Running AMX PageMaker Plus without Floppy Drive

[vela025]

Hi All,

I was wondering if someone might be able to offer a little support. I've been trying to run AMX Pagemaker Plus on my BBC Master 128 (with Datacentre) without using the floppy drive. Does anyone have any experience of getting this to work (without floppy drive)? I do not have the physical roms for pagemaker so have been loading the roms mentioned here viewtopic.php?t=5222 into sideways ram.

I'm having a few problems in that I seem only to be able to load the sideways ram in to slots 6 and 7 which is then filled with the pagemaker plus and pagemaker plus support roms leaving no room for the mouse rom, is 2 slots the limit for sideways ram and the other free slots (0,1,2 and 3) are for physical roms?

I decided to try to see how far I could get without the mouse rom loaded. The second problem I ran in to is that running the disc images from the hard disk (having copied the files and folder structure from the ssd images to the hard disk) it tells me to insert the page maker disk into the drive and then hangs (I assume trying to read the non existent disc drive). Despite the images containing a !boot file, this will not run with *exec !boot, instead I'm having to load and run a file called "GO!". Is there a way around this?

It's not essential that I use pagemaker plus, however I've assumed this is probably the best DTP for the BBC. I have the PiTubeDirect and did wonder if there were any packages that would operate under the x86 processor, but did not get very far with Ventura publisher it was also asking for disk, despite trying (Ventura being the directory with the installation disk files in).

Code: Select all

CD A:=C:\Ventura

So in short, can I load more than 2 roms in to the sideways ram, can I direct page maker plus to the hard drive instead of looking for a floppy, and failing all of that is there a better/comparable DTP application that I could user under Dos or Acorn CP/M?

If you've made it to the end...thanks in advance I'd really appreciate any thoughts/ideas/recommendations anyone might have.

[CMcDougall]

Swram is in 4,5,6,7 & your correct ROMS go into the cartridge slots 0,1,2,3

you could burn the ROMs & buy a cart to put them on, so Mouse could also exist if have two carts.

if you can only get 6&7 swram, there is a jumper to make 4&5 too, it turns something else off, think the rom slot for a 32k rom within.

must be code somewhere to look for drive0, hence your hangs off HD

[Yrrah2]

At the moment I'm busy creating a webpage where all the roms of AMX are displayed with some explanation and zip's as package that should work. Including manuals etc.
(hope this week it will be done, or presentable)
But to answer your question. If you have the PageMaker 1.7 or better Stop Press V1.9 (the followup of PageMaker) you only need 2 rom images. The Pagemaker rom and the Pagemaker support rom. The mouse support is not needed. (unless you want to use AMX Art as well.)

You can Use pagemaker system disc from your hard drive, but when creating/editing pages PageMaker wants to use a DFS physical disc.
And this disc is a pages disc. This disc can be created with the system disc. PageMaker makes a file called 'Pages' on that disc this file contains 3 or 4 pages (depending on the 40/80 track disc) and it is indexed special for the program. So (as far as I know) it is not possible to use a different drive system. (unfortunately)

If you are looking for a different DTP try Wapping Editor. I think it is as good (or better) as PageMaker. Wapping Editor works from DFS,ADFS or RFS. Only the drawback is you need a physical ROM to use it (it is not hacked as SWR image). It also can read fonts from PageMaker if you want.
I was using PageMaker before but recently switched to Wapping Editor for the same reason as you experiencing now. And have to say I like it better than PageMaker.

[vela025]

Hi Both,

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me, my beeb tells me that in slot 4 it has Acorn ADFS 53 and in 5 it has Acorn ADFS 33 (which is unplugged), so I'm guessing the trade off would be losing use of the datacentre if I moved the jumper.

The website sounds like a great idea, I've struggled to track down the AMX software until I found the post on this forum with most of them listed. To be honest I've struggled to find many applications, games seem to be archived well, but it seems applications not quite so much. I will try Stop Press and see how I get on with that, thanks for the tip!

I'll look in to Wapping Editor, is there a way to obtain the physical roms do you know? I've had a quick check of ebay but alas no luck. Or is there a device I can program the eproms with, that's more on the budget side of things?

In other news I did eventually get Ventura working under dos plus, although after changing the GEM display driver to the colour version, it stopped working again...so I'll go back to the B&W option for now. If anyone else has struggled with this as I did, I found that installing Ventura under dos box and then copying the resulting directory across to the CF card worked a charm. VP.bat did not work for me, however once GEM is loaded up in the Ventura directory there is a file called VP.app, this is the one that worked for me...no floppy drive required.

Thanks again for the help, it's given me a few more things to look in to!

[Yrrah2]

Thanks again for the help, it's given me a few more things to look in to!

I have updated my site, so you can find more info on both programs an downloads for it.

[vela025]

I have updated my site, so you can find more info on both programs an downloads for it.

Sorry for the late reply, I've just started looking around your website and it's great. It has the majority of resources that I've been looking for! My main mouse is a Watford Electronics mouse (as the plastic snapped off the ball-holder-in thing on the bottom of my AMX mouse)...and I didn't even know they had their own software for it! Admenu looks great too going to get started on using that later. Thanks again for the time and effort it must have taken you to create all of this for Beeb users!!

[Yrrah2]

You're welcome.
At the moment I'm busy OCRing the pagemaker manual. But it's quite big and a lot of pages to scan/OCR and re do it in a DTP application.
So a little patience on that one

[Yrrah2]

Sorry for the late reply, I've just started looking around your website and it's great. It has the majority of resources that I've been looking for! My main mouse is a Watford Electronics mouse (as the plastic snapped off the ball-holder-in thing on the bottom of my AMX mouse)...and I didn't even know they had their own software for it! Admenu looks great too going to get started on using that later. Thanks again for the time and effort it must have taken you to create all of this for Beeb users!!

Just uploaded the OCRed version of the PageMaker manual. During the converting proces I saw that the Opus Challenger was also supported. And this gave the option using the RAM disc (if I'm correct) as page discs. So that would work much faster comparing to a DFS disc.

[fordp]

Sorry to jump in on this thread but does anybody have a Pagemaker work disk (SSD) with some DTP documents on they are willing to share. I want to add extraction to BMP so you can view/print them on a modern PC?

[Yrrah2]

Sorry to jump in on this thread but does anybody have a Pagemaker work disk (SSD) with some DTP documents on they are willing to share. I want to add extraction to BMP so you can view/print them on a modern PC?

On one of the StopPres SSD's is a demo page. Not on the system disc, but on the utilities disc.

UPDATE
Got it here :

StopPress_Demopage_40T.ssd

(100 KiB) Downloaded 68 times