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Originally published in the July 1999 issue of the LUCKY REPORT (newsletter of the Louisville Users of Commodore of KentuckY published by K. Dale Sidebottom – the editor K.D.S. making a comment)

WHEELS
===One Year Down the Road===
by Bruce Thomas

Wow! It doesn't seem like it was just over a year ago that a package arrived in the mail containing Version 4.0 of Wheels 64. A lot has happened in that year, and a lot has changed as far as the condition of my Wheels today. It's hard to determine where to start. I guess the best place to start is at the beginning.

When Wheels 64 arrived, there were a lot of features that had not yet been implemented. To be exact, Maurice included a list of 12 features that were not in the initial release of Wheels. Also missing were what he referred to as `other features that I can't think of right now.'

Editors Note: Why did he release the product before it was completely finished? Two reasons...first he wanted people to start 'playing with it' so that he could get other perpectives than his own regarding future improvments. Secondly, I and others begged him to release it immediately. We didn't want to wait a year for a "perfect" product to evolve. We wanted it ASAP! ---K.D.S.---

While all features were not available in the original Wheels 64, it was still an amazing piece of software. The system opened up all kinds of possibilities for Commodore Power Users. If you owned any CMD Storage devices, it was now possible to start using them as you never could before. It added functionality to the core of the system making it easier to get things done.

An Oil Change

A little over 7 months passed and another package arrived in my mailbox. This package contained Wheels 128 V4.1 - the first new version of this GEOS enhancement to run on the 128. Running Wheels 128 at 20 MHz would be a natural thing to do, but it would have to wait. The package happened to arrive the day before we were to leave for a one week Christmas vacation to California...Disneyland! YaHoo!!!

While I did not get the chance to fire up my new Wheels prior to leaving, I knew I would have time to at least read the manual on the plane or at poolside while we were away. This proved to be very interesting as I compared the original Wheels 64 manual with the new combined Wheels 64/128 manual. I got very familiar with all of the new features, the added functionality, and the feel of the system. When we got back I was ready to dig in.

LIGHT 'EM UP!

A very big difference to this release of Wheels was the fact that the disk I received from Maurice was now bootable. While I needed my original GEOS 128 boot disk during the install process, I didn't have to load GEOS 128 first. On top of that, it was no longer necessary to own GEOS V2.0 to install Wheels as this version would also accept a GEOS V1.4 boot disk during installation.

The entire installation procedure was much smoother. There was no need to juggle hardware or disable any piece of equipment. I was on the road very quickly.

Whew! 80 Columns! 20 MHz! So long GEOS 64...

All of the nagging little inconsistencies in version 4.0 of Wheels 64 were gone. There was now a printer icon on the screen. The disk names didn't overlap the drive windows and mess up the display.

The drive windows even had a new look. It was now easier to tell the difference between your active window and any non-active window (a thin line appears under the close box in the top left corner). System Windows also had a different look by displaying a non-filled close box. These features were necessary due to the Color Memory differences between different versions of the 128. By adding little touches like these, Maurice made it possible to run Wheels without a Color Monitor and be able to work just as well as if you had one.

Best of all there were no more annoying 'not implemented' message boxes. Everything worked! There were, however, still some little things missing and Maurice was still working on them.

Final Oil Change

March 30, 1999 brought the final package in the mail from Maurice. This one contained two disks. Wheels 64 V4.2 and Wheels 128 V4.2. The first improvement was that all the known bugs were gone!

The really nice thing about Wheels is that the boot disk that loads on my SCPU-powered 20 MHz system will still load and run on my 1 MHz system. This is a first for GEOS. I used to own a 4 MHz TurboMaster Accelerator and, if I disconnected the Accelerator, I needed a different boot disk to get GEOS going. You often needed a different GEOS boot disk (made possible by Jim Collette's program, geoMakeBoot) each time you changed the configuration of your hardware. No longer! Wheels 64/128 has the ability to "see" what is connected to your system and access it accordingly!

Wheels allows multiple drive windows from up to 4 drives to be open at the same time. In GEOS you could only have one open and only two active drives. With all of the windows open it is nice to be able to re-size the windows to see some of each. Up until V4.2 came out, the re-size feature of Wheels was limited. We can now re-size windows and still see all of the icons in the window. Since there are no horizontal scroll arrows on a Wheels window, the number of icons in a row now changes from the mazimum of four down to one if you make the window narrow enough.

Wheels V4.2 now features an application called the Detail Shop. It is here that you can customize all of the neat things like screen colors, mouse pointers and the screen saver. Also found in the Detail Shop is the ability to customize your mouse and keyboard input.

Adjusting your Mouse Driver can give your computer a huge performance boost. Maurice explains the timing and that 1/8th of the time Wheels is running is spent waiting for switches to pass the signals from the mouse to move your pointer. By adjusting this value (I ran mine right down to zero on my 128D), you gain more time for the processor to make your applications work.

It is also possible to speed things up by adjusting the Keyboard Repeat timing. In GEOS this was set to a value of 15 (the Wheels default) and that means that you will get four letters on the screen every second if you held a key down continuously. By adjusting the three values available, you can improve the time you spend typing (and isn't slow geoWrite performance the reason why so many GEOS users do their writing with The Write Stuff?).

All settings that you configure in The Detail Shop can be saved to a file that is automatically loaded when you boot Wheels. Wheels 64 V4.2 still has some difficulty with loading custom pointer shapes automatically, but you can load them manually by going into the Detail Shop and Loading Details from the File menu.

Maurice has improved the File Copying ability of Wheels, and the added Drive SWAP function of the Dashboard makes it easy to arrange your drives however you want. We definitely want to have as many drives working as possible, and they are all active and accessible, but if you have less than four you can still put them into any drive position you want regardless of their device number when you powered up.

I'll wrap this up for now, although I know there are lots of other features of Wheels I could talk about. I think I have covered the major new ones that have arrived since that first version was released last year. In any case, you will be very pleased with the new-found freedom these 'Wheels' can give you and your Commodore.

Since a RAM expansion unit of some kind is a requirement to running Wheels, you are well on your way to becoming a 'Power User'. Once you experience the freedom of Wheels, you will likely want to get some more hardware for your system. Whether that means getting a second 1541 drive or whether you want to go for a Hard Drive and SuperCPU, you will find that all of this integrates smoothly into your WHEELS environment, and you will just keep rolling along! After all, isn't that what Wheels are for?