🚀 go-pugleaf

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64C: the case is much nicer, but the keyboard has been reduced to something
like a toy. Great big letters, clickety clack keys, much worse feel than old
64. Why? Who knows? I've also seen 3 or 4 different types of lettering on
old 64 keyboards, but none of them had such bad feel.

1541C: improvement? We don't need no stinkin' improvement!!! After all this
time of telling people how the new 1541 would have a light-sensor to eliminate
head clatter, you can imagine my disgust at the rattling it makes EVERY time
you turn it on or reset the computer. First one unpacked and put on display
went out of alignment AND overheated, it fails to load Paperback Filer and
probably some others. I'd rather stick to my old 1541, which only rattles
once in a blue moon when I boot up a copy-protected game from the Dawn of
Time, instead of every 5 minutes or so.

New manuals: haven't checked them out too much; I like the fact that they
actually deal with more than hooking up the hardware and looking up Basic
keywords in alphabetical order.

Price: people who are looking for their first computer are staying away from
the new 64's in droves around here. These are people who haven't heard
about Quantumlink and Geos, and once they hear the higher price, they don't
stay around long enough for an explanation. The only people who are interested
seem to be veteran 64 owners who want Geos because they've heard so much
about it. Quantumlink in Canada is not feasible yet, with the $9 per hour
surcharge to connect through Datapac (yes, every hour!). If this could be
eliminated, EVERYONE, I mean *EVERYONE* with a modem would be signed up
tomorrow.

Geos: a disappointment in many ways to me. I'd rather see a paint program
stick to monochrome hi-res and do it *well* than try to imitate a Koala Pad
and do it poorly. Or else go all out for multi-colour. Not fumble around
somewhere in between. The Geos main screen lends itself to the worst colour
bleeding I've ever seen, and the Preferences Manager seems unpredictable in
its choice of colours - you set 'em up, but they usually just revert to what
they were before. The word processor I like (for beginners - I would have
been happy with it when I first got my 64). Joystick control is poor, why not
have 256 different joystick speeds? And as for the "Real Soon" drivers for
other devices - a 15 byte routine will return X & Y coordinates and status
of button for a lightpen. Same for Koalapad, I would guess. If worry is about
lightpen compatibility, how tough can it be to have one 15 byte routine for
Koala lightpen, another for Flexidraw pen, etc? There is really no excuse
for any delay in these! Same holds for printer drivers. Let's not get carried
away with "beta-testing" things to death! Drive speed seems marginally better;
the amount of disk access tends to negate this advantage, and the Berkely
Softworks fast-loading routine's strange noises and light-flashing always
makes me uncomfortable. Why not provide some sort of facility for Vorpal
loading (from Epyx - the fastest software loading utility I've seen by several
orders of magnitude)? I mean, let's get all the troops together on this one.

Geos manuals: i'd really like to be more positive in this article; I really
would. But the bad spots stand out so much! There are dozens of glaring
misspellings in the Geos manual ("droping...visable...refered...occured")
that almost leapt off the page at me as I casually browsed through it. Can
it ever have been proofread??? I paid close attention only to the beginning,
about how to begin to use Geos if you've never used a computer before; this
is supposed to be the big advantage of Geos, how friendly it is to the first-
time user. The first thing I encountered was the dreaded "back up your disk
before using it" bit (shades of Big Blue!), a pet peeve of mine (2 master
disks makes more sense to me). Reason: if you ever zapped your master, you
could copy all the files back on to it. I can at least see the reasoning, even
if I would do it differently. However, the next thing it suggests for you to
do is scratch the Geos Kernal off your backup disk ("because it's already on
the Geos master disk"). Maybe they intend for you to have numerous backups and
work disks, but this was VERY UNCLEAR to me. Who knows, maybe a first-time
user would be able to follow the instructions without making a fatal mistake,
but I somehow doubt it.

What else? The above thoughts all arose out of my initial impressions on
Geos and the new 64. Since then, I've done some more fooling with the soft-
ware. I like the calculator. I like the notepad. (But then I also like my
Amiga ;-). I really dislike the paint program - the copy on the work disk
has developed some problems where it doesn't fill properly and the colour
selection is sometimes munged. Give me Koalastuff, Flexidraw, or Doodle
anytime. The wordprocessor appeals to me as a way to introduce tyros to
using a computer for printing. For the enlightened, I would love lots of
keyboard shortcuts, with Amiga-style reminders in the joystick menus. The
amount of time it's taking for anything Geos-compatible to come out still
amazes me (this includes device drivers & applications prgs & revised versions
of older prgs). *** SUGGESTION TO WHOEVER IS STILL READING *** : have Geos
boot a program, leaving only enough code hidden under ROM (preferably $D000)
to boot Geos back up again. That way your favourite game or whatever can go
back to Geos when you quit. Memory-tight programs like word-processors
or spreadsheets could incorporate their own loaders for re-booting Geos after
you are finished with them. And new programs, written to run UNDER Geos could
still access all the desktop utilities and such. Doesn't seem like too much
to ask. Making a system LOOK like a more powerful one is all well and good,
all the beta-testing and code no doubt ported straight from C sources on
bigger micros and intensive disk access; yet this shouldn't be an end in
itself. People (especially people with money to spend) respect the finer
points of the software too (still can't get over how much the joystick control
reminds me of Music Construction Set).

John Russell, very sleepy owner of an old 64 (great machine) and fan of the
Amiga (GREAT machine).

Disclaimer: All opinions are mine, not those of...you know the routine!