"Family Pictures" is a mysterious object that to those in the know is a goldmine of Audi information. This is the CD-ROM based parts database that replaced the old microfiche system at our beloved dealers. Somehow copies of it have filtered down to the "street level" and are being copied and disseminated. I'm not sure what copyright issues may be involved here, but let it suffice to say that I have never seen one of these, don't know anyone who has, and even if I had, would not be at liberty to discuss such a mission... Anyway, if you get your hands on one of these CD's and are running a Windoze based PC, it is a fairly simple matter to install from the CD and then run "Family Pictures", with the CD in your drive to provide the database. You can pick the brand (Audi/VW), the model, then the year of vehicle, then the parts diagrams are broken down into 10 "Main Groups" and multiple "Sub Groups", each of which may have several drawings. Pay careful attention to vehicle numbers and the like since often three drawings in a row will apply but to different engines or period cars. One potential drawback to "Family Pictures" is it must run on a 1280 x 1024 screen. This means that if you don't have a screen large enough you won;t be able to see the outer edges of the program - unless you can resize your desktop to that setting without blowing up your computer or monitor. Most modern high MB video cards can handle this, however.
With the desktop set at 1280 x 1024 and a smaller screen size, you only see a section of the video at a time but the cursor causes the visible portion to scroll around when it hits the edge of the screen. The only tiresome part is resizing the desktop when preparing to run "Family Pictures", and vice versa.
Another problem that has cropped up is that it expects to print on A4 size paper. Here in the US our 8.5 by 11 inch paper is slightly smaller than that size, so each time you print something, you waste a page with the border of the image down one end. But, (Source temporarily suppressed) posted this great solution to the problem: Edit the *.ini files in the et_prog directory. There is a setting for "Paper=" with "A4" the default, and "US_Letter" commented out with a #. Comment out the Paper=A4, un-comment out the Paper=US_Letter, you should be fine. HTH. You can open these files in notepad easily by right clicking on it from explorer. A few lines down in each one you will see a bunch of gibberish that looks like this: PAPER=A4
What you need to do is make it look like this: #PAPER=A4
warning: so far this hasn't worked for me. look for update soon/try this: > Is there a secret to being able to print out these pictures to 8.5"x11" paper? eventually, yes sort of. when you get the "print" window (the one that goes with your computer,
not FP), you have an an opportunity to mess with the printer params
(instead of just clicking "ok"). Go in and under paper size you will
see it has selected A4 (or whatever A size it is...) change it to 8.5 x
11. Doesn't waste the extra sheet, but seems to lose that dumb little
bit of the frame that would have been printed on it.
Here's what you need to do to run "Family Pictures" on an NT workstation (Source temporarily suppressed): 1. Install "Family Pictures" on your hard drive [C:\ -?] 2. Copy the LEXHDL5.DLL from the directory et_prog.w95 on the installation CD [D:\ -?] into the et_prog directory on your hard drive [C:\ -?]. It will overwrite the existing LEXHDL5.DLL. In order to see prices: 1. Find the file PREIS.SAV in the directory et_root on your [C:\ -?]. 2. Change its extension to .E for English or .D for German. (i.e. change it to PREIS.E) 3. Double click on the part number to get the price screen. 4. The first price is the actual one, the second one is with the 14.5% VAT factored in. For us in the States it is pretty much irrelevant coz we are not subject to VAT on our import orders. We still have to pay the customs brokerage fees, tho, but IME the UPS handles this chore just fine. In order to see the full "Family Pictures" screen: 1. Switch your video card resolution to 1280x1024 if you can. 2. If your video card does not support the above resolution - download one of the "virtual desktop" or "multiple desktop" programs floating around as shareware. (Source temporarily suppressed)
From: (Source temporarily suppressed) This note describes a technique that I stumbled on this afternoon (with apologies if it's already been mentioned--or is considered obvious). It could be useful to those Macintosh users who are interested in running the "Family Pictures" CD program, but whose monitors have insufficient resolution. My Macintosh G3 Powerbook (laptop) computer has a nice 14.1" (diag) active matrix display panel with great definition, but its 1024x768 pixels maximum resolution falls short of the1200x960 (?) resolution demanded by the "Family Pictures" program. But in spite of the deficient resolution, I decided to try using the the "Family Pictures" CD with the Powerbook (btw, I'm running Win95 in Virtual PC 2.1 software emulation). This VPC software has worked very well on my desktop G3 Macintosh system, and I thought: wouldn't it be nice to have the "Family Pictures" CD data also available from a portable computer? As expected, when the Display control in Win95 is set equal to the maximum resolution of the Powerbook monitor, i.e., 1024x768, then the "Family Pictures" program has a 2-3 inch-wide section along the right side that falls off-screen. This loses part of each p/n page plus several of the program's menu buttons. And as most of us know by now, the darned program makes no provision for scrolling. So it's pretty useless this way. What to do? Well, Virtual PC emulation makes it possible to run the Win95 desktop in a Mac "window mode" (small "w"). This mode places the Win95 desktop within a Mac window. Although this window unfortunately lacks the usual scroll bars, it can be moved on the screen by any desired extent by click-dragging on the title "bar" of the window or on any point on the window edges. But so what, since1024x768 is still too small, right? Well, it turns out that Virtual PC tries to size its Win95 desktop according to _whatever_ resolution value is entered in the Windoze "Display" control panel, so I decided to *not* tell Windoze the sad truth about my Powerbook's limited resolution. In fact, I have Windoze thinking that the monitor is the Sony 17" multiscan on my other system. That enabled me to set the resolution slider at1280x1024. Consequently, we have VPC/Win95 creating a 1280x1024 Win95 desktop within a 1280X1024 Mac window, and the entire "Family Pictures" program can fit very comfortably. Since the program/window is now obviously larger than the Powerbook 1024x768 screen, it's necessary to move (drag) the window around in order to view all areas. A lot of tedious dragging is required so It's actually not very friendly for casual browsing. Nevertheless _all_ of the program and data are viewable and usable--despite the screen's limited size. If I could find a Mac utility that allows an application window to be dragged from *anywhere* within the boundary (not just at the edges), then using the Powerbook could be...almost...convenient. For now though, convenient browsing-- for me--means using my desktop G3 with (1280x1024) 17" screen. But on the road my Powerbook may now have some Audi-enhancing capability (in addition to producing Steet Atlas USA maps). Windows 2000: Do a full install on the C: drive, then
This should work for the CD Installation as well. It appears the problem is that the Family Album thinks W2K is W95, when it is not. This is the fix.  |
