Of many, many things...

Bill J Gray Mar 20, 2002

Hi folks,

In no particular order...

CCD FRAME COLOR:

I've tracked the CCD frame issue down and fixed it. Problem is that
when you select a new color, it's not automatically reflected on-screen...
you have to make some other change (say, click "spin left", then "spin
right") before it is applied. Anyway, that misbehavior will be gone
with the next update.

ASTEROID SYMBOLS:

The asteroid symbol is indeed settable. Add a line such as

ASTEROID_SYM=m-32,-32;l32,32;m-32,32;l32,-32;

to GUIDE.DAT. (The complete list of settable symbols is now given
at http://www.projectpluto.com/update7.htm#dso_symbols . At least,
I'm pretty _sure_ it's complete...)

"GO TO COMET" MISBEHAVIOR:

I was able to get "go to comet" to pick the wrong comet, too. It
may turn out not to matter very much; in the next update, it is likely
that "go to comet" will bring up a list similar to that of the "tables...
current comets" variety.

BACKGROUND COLORS IN HELP/MORE INFO/TABLES:

About background colors for such tables: I wasn't all that optimistic
that this idea would go over very well. (Though I expected more "aesthetic"
objections; the troubles with laptop screens causing text to float had
not occurred to me.) I'll figure out some way to add color controls for...

help/tables background (defaults to black)
"normal" text (defaults to white)
glossary links (defaults to blue)
go to object/event below horizon (defaults to red)
go to object/event below 10 degree altitude (defaults to yellow)
go to object/event well above horizon (defaults to green)

One warning here, though: the nice thing about the red-yellow-green
setup is that it's quite intuitive. I can't imagine having to look up
the color scheme in the manual, for example, but if it were instead
(say) "blue means well above horizon, red means near horizon, brown
means below horizon", it would be less immediately obvious.

GUIDE ON A CD-LESS LAPTOP:

To do this, you would have to install DOS Guide to the desktop's
hard drive, following the instructions at

http://www.projectpluto.com/harddriv.htm

since DOS Guide lacks a "nice" way to install to the hard drive.
Once you've got it working, move it over to the laptop, possibly
adjusting the directory structure a bit. As you'll see at the above
site, a "minimal" install will cost you maybe 11 MBytes, but you
will probably want to copy over a few other things and consume large
chunks of that 350 MByte hard drive.

-- Bill