The July meeting of the TI-Chips was opened and the June minutes were read and accepted. Lin Shaw stated that our new memberships and the monthly raffles were keeping our balance in the black. There was no membership report this month.
Fred Ialacci, a long time member, dropped in for the meeting this month. It seems that Fred had decided to retire July 1st, and finds he just might have the time available to come to the meetings again. We certainly hope this is true, and the TI-Chips wish Fred a very happy and healthy retirement.
We also had another "new face" come to the meeting. The new face belonged to Les Kee with a clean shaven chin and upper lip. It took everyone a while to recognize the "young guy" who walked in. I took the opportunity to take Fred and Les' pictures for our Members' Gallery. Craig Getty gave Les a Zip Disk with the latest Web site back-up updates.
Regarding the formatting problems Lin Shaw had experienced with some of the 5¼" floppies he had, Lin said John Parken was welcome to keep the disks he brought in last month, and that it seemed that some of the disks he was attempting to format on his TI-99/4A were HD (high density) disks. Lin agreed that the TI disk controller programs don't support the HD size very well and that he probably should stick with the old DSDD (double-sided double-density) disks.
Alan Hewston brought in his PEB to try out the Corcomp and TI disk controller cards Harry Hoffman brought in for him to try. Alan spent the majority of the meeting running his PEB, sans TI-99/4A console, with different cards and configurations to see if he could get a response from the 5¼" disk drive in the PEB. Try as he might, Alan was unable to get the drive to respond. He removed the drive from the PEB and gave it to Harry to take home and evaluate. We hope Harry will have some good news for Alan next month.
In an attempt to provide Alan with as much evaluation/troubleshooting help as possible, I brought in an article I wrote for the November, 1992 Cleveland TI-99/4A User Group Newsletter titled: "What The LEDs Can Tell You About A Lock-up." This is a trouble shooting guide, of sorts, that I wrote to assist PEB users determine how and why their TI-99/4A / PEB system locks up or refuses to work.
Craig reported that he looked at Lucy Mayer's E-mail attachments she was sending to her Webmaster, and Craig recommended that attachments should be sent as generic text as much as possible. The plain, vanilla flavor text is easily read by all systems. Whereas specialty articles, containing graphics and special fonts, must be sent to a recipient who has the software capability to down load and view the file in the format it was created.
Alan Hewston said that Jim Krych has the conference site and date for CCAG 2003 set. Alan said this information and several interesting articles regarding the TI-99/4A and TI-99/8 can be found on http://tomheroes.com/retrotimes_59.htm. Alan said, although the site is still under construction, the articles are well worth reading.
Harry brought in a hard copy of E-mail he had received from a former member, Steve Eggers. I said I would forward Steve's E-mail to the TI-Chips who were unable to attend this month's meeting.
Alan's son, Timothy, did the honors of drawing the winning 50:50 raffle ticket again this month. Lucy Mayer was the winner. However, Lucy requested that her winnings be turned back to the TI-Chips. Congratulations, Lucy, and thank you for your thoughtfulness.
The next meeting of the TI-Chips will be August 17th, from 10:00 AM 'till noon in the Story Time Room in the North Royalton branch library.