Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education
If you have an announcement you would like to have appear in our developer page,
please send it to secretary@os2voice.org
White Bear Lake, Minnesota -- December 15, 1998 -- Keller Group, developer of
the PMfax and FaxWorks OS/2 products, now has a special LAN version which supports
Windows, NT and OS/2 workstations for small SOHO LAN situations. This provides LAN
fax sharing at a very attractive price of just $299.
The new product allows "shared mode" use of the fax hardware by up
to five other workstations, and the workstations can be any mixture of Windows,
NT or OS/2 machines. The fax server can be any OS/2 machine on the LAN. This is
ideal for SOHO configurations where privacy, routing and other advanced features
of the regular PMfax LAN products are not needed.
"We continue to support the use of OS/2 by the home and small office user,"
says Mark Ahlstrom, President of Keller Group. "Many customers are now using
Windows and NT machines in addition to their OS/2 machines, and this new product
provides a cost-effective faxing solution for their office."
All PMfax products are now available for electronic ordering and delivery
through the Keller Group web site at http://www.kellergroup.com.
# # #
PMfax and FaxWorks OS/2 are trademarks of Keller Group Inc.
(Keller Group Inc., info@kellergroup.com,
http://www.kellergroup.com)
QuickFix is another of those programs to apply OS/2 fixpacks without forcing
you to deal with a stack of floppy diskettes. The main difference between QF and
others is that QF uses a diskette image extractor which performs CRC checking and
so avoids the catastrophe of blindly applying garbage from a bad download to an
otherwise perfectly functional system.
Changes since 1.0:
1. Sanity checks on directory names to avoid confusing FSERVICE.
2. Now works for OS/2 3.0 and 4.0.
3. Handles all known variations of the fixtools distribution.
4. Simplified user interface. Defaults are now shown in editable
input fields. Explanations are generally shorter.
5. Re-use of the archive directory is allowed (with appropriate
warnings).
6. Detects artifacts (log files, uncommitted fixes) from prior
fixpack applications and (with user approval) cleans up the
mess.
--
Jon Saxton <triton@ibm.net> OS/2 software developer
U.S. agent for Triton Technologies International Ltd
BATTLECRUISER:3000AD v2.0 FOR OS2
With the assistance of the OS2 community, plans are underway to port BC3K v2.0 to
native OS2. There aren't that many OS2 games out there. Two guesses why that is.
Considering IBMs marketing screw-up of a superior operating system, game developers
haven't bothered doing a native OS2 game, even a port, with good reason. OS2 has
been my development platform (as well as Peter's) for several years now and it was
only recently, after visiting the OS2 games newsgroups, that I was made aware of
these advancements in graphics and sound technologies for OS2. Hopefully, if those
IBM marketing 'suits' are reading this, they will sit down and think about this
carefully and spend some dollars on companies that are striving to push this OS
into the mainstream gaming arena. Well, one can only dream.
The biggest issues with OS2 ports have been with sound and graphics libraries.
However, SciTech are geared up to release MGL/OS2 at the end of this month. This
will make porting the software renderer to OS2 easier. This library will also support
OpenGL, making a 3D accelerated port of the renderer also a possibility. For sound,
the SEAL or DSMI/2 sound system, will replace HMI's Sound Operating System.
This is a part-time project and therefore, since there is currently no financial
gain (unless an OEM deal comes along), will not be a priority. We'll see how it
goes.
--
Derek Smart, Ph.D.
Designer/Lead Developer
The Battlecruiser Series
http://www.bc3000ad.com
if you are interested in taking a look or download it.
Some facts about Larsen Commander
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Larsen Commander is a 32-Bit OS/2 Presentation Manager based File Manager with built
in command line and scrollable console monitor. It has a default look and feel that
is designed with inspiration from the grand old Norton Commander for DOS and the
great File Commander for OS/2.
* Nice, attractive and highly customizable look and feel.
* The program actually works very well, and it is quick too.
* Powerful and user friendly at the same time.
* Built in GUI Console and Command Line Prompt with History.
* All standard file management commands; copy, move, delete, etc.
* You can SET environment variables directly in the shell.
* Preserves the Command and Directory History between sessions.
* File Columns are no wider than the widest item of the respective Column.
* Platform independent human editable INI-file.
* Easy creation of Program and Shadow Objects on Desktop.
* Built in command line commands: PUSHD, POPD, R, SET, TAG, WHICH, +++
* All built in commands can be disabled on a per-command basis.
* Almost all commands are accessible by keyboard shortcuts.
* Directory Cache with smart CD command.
* Built in Extended Attribute Viewer.
* Smart Program Launching.
* Toolbar bubble help.
Changes since the previous public release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Add: New section "[NoneConsoleProgs]" in LCMD.INI contains a list which
programs should always be launched in a new session. See LCMD.TXT
for more info.
Add: Use SHIFT+F7 to goto the previous directory of the current file panel.
This feature makes it very snappy to jump between two "working"
directories.
Imp: The standard message box of LCMD now shows the message text in a
multiline text entry field with a vertical scroll bar so that all the
text can be seen (by scrolling it) in case it is too long.
Imp: Rewrote some parts of the program launcher code. Larsen Commander is
now, at least in theory, ready to support launching and management of
more than one child process at once. I will, however, limit the number
of active children to only one until further notice. This is mostly due
to the extra risks for serious unknown bugs as a consequence of the
relative complex code.
Imp: System command interpreter no longer assumed to be CMD.EXE. Is now
fetched from the COMSPEC environment variable as it should.
Imp: The "Choose Drive" dialog is now much more snappy to pop up after
the first time it has been used.
Chg: Now compiled for the 80386 processor rather than for 80486. This has no
practical effects to the speed of Larsen Commander at all, but it caused
the size of the EXE-file to be reduced by about 10 KBytes before
compression.
Chg: The ALT key must now be released before 250ms after it was pressed to
get the menu bar activated by keyboard. This used to be 500ms until now.
Chg: Some cosmetic changes on the size of the three dialogs: Command History,
Directory History and Directory Cache.
Chg: Changed the icon on the MOVE button of the toolbar. I think this new one
is a bit more intuitive. The old one looked like an icon for creating a
shaddow object.
Fix: Enlarged the stack of the filename reader thread of the file panels to
prevent a "stack overflow" that sometimes did occur upon startup on some
systems.
Fix: In some very rare situations the toolbar buttons did execute their
respective command when mouse button was released even if the button
was initially pressed on some other window than the Larsen Commander
window.
Fix: The "Free Drive Space" item in the INFO panel was almost never
updated
within a Larsen Commander session. Now updates upon every directory
reread.
Fix: Did not react when user tried to adjust the height of the file panels
by dragging the bottom frame of the panels in full "screen" mode.
Fix: Sometimes crashed due to insufficient stack space when showing an
error message during a copy or move progress.
Fix: When move or copy only the current selected file or directory then the
selection annoyingly changed to the file just obove the originally
selected.
Fix: Finally fixed the serious bug that Larsen Commander did not
prevent the user from trying to copy or move a parent directory into
it self or any of its descendant subdirectories.
Fix: Some of the columns in the FULL mode sometimes was calculated to be
to narrow.
Fix: Some PM programs was unable to start from the command line, including
the Larsen Commander executable it self.
Fix: Could not view (F3) or edit (F4) a file while a child program was being
run from the command line, until the child program terminated.
Fix: If a program was launched by pressing enter on a program file object in
a file panel when a child program was still executing in the command
line, then the command line did not restore back to its normal color
when the child program finished.
Fix: Tab characters was not expanded in the console monitor.
Fix: Text "Flat Toolbar Buttons" in options dialog View->Style was
cut on
some screens.
Fix: If the console minitor contained any selected text then the selection
was annoyingly extended whenever any new text was appended to it.
Fix: Only the first mouse click was handled by the toolbar buttons if mouse
was not moved between two or more clicks.
Fix: Removed som painting bugs from the toolbar window.
Fix: Failed to edit (F4) or view (F3) files that was contained in a directory
which name contained one or more spaces.
Fix: "Calculate Dir Size" sometimes did never say "Finished!"
if multiple
file and directories was tagged.
Fix: The exception dump in the console munitor that alwas occured the first
time an external program was run from the command line, is now removed.
Fix: Sometimes crashed when selecting "Previous Command" from popup menu
of command line.
Merry Christams and Happy Hannukah! Hopkins Special!
Hopkins: FBI for OS/2 is now being offered at the amazing low price of only $34.95,
take advantage of this offer as soon as possible in order to get Hopkins before
the holidays!
Go to http://www.polyex.com
for more information.
-Adam Hall
adam@polyex.com
PowerGamer '97 and PowerGamer '98 contain many of the most popular OS/2 games
of all time but now bundled together at special low prices.
PowerGamer '97 is only $49.95 and contains:
* Avarice: The Final Saga - an adventure mystery game similar to Myst/Riven
* Trials of Battle - a first person shooter
* Star Emperor - a turn based strategy game of conquest
* Galactic Civilizations II - thrown in FREE of charge with your
purchase of PowerGamer '97, it is a space aged strategy
game with diplomacy and warfare.
New PowerGamer '98 is only $69.95 and contains
* Entrepreneur - the real time multiplayer strategy game that with
versions
for OS/2 and Windows in the same box.
* Entrepreneur: Corporate Expansion - the expansion pack for Entrepreneur
* Galactic Civilizations GOLD - the third chapter in the Galactic
Civilizations
chapter brings land conquest and a host of new features and
technologies
to play with.
Visit http://www.stardock.com to learn
more about each game.
Or go to https://www.outreach.com/stardock/order_ship.html
to order
electronically.
Phone orders can be made to 1-800-672-2338!
You will need to download the FULL PACKAGE. Simply reinstall over your old stuff.
There are some known issues:
1. A fix for VIA/SIS based motherboards is still not in the driver. We know what
the issues are and will address them shortly.
2. Video scaling is incorrect for PAL boards in DIVE mode.
3. No audio support. If you have the simple mono version of the board, you should
get audio. Stereo and FM cards are still not supported.
4. No SVHS support yet.
Please give the new drivers a try, and send bug reports directly to Tim. The
WarpTV download area is at:
http://www.wdi.co.uk/os2tv/download.htm
Thanks,
John Rodriguez
Hauppauge Computer Works, Inc.