Bob Gardner wrote:
Ron has had spectacularly bad luck with ASA products. Apparently no one else
has.

Bob Gardner

At the booth in Oshkosh I received a demo of On Top and purchased both
On Top and IP Trainer. I was told nothing special was required to run
these packages. I got home and found they didn't work. The one
useful information I ever got out of ASA Tech Support was:

Op Top and IP Trainer (of the version then current) did not support
Direct/X. This means there was no way the code would run on Windows
NT or later operating systems. Nearly all of my computers ran some
variant of these operating systems. This meant that I was out of
luck there. Margy did have a Windows 98 system on her desktop, so
I installed IP Trainer on that. It seemed to be extremely fragile
in it's operation which ASA support blamed on sound card
incompatibilities. I never got around to trying OnTop on the
Windows 98 system.

Further attempts to get any assistance out of ASA's software
department were futile. I was essentially, told sorry, you're
screwed. The product isn't advertised to work on the later
versions of windows. I was stuck with over $400 of useless
(to me at least software).

A year or so laster, ASA releases a patch to "provide" DirectX
support for the products. Of course, they don't bother to
actually tell me about this. I tried it on a couple of machines
but still never got it to work.

I'm not an idiot. I write high performance computer graphics
software for PC's for a living. Higher performance stuff than
what OnTop's demands are.

Despite numerous attempts to resolve this, nobody at ASA has bothered
to follow up other than Bob (who really is only related to the
company as they publish his books, which are quite good by the
way).

As for Prepware...the verseion I got at the same time as I purchased
the OnTop/IP Trainer worked as intended. It was just junk. The
image viewer was unusable. The images were scanned at a low res
and there was no way to zoom it. There was no way to measure
anything on the charts. As they didn't give you a copy of the
charts in any other form, it was kind of useless to study by.
Further annoyances were the fact that the entire help page for
the product was a single HTML file with links in it that didn't
go anywhere.

Compare that to Irwin Gleims stuff which has a very sophisticated
image viewer that allows you to zoom up and gives you enough tools
to actually measure things on the charts and answer the questions.

The general agreement (and Bob will admit to this) is that there
is no real tech support for the software at ASA. I'll continue
to point this out until ASA resolves the issue by either refunding
the money I wasted on this, or providing me with a version of the
software that actually runs on a modern machine (hopefully now
that the direct X issues have been fixed because nobody is
using Windows 98 or earlier seriously anymore).

=Ron