Little BITS
By Andrew Roughan
Copyright (c) 1990 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
o The new Apple SCSI card, announced on the 15th March, is set to cause quite a stir. The card is capable of up to a 1MB per second transfer rate on the GS or 1/2MB per second on the //e. It has a SCSI terminator, 32k ROM and 8k RAM on board and it is capable of Direct Memory Access. No upgrade will be offered, but the new cards will be available at the same price as the old ones, $245.
o Several members are experiencing problems with their GS power supplies. Apple request that you send your power supplies back to a registered dealer for fixing rather than trying to fix them yourself. It may be cheaper, but it is highly dangerous, voids your warranty, your replacement parts from the local component shop do not last as long as the Apple ones, and if Apple is not notified of the problem then they will be unable to fix it in later machines. The $108 exchange may seem dear, but this is a set price which
you would pay even if the cost of repair was a lot higher. Your new power supply is also covered by a warranty, so if it fails again within the warranty period, you can get it exchanged free of charge.
o ComputerTime at Chatswood has lost its Apple dealership (stop cheering). To fill the void, there will be a new Apple Centre opening soon in Chatswood.
o Visionary GS, a real-time video digitiser for the Apple //GS, has just been released in the USA. It allows the digitising of any video signal at 15 frames per second in black and white or 5 frames per second in colour. Currently it is only available for use with NTSC video sources, but there is good reason to believe that a PAL version will be available very shortly. There is an upgrade path to owners of the AST VisionPlus and ComputerEyes GS. "Watch this space" for more details. Meanwhile, the club is trying to aquire a demonstration file from AppleLink.
o The March GS SIG centred on the Tunderscan GS demo given by Ian Jones. Ian scanned a colour picture and amazed us all with the resolution obtainable. In fact, the black and white super hires picture created was virtually identical in shading to the original picture.
o Trudging around PC90, I managed to find few decent products that were not PC based. Celcast (02) 975-3232 manufacture a whole range of overhead projector transparencies. One of their range is a clear plastic sheet that can be printed on by a Dot matrix printer to create your own transparency. I think these would have a great opening in schools as a visual display aid for students who may need to give presentations. The student could make a graphics screen or a talk summary page, print it out on the transparency and then give the talk using the overhead projector to display the page. The cost of 50 A4 sheets is $90, so I would imagine the school would buy them in bulk and distribute them through a stationary supply. The
lecturers at my university make extensive use of these transparencies in their lecture presentations. They prepare notes on the Macintosh print the "foil", run off copies for the students, and then lecture from the overhead projector.
o Memory And Storage Technology through Computer Discount (Aust) (02) 281-7414 are supplying 80ns 1MB low profile simm modules for $149.
o Wet-Ribbon from Softcover Software (02) 957-4010 is a dot matrix printer ribbon re-inker. It costs $329 with an initial bottle of ink; at this price it can pay for itself after re-inking as few as 10 ribbons. Softcover Software claim that good quality fabric ribbon can be re-inked up to 40 times. One bottle of ink lasts about 40 inkings. Wet-Ribbon can handle all sizes and widths (up to 30mm) of ribbon.
o Applied Engineering have ceased sales of the TransWarp II due to the awarding of a patent to Zip Technology on the technology used in the Zip Chip. Applied Engineering reportedly licensed technology from Bits and Pieces, makers of the RocketChip. On the basis of the patent, Bits and Pieces, apparently, cannot produce the RocketChip. Applied Engineering will replace the TransWarp II with a redesigned TransWarp III.

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