A2 News and Notes March 2001 INDEX * Delphi Textside Doomed * Enhanced Accounts Available on A2Central.com * Kim Howe Releases Two New NDAs * Focus Drives Available Again * More Silvern Castle * Thomas Compter Releases DiskChanger * KansasFest 2001! ** Repeater Registration Ends ** Early Registration Extended ** Keynote Speaker and Roastee Announced * Delphi Textside Doomed The official announcement from Delphi finally came: in a short two sentence announcement as you log into the text interface of Delphi.com comes the news, "Delphi Text-based services, including telnet and e-mail, are being discontinued as of May 1, 2001. Delphi.com continues to be available on the Web." In the meantime, message traffic on both the text and web sides in the A2 and A2Pro areas has slowed to a crawl. If you haven't moved your email yet, it's imperative you do so now, and get in all the downloads you can before May 1st. Many of us are, as expected, having a great time over on A2Central.com. * Enhanced Accounts Available on A2Central.com In A2Central.com news, for an additonal charge members can have their own web pages with up to 10 megabytes of storage. See http://www.a2central.com/join.html for more information. * Kim Howe Releases Two New NDAs Australian programmer Kim Howe, who is continuing to work on the first standalone World Wide Web browser for the Apple IIgs, Arachnid, took a break from that to put out two New Desk Accessories. One is a new version of an old favorite, Yahtzee, updated for the Apple IIgs. No more dice and pencils. The other NDA is a useful piece of software for all of you A2Central.com conference addicts--Telnet NDA provides a way to telnet out with a chat buffer for your conferencing needs. See Kim's webpage at http://www.a2people.com/~kimhowe/ for more details. * Focus Drives Available Again After a dry spell of a few months that had Apple II users down to only ///SHH Systeme to turn to for hard drives, Alltech Electronics Focus Drives are once again available. In 340 megabyte and 170 megabyte sizes, these are great hard drives for anyone with a IIe or IIgs. Contact Alltech at http://www.allelec.com/ for more information. * More Silvern Castle Jeff Fink continues to update his amazing 8-bit role playing game, Silvern Castle. Version 7.2 adds "auto-notes" as well as improving the speed of auto-mapping and drawing of the maze. You can download it from ftp://ftp.a2central.com/pub/prodos/games/scupd72.bxy * Thomas Compter Releases DiskChanger Long-time Apple II user Thomas Compter has released a new utility for use with KEGS32 for Windows, which allows KEGS32 users to use a graphical user interface to mount and eject disks (as opposed to the manual editing of a configuration file). Download it at ftp://ftp.a2central.com/pub/emulation/DiskChgr.exe * KansasFest 2001! A few notes from the Apple II event of the year, KansasFest 2001: ** Repeater Registration Ends The March 31 deadline for repeat KFesters to get their special rate has come and gone, and about 40 KFesters have already signed up, including Juiced.GS Publisher Max Jones, Joe Kohn of Shareware Solutions II, Syndicomm's Eric and Sarah Shepherd, InTrec's Jerry Cline, Spectrum author Ewen Wannop, and world famous Apple IIgs programmer Geoff Weiss have already signed up. Use this opportunity to meet these long time Apple II fanatics in person. ** Early Registration Extended The April 15 deadline for discounted registration has been extended to April 30 . To get this special rate, just go ahead and register before April 30, 2001. For more information, see http://www.kfest.org/ ** Keynote Speaker and Roastee Announced According to Steve "The Grand Gouda" Gozdziewski, head of the KFest committee, well-known Apple II programmer and Syndicomm owner Eric Shepherd has been announced as the keynote speaker for KansasFest 2001. Shepherd, known for programs such as Shifty List, WebWorks GS, and Wolfenstein 3D for the Apple IIgs will surely be a must-see. Additionally, in a long-anticipated move, Juiced.GS Publisher and all around good guy Max Jones will be roasted this summer. If this doesn't get you motivated to come to KFest, I don't know what will! * Sign Off A2 News and Notes is produced with real or emulated Apple II computers using Appleworks 5.1 and Hermes with the occasional assist from ProTERM Mac on the Macintosh. Apple II Forever! A2 News and Notes is (c) copyright 2001 by Ryan M. Suenaga, M.S.W. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the copyright holder and publisher. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or suitability of any information included herein. We reserve the right to edit all letters and copy. Material published in this edition may be reprinted free of charge anywhere provided this copyright notice is included.