing out that they don't have problems like this: their drives have drive names, not letters. It's all true, too.
Following up on last month's disaster: the problem with Cyrus
was definitely overheating in the Seagate Barracuda 4.2-GB hard drive. This is a good drive, but everyone I have consulted says you want to be careful about heat.
I learned the hard way. Just after I finished last month's column, it got cool enough in Los Angeles that I shut down the air conditioning. The Santa Ana winds blew up a couple of days later. These are hot winds. The temperature in my office got to 100¼F, by which time Cyrus was giving me disk errors every few seconds. When I opened the bezel on the front, the Barracuda drive was so hot I didn't want to touch it.
Leaving the bezel off allowed it to cool down a little, but then the CD-ROM dr
ive wouldn't work: without the bezel in place, no air was being sucked in through the CD-ROM slot. Replacing the bezel fixed the CD-ROM drive (once it cooled down), but then the Barracuda drive overheated again.
Computer designers give a great deal of thought to heat flow, but there's a problem. Openings large enough for good ventilation can leave gaps that will spoil the unit's FCC certification. Moreover, some people, in total defiance of the awful majesty of the FCC, run their systems with the covers off. While that doesn't seem to do much electromagnetic harm -- I haven't heard of airplanes crashing or firemen unable to communicate because someone hasn't put the cover on a Pentium system -- it does spoil the airflow.
I suspect I had got the wide SCSI cables out of place in one of my excursions into Cyrus. Cyrix has since changed their cable routing scheme because of this problem.
Replacing the Barracuda drive wasn't difficult -- the Cyrix case is designed so that everything pulls out through t
he front and you don't have to disassemble any of the cage -- but replacing the drive wasn't a permanent solution to the problem. The airflow around that drive is only adequate at best, and I worried that I'd merely have to displace a cable to cause some more overheating.
One possibility would be more airflow: replace the Cyrix power supply with one from PC Power & Cooling. I'll probably do that before next summer, but for the moment, I needed something less drastic.
After a bit of thought, I got Larry Aldridge to send me a CPU-Cool chip fan. There's just room between the Barracuda drive and the front bezel to attach the fan and run the wire back to an unused drive power jack.
That seems to have done it. Even in the hottest weather, the Barracuda drive is only warm; the CD-ROM drive works fine; and Cyrus has given me no problems at all. I never did have any problems with heat in the box itself.
If you suspect you have temperature problems, or want to be sure you don't , think about getting a P
C Power & Cooling CPU-Cool chip fan to cool your hard drive.
Replacing your hard drive is no fun.
It was a bit easier for me, because Cyrix preconfigured the drive by installing Win 95 complete with the Plus package before they sent it to me. Once I'd cooled off the original drive, I was able to peel off nearly all the software onto networked drives. The whole operation took less than a day, including all the retry errors until I figured out that I'd overheated the CD-ROM drive.
Alas, whoever configured the new drive for me told it that the system belonged to Jerry Pournel of BYTE Mazgne; which meant that when I installed Microsoft Office, it insisted on labeling all my documents that way.
Clearly, something had to be done. Unfortunately, neither Win 95 Help nor any of my numerous books on Win 95 had much information on how to change user names. Even Lenny Bailes's
BYTE Guide to Optimizing Windows
, which tells how to get the Microsoft Windows 95 Easter egg, had little information on i
t.
I used Gopher to search all my files for the string "Mazgne," and found it in a First Aid safety file. That file can be edited, but editing it does no good at all. Clearly, the string was stored in hexadecimal format, not ASCII.
The books say that a program called REGEDIT.EXE comes with Win 95; it's in the Windows directory. There's not much information about using it, and all the books warn you to be extremely careful. I tried it a couple of times, but I wasn't sure what I was doing, so I never saved any changes I made. However, it became clear that what I wanted was in a hexadecimal file called SYSTEM.DAT.
Eventually, I made two backup copies of SYSTEM.DAT and attacked that file with the Norton Disk Editor. It turned out to be easy enough to find the hexadecimal equivalent of the word
Mazgne
. A bit of study showed how the user and company names are stored, including what is used to terminate the string: it's an 01 followed by blanks (00). I looked up the hexadecimal equivalents of th
e English letters I wanted, used Disk Editor to fix my name and spell
Magazine
properly, terminated the strings with 01, and all's well.
Fair warning: you edit SYSTEM.DAT at your own risk. It would be very easy to muck up your machine so that you can't boot up Win 95 at all. If you're going to do it, make a backup copy of SYSTEM.DAT. Also, be sure you have a DOS boot disk and a program like Norton Commander that will see hidden system files so that you can boot up in DOS and restore SYSTEM.DAT from a copy.
Next, go to Norton Utilities and Disk Editor. If you have never used Disk Editor, this is
not
the time to learn it. Learn how to use it on game files or other stuff you don't mind losing.
Disk Editor will drop you into DOS mode. Now do OBJECTFILE and browse in the Windows or Windows.000 directory until you find the file SYSTEM.DAT. Let Disk Editor bring that in. Search for the string you noted earlier. It will find it. Note that the end of the string has 01 followed by blanks (
00). If you change the length of your string, you
must
terminate it with that 01. Now make your changes by writing in the hexadecimal-number equivalents of the letters you want to insert.
If you have a mouse working (you may not, depending on the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files used to bring up DOS internally), you can go over to the little ASCII interpretation that Disk Editor puts out to the side and make changes there by typing in ASCII letters; be
sure
you are putting them exactly where you think you are, and that this is where they are supposed to be. It's easy to make mistakes here.
Do it right. You can make the user Elmer P. Fudd and the company The Acme Corp., or whatever you like. When you have everything exactly the way you want it, with 01 as the last character in each string, exit Disk Editor with the save option.
Windows will come up. It will see that the date of the SYSTEM.DAT file has changed and will be unhappy. It will offer you the choice of proceeding even th
ough it doesn't like to. Do that, and when it comes up properly, Bob's your uncle.
If all doesn't go well, boot up in DOS, copy the saved file back to SYSTEM.DAT, and start over. Good luck.
Some months are just a series of disasters.
Fortunately, many disasters are instructive.
The other day, Niven came over to work on our new book. He usually works with an elderly Cheetah 486 upgraded with Intel's Pentium OverDrive. That system runs NT 3.51 because we haven't got around to installing version 4.0 yet. In a burst of zeal, I had attempted to dismantle that system and put in something faster for Larry, mostly for games, since the system is plenty fast enough when running Word. I'd got as far as unplugging things when I ran out of time; so when Larry came over, I plugged things back in.
The result was that every time we put Word on full-screen, the machine screamed at me. When we'd minimize Word, the screaming stopped. I wasn't thinking too clearly: I assumed it was the machine it
self. I turned it off and attempted to move Cyrus, which sits on a portable stand, over to where Larry could use it.
This led to disaster: Cyrus, still running, fell about 3 feet to the floor. The bezels popped off the front, and the CPU-Cool chip fan I'd attached to the Barracuda hard drive hung out the front looking for all the world like an eyeball popped out of its socket. It really looked bad.
I turned the machine off, and we went to dinner. When we got back, I tried it: no horrible noises, no blue smoke, but no video either. I put in a frantic call to Alex, who came over to help do a systematic checkup.
First things first: try a new video board. Still no video. Next, remove all the boards except the new video board.
Voilà! The machine booted up, and, astoundingly, a surface scan revealed absolutely no problems with the hard drive. I still can't get over that. The SCSI Zip drive, which had sat on top of Cyrus and thus fell even further than he did, also worked just fine.
The ne
xt step was to install the boards one by one. We soon found that the problem was the Creative Labs AWE32 CT-3600 sound board. Close inspection didn't show anything wrong with the board, but when it was in the system, Cyrus wouldn't boot. One of these days, I'll ship it back to Creative Labs and let them try to figure out what's wrong. I sure can't.
Fortunately, I had another AWE32 board. Unlike the CT-3600, this one had an IDE controller for a CD-ROM drive. That meant it needed another interrupt request (IRQ), and while it was supposed to be Plug and Play, it wasn't. Win 95 insisted on assigning it almost anything except IRQ 5, but far too many DOS games are hard-coded to expect the sound board at IRQ 5. Eventually, we got the sound board set to IRQ 5 and installed a new SupraExpress 336 Sp with Analog Simultaneous Voice and Data (ASVD) internal modem. For some incomprehensible reason, Win 95 wanted to assign that to IRQ 15. You can't do that.
We spelunked into Device Manager. Deep in that well, we fo
und a way to configure the modem to "Configuration 000002," which assigns it to share COM1.
It all works just fine now. The SupraExpress is as good an internal modem as you'll find. It works with all the terminal and fax programs I have. I still mildly prefer external modems, because you can sometimes get into a situation in which the easiest way to reset the modem is to turn it off. I wish modem companies would put a little Reset button on the back. In fact, though, I haven't recently had to reset the modem at all, and I sure can't complain about the SupraExpress's performance. It is fast, locks on through lots of line noise, and just plain works. Recommended.
As to why the Cheetah was screaming at us, when I plugged things back in, I managed to plug the 21-inch Hitachi monitor into the wrong uninterruptible power supply (UPS). That didn't
quite
overload the UPS, but when we brought up Word, with a big expanse of white screen, that required just enough more power that it triggered the UPS's
overload warning. Closing Word or reducing the white-screen size would reduce the power requirements just enough. Silly, but maddening if you're in a hurry and don't think things through.
The Cyrix system comes with a Matrox MGA Millennium, which is a very good video board indeed. However, after we dropped Cyrus on his head and weren't getting any video, we changed boards. That didn't turn out to be the problem -- the Matrox board works just fine -- but it did give us the opportunity to test the new Orchid Fahrenheit Video 3D board.
That sucker screams. It does 2-D and 3-D movies really fast and really pretty. You can't believe how smoothly Duke Nukem, Doom, and Quake scroll.
Most of my work with computers involves words and text, and, except for games like Doom, I honestly can't tell the difference between the Matrox, Diamond, and Orchid boards. They all show 2-D graphics in good resolution with steady pictures and high contrast. That doesn't mean there aren't any differences, or that they won't
be noticed by people doing graphics work. I've arranged for David Em to test our graphics boards on the Doubleshot 133. David does really complex graphic art and works these systems as hard as anyone can.
The shareware of the month is Visual DialogScript.
This is a scripting language, the successor to WinScript. You can use it to create all kinds of Windows dialog boxes and controls, some very elaborate. It comes with both text and icon editors. An example of Visual DialogScript in use: a program applet that lets you browse through files and change their time and date stamps by drag-and-drop operations.
Use this to create installation programs or build elaborate batch files that can trigger at specific times. Stand-alone programs along with the run-time package can be freely distributed without royalties.
You can find out more from jmtech://www.netlink.co.uk/users/jmtech, or the CompuServe WINUTIL and WINSHARE forums.
The
book of the month
is John Keegan's
Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America
. Like all Keegan's books, this is both readable and insightful. Fair warning: this is not an introductory work. You need passing familiarity with the American Revolution and the Civil War. I have one quarrel: Keegan goes to great lengths to tell why geography has dominated the wars on this continent -- but the book has almost no maps. To properly appreciate this book, you need a good historical atlas.
The
computer book of the month
is Ned Snell's
Navigating the Microsoft Network
. It includes a copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer and goes into interesting detail about tuning your computer, what you'll find on the Internet, and some tricks of the trade. Most Internet books are out of date by the time they're published; this one is probably good for a year or so.
The
game of the month
is Strategic Simulations' The Age of Rifles. A DOS game, it plays well in Win 95. It's a turn-based tactical/strategic game with
scenarios from just after the Napoleonic Wars to the turn of this century, including the American Civil War. The dominant fact of the age of rifles was that unlike muskets, rifles had effective ranges right up with artillery; well-dug-in riflemen could pick off the gunners faster than the gunners could return their fire. That's not always obvious in this game. It's still a lot of fun.
I'm heading overseas at the end of this month, so next month I should have some observations about computing in Europe, as well as a lot of data about graphics hardware and programs.
Product Information
The Age of Rifles..............................$54.95
Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone: (800) 245-4525 or (408) 737-6800
Fax: (408) 737-6814
Internet:
http://www.ssionline.com
Circle 1042 on Inquiry Card.
A Hard Drive and a Hot Santa Ana
