|
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 198 responses total. |
dunne
|
|
response 169 of 198:
| 
Dec 15 09:07 UTC 2000 |
#164: I wouldn't bother. The chess program on grex is very weak, and
the user interface is pretty horrible. Stick with the Chessmaster
2100. If you really want top-notch Unix chess, there is GNU Chess
and Crafty -- I prefer the latter myself -- but unless your Russian
friend is a strong player, Chessmaster will be more than sufficient.
Needs less hardware resources too.
|
bru
|
|
response 170 of 198:
|
Dec 15 12:22 UTC 2000 |
I can remember being completely amazed when a geek brought a computer to the
college, hooked it up via a modem to the votec computer, and played a Star
Trek game with Klingon ships vs. the Enterprise.
|
danr
|
|
response 171 of 198:
|
Dec 15 14:18 UTC 2000 |
Ah, yes. Star Trek games were also a favorite on those early computers. I
forgot all about those.
|
jp2
|
|
response 172 of 198:
|
Dec 15 15:01 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
|
keesan
|
|
response 173 of 198:
|
Dec 15 18:52 UTC 2000 |
Chessmaster 2100 is certainly the nicest of the chess programs I have seen.
Grex chess is a complete mystery to me. I tried p2-p3 (which is what the
command looks like in other chess games). eh? The only command the chess
game on grex has understood is exit. I played Boggle instead and found more
words than the computer did. This made me feel better.
I just found a really nice little shareware CAD program called microcad40,
which has nothing to do with the 'toy' microcad, though they are about the
same size. In just a 66K zipped file (unzips to 58K .exe and 102K .doc) it
does everything we could ever want, including export as .pcx (bitmap,
convertable to gif for sending out in New Year's e-mails) or .dxf (vector
format usable by other programs). Not quite as flexible as the 300-500K
PC-Draft Cad and Draft CAD, both also DOS shareware, but much easier to learn
and so far no bugs. Draft CAD would have worked, if it worked, but it is too
buggy - crashes when you try to change units (every time), erases sometimes
the first and sometimes the last line drawn. Homepro, and architectural
program, is also nice (669K) but lines mysteriously disappear or reappear when
you resize, and we could find no way to shorten our house drawing by a foot
after making a mistake in window heights. Microcad did this perfectly. You
have to do a bit more thinking to get certain effects. AutoCAD would probably
also do everything but Jim has not yet managed to get it working (12, DOS)
and it takes up around 25M hard drive and keeps running out of memory or
environment space. It is overkill for us. There is another Microcad at
simtel that is unrelated. In about the same size file, it does much less.
Anyone know more than I do about the history of CAD programs?
Microcad 40 is mcad40.zip, available from at least one shareware site.
My only objection is that it absolutely needs a mouse, but for those of us
who cannot remember the meaning of icons, it displays a text description of
them when you click on them. Help is available both while using the program
(click on ?) and as a .doc file readable with more, list, edit, etc. I found
not a single typo! I nominate this for the Shareware Hall of Fame.
|
ashke
|
|
response 174 of 198:
|
Dec 15 18:55 UTC 2000 |
I would love to try and help, but I only have copies of AutoCAD 14 and 2000
as well as a program called CadKey. I don't know how big CadKey is, but it's
a bit easier to use than AutoCAD. Is there a reason you don't upgrade to a
larger hard drive/computer?
|
mdw
|
|
response 175 of 198:
|
Dec 15 21:20 UTC 2000 |
Chess players like to say things like "pawn to king's bishop 3." There's
a short hand for that; "p-qb3". This is the "standard notation"
described in the man page, and any good chess book will also describe
it, because that's the notation used to describe openings and games.
The "chess" program on grex labels the cols & rows when it prints out
the board, so there shouldn't be any guesswork there.
|
mcnally
|
|
response 176 of 198:
|
Dec 15 21:32 UTC 2000 |
And algebraic notation is just a cartesian coordinate system for the
chess board with the rows assigned numerical labels (1-8) and the columns
labelled with letters (a-h)
|
gelinas
|
|
response 177 of 198:
|
Dec 15 22:21 UTC 2000 |
So White's move "pawn to king four" would be "p-e4", I think. Or maybe
"e2-e4". (It's been a long time.)
|
dunne
|
|
response 178 of 198:
|
Dec 15 22:39 UTC 2000 |
Just teested this, and the grex chess program appears to only accept
moves of the form "OriginDestination" eg e2e4. It doesn't like e2-e4,
or Pe4, or even Pe2e4, responding with the classic Unix error message
"eh?" (thanks Ken!). Very poor; it should accept at least e4 for
that pawn move, and arguablly any legal variation (there are standards
for these things).
|
keesan
|
|
response 179 of 198:
|
Dec 15 22:44 UTC 2000 |
I thought I had tried the e2e4 variant, but I guess not. I don't recall
seeing e on the board, just the numbers. Not real intuitive, but then Unix
rarely is intuitive, just concise.
|
keesan
|
|
response 180 of 198:
|
Dec 15 22:55 UTC 2000 |
re 174, we try to avoid programs that are written to take up enormous amounts
of space when we can find smaller ones that do what we want. Autocad
obviously is like swatting a fly with a sledge hammer, and it is not helpful
to have to choose one thing out of a very large menu when you have no use for
anything else on the menu. Bigger is often not better. Is your Cadkey for
DOS? Windows wastes time and space. Windows programs are always larger and
take longer to download and install. I am using a lovely little DOS database
program that lets you access all functions with one keystroke and was a 30K
download, and even adds and subtotals. (edb33 - ask me for a copy). A basic
spreadsheet program about 60K that does way more than I need. Unlike Windows
programs, these do not rely on menus and submenus, but both have all the
commands on one help screen, and you really do have to read the documentation
before starting. After that they are much more efficient to use than
pull-down menus, at least if you can type with 10 fingers. Both are entirely
ASCII character, which makes them much smaller.
Our Microcad program supplies one font (in four sizes) instead of the
five fonts in another program. A choice of solid or dotted lines. Another
program gives five fonts and 7 line styles, out of which we had chosen the
same offerings as Microcad offers. In its 58K exe file it even draws 3D,
spins/rotates/tilts, moves, resizes, lets you use or add to fill patterns and
a symbol library, print on various printers and resolutions, choose many
different units, zoom to 7 sizes (not infinite but adequate). If we get
something actually drawn I may post a page of our house plans at my website.
We also have a Win31 house drawing program that is 9M zipped and draws
furniture for you in 2D or 3D, with no way to resize it. Our refrigerator
does not happen to be the standard size. Too many wrong assumptions filling
up too much space. The Windows philosophy seems to be to make the program
as large as possible and include everything whether or not people need it.
|
mdw
|
|
response 181 of 198:
|
Dec 16 00:52 UTC 2000 |
The SunOS chess program appears to be based on the K&R version, and
includes sparc assembly code apparently hand-translated from the
original pdp-11 code. It's only 32k in size. Gnuchess is 108k. The
K&R folks didn't have 108K of code space to play around in.
|
keesan
|
|
response 182 of 198:
|
Dec 16 02:04 UTC 2000 |
We have been experimenting with graphics formats. Using a screen capture
program we produced a tiff (154K), a bmp (44k) and a pxc (reverse monochrome,
18K). 1998 screen capture program. I then tested various DOS-based viewers.
VUIMG (1993) displays all three just fine. CSHOW ditto, and has a way to
print 'negative' so as to print black lines on white from the white on black
pcx. It is 1995. Cshow (Compushow), which is 1995, tells me that the BMP
is damaged and displays it as a smear, but displays the bmp and tiff fine.
It can convert between lots of formats so we made the tiff into a gif and a
reverse gif, and uploaded the gif: homepro1.gif. This is Jim's preliminary
drawing of our house from the front. It can only be exported as a pcx rather
than a colored image (gif or tiff or bmp). Same for Microcad 4.03 (mcad 40).
You can see our house at ~/keesan/homepro1.gif.
I then tested a new office suite on this and it had problems with two
out of three and no way I could find to reverse the colors. Beta version.
It would not recognize the bmp at all. Are there different versions of bmp,
and why would the two newer programs have problems but not the old ones?
|
keesan
|
|
response 183 of 198:
|
Dec 16 18:01 UTC 2000 |
Graphics Works is the one that thinks the bmp is damaged. Cshow is the one
that works perfectly. When was the first CAD program designed and for what
sort of computer and operating system? How big was Autocad 1?
|
ball
|
|
response 184 of 198:
|
Dec 16 23:43 UTC 2000 |
Re #182: Sure the third wasn't a PCX Sindi? CompuShow has
worked pretty well for me over the years, althoug it does
struggle with some of the more obscure formats (colour GEM
.IMG and RLE encoded .BMP spring to mind, although I could
be wrong). I find GIF a convenient format for bitmapped
drawings, the lossless compression means they take up less
disk space but don't loose any quality. I may move more
towards PNG in future, once I get a chance to experiment
with it some more. The drawing looks great from here!
Re #183: It's a pretty safe bet that the earliest CAD
programs predate AutoCAD (and the IBM PC).
|
keesan
|
|
response 185 of 198:
|
Dec 17 01:56 UTC 2000 |
Cshow was the program that worked perfectly (though I could not figure out
how to print with it). Graphic Works (grfwk) complained about a 'damaged bmp',
and Cshow displayed the bmp just fine. Both did the PCX. Newdeal also could
not handle the bmp, so I wonder if Screen Thief produced a format which is
too new for Graphic Works, and Newdeal also has to add this format. Graphic
Works did a splendid job converting the tiff to a gif (which you saw) but
printed the tiff rather small, and with a grid pattern which was not in what
we had fed it during the screen capture process and which did not display
withGraphic Works either. I did not see a way to make CShow convertfcvffc.
Between the two programs I can view and print all three formats (after
converting the tiff to a gif). Anyone know why the pcx was smaller than
the other bitmapped formats - is it also compressed?
Jim is having some trouble switching scales - as he was warned in the
documentation, the dimensions change when you change scales. The author of
microcad promised to e-mail me version 4.1.5 (instead of 4.0.3, which we have)
and said that he avoided keyboard commands in favor of mouse because he is
a bad typist. I am the opposite. That must be why the larger programs offer
a choice. I typed up a list of what the different buttons means rather than
having to hunt for the right button all the time by moving the cursor over
it to display the text description. They all look like little squares to me
(other than the circle and the triangle) with no particular meaning. I am
the one who finds my way around downtown by memorizing which street a store
is on and reading street signs (we have about four streets in each direction).
|
gull
|
|
response 186 of 198:
|
Dec 17 03:04 UTC 2000 |
CAD programs don't really lend themselves to toolbars, in my experience.
Drop-down menus and/or keyboard commands, sure, but not toolbars. A lot of
CAD concepts just can't be gotten across in an obvious way with a 16x16
icon. For example, in AutoCAD R14, some of the toolbar buttons are
fine...CIRCLE, RECTANGLE, and LINE for example are easy to make good icons
for. But the icons for ARC, SPLINE, and POLYLINE are very similar and easy
to confuse. And it's hard to make icons that get across the concepts of
OFFSET and ARRAY well.
|
keesan
|
|
response 187 of 198:
|
Dec 17 23:31 UTC 2000 |
There are four icons in this program that consist of a single square. This
is why he has the pop-up text when you put the mouse cursor over them. The
problem with drop-down menus is you have to remember which menu has the right
submenu with the right command in it, and this way he got all 63 commands (and
nine color selections) into a small area. I have typed up the text meaning
of each icon and will print it out and keep it handy to save hunting for the
right command since I cannot remember meanings of icons, which is still much
faster than three levels of menus. Actually it is double 63 commands, and
you click with either left or right button for a different command (choose
symbol/add symbol). I drew up a really bad looking 3D house with a chimney
that had brick infill, as practice. Hard to get the hang of 3D. See
steve.gif in my home directory for a good laugh.
Someone interested in unicode (whose Russian test page I corrected some typos
on - he does not know Russian) has been helping me try to set up with Cyrillic
fonts in DOS so that I can read Russian using lynx. I can now run a little
font and keyboard program that toggles between Latin (use this mode to enter
a command) and Russian (for typing and viewing Cyrillic). It uses the DOS
(ALT) CP-866 encoding for Cyrillic. Lynx offers the encodings ISO-8859-5
(UNIX), WIN-CP1251, and the Russian standard KOI8-R. My DOS font program
contains one file that is simply a list of characters, which we will need to
rearrange to get the usable encodings. Everyone told me it could not be done.
I was able to type Cyrillic e-mail while in pine. ALso got a program called
Telemate that promises to convert between encodings while online. Our RUssian
friends could then (when the computer is not busy playing chess) read Russian
news in Cyrillic using their grex account! Type o for options and then C
for charset to select the charset you want. I have 7-bit-approximation
selected so as to display transliteration rather than box characters or other
'upper ASCII'. I can now type Cyrillic with Jim's text editor, but printing
it would be another matter. We will see if RK works on a TTL monitor.
The DOS font editor sent to me did not like it.
|
ball
|
|
response 188 of 198:
|
Dec 18 02:39 UTC 2000 |
By 'upper ASCII' I'm guessing you mean characters with codes
above 127, which aren't ASCII at all since that is a 7-bit
standard.
|
keesan
|
|
response 189 of 198:
|
Dec 18 04:36 UTC 2000 |
Everyone I know but Andy calls it 'upper ASCII' =) It turns out the the
little file in rk with the list of characters is only for the keyboard so
there is no easy way to change from DOS to KOI8-R. The telemate program that
I downloaded turns out to be only the documentation. It was recommended that
I simply design my own Cyrillic fonts for KOI8 in DOS, with the font editor
sent me. Might be quicker than hunting all over for one.
|
ball
|
|
response 190 of 198:
|
Dec 18 16:39 UTC 2000 |
That's because I'm the last person left on Earth who cares!
<grin> I do try to use the proper terminology though, it
can avoid confusion.
|
keesan
|
|
response 191 of 198:
|
Dec 20 16:05 UTC 2000 |
We are having an interesting discussion in Coop 218 about how to do file
transfer of 8-bit (binary) files on m-net, which does not support binary file
transfer. I have just learned to uuencode and uudecode. The transfer time
appears to be about 22% longer, but the faster modem speed more than
compensates. There is also the time needed to encode and decode.
Also trying to come up with some combination of other features in the new CAD
program (which Jim said to go ahead and pay for - after two months of
experimenting and 2 weeks of trying to install AutoCAD and finally drawing
a line with it) to allow overlays - viewing two drawings at one time and
modifying only one of them. This lets you work on one floor plan while seeing
where things are on the floor below, or draw a separate sheet for electrical
wiring or plumbing. I offered to trade the author ten new bugs for a new
feature but I cannot find more than one possible bug so far. What we need
is a way to 'group' an entire diagram (treat all the lines as one whole) so
we can shrink it to 1/4 size, make it into a user-defined symbol which we then
import into the drawing we are working on in a different color, move on top
of that drawing, zoom back in, and eventually delete the 'symbol'. There are
two usual ways to make groups - one is to mark each line separately, which
gives you more control, and the other to group everything that fits into a
rectangle. This program uses the first method and we need the second.
Anyone have an idea? It is downloadable shareware - mcad40.zip (we have a
slightly later version) and only 66K download.
|
ball
|
|
response 192 of 198:
|
Dec 20 18:38 UTC 2000 |
I use UUEncode quite a bit. When retrieving a file from
Grex that has become a bit portly (more than 10Kb) I email
it to one of my accounts that accepts UUEncoded attachments
and detatch it on my machine here. An example command line
would be...
cat stupid.bin|uuencode stupid.bin|mail ball@thehelm.com
...this demonstrates unix's tradition of stringing together
commands to perform a given task. I think you wanted to
download files over a dial-up (non TCP/IP) connection.
Kermit might be the simplest way of acheiving that, and is
7-bit clean which may be required for MNet.
|
keesan
|
|
response 193 of 198:
|
Dec 20 23:02 UTC 2000 |
Do you want to try installing Kermit on m-net? I can download uuencoded files
just fine with grex using Ymodem batch, but not at all with m-net using X or
Y modem.
|