Synapse SynCalc-program & source code now in PD

[luckybuck]

Hi Mike,

 

SynCalc was the best spreadsheet and had the best protection, too.

 

Further, I remember my Filemanager 800+ dongle in the 1st joystick port.

 

Recently, someone in the Netherlands found, that an original Wordprocessor disk from Atari had a 2nd index hole...

 

So, even 30 years later, they work!

[MikeSilva]

(well I STILL can't make the "quote" reply feature work in this forum - crazy!!)

 

Anyway, about the board, I'm sure they're all in landfill somewhere in Marin County, where Broderbund was located. I don't remember how many they made, maybe 6 to 10? Anyway, just imagine the PCB of a standard cartridge, but on the top the board grows out to maybe 14" wide and 10" high (35x25 cm). Lots of 2102 memory chips, enough to hold all the possible transitions in a single track - I just did a really rough calculation now and I come up with maybe 60 2102 memory chips, assuming 18 sectors * 200 total bytes/sector * 8 bits/byte * 2 transitions/bit.

 

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Edited May 2, 2016 by MikeSilva

[Heaven/TQA]

I guess I should try SynCalc on my 800 and show my wife and the "youngsters" here in the office who think that Excel was here forever.

[ijor]

Anyway, just imagine the PCB of a standard cartridge, but on the top the board grows out to maybe 14" wide and 10" high (35x25 cm). Lots of 2102 memory chips, enough to hold all the possible transitions in a single track - I just did a really rough calculation now and I come up with maybe 60 2102 memory chips, assuming 18 sectors * 200 total bytes/sector * 8 bits/byte * 2 transitions/bit.

 

 

 

That's amazing! Yes, it's around 3250 bytes per unformatted track at nominal speed.

 

But you used regular Atari drives, didn't you? Just modified to accept the input from this board, I guess.

 

Also, do you know if you duplicated disks for other companies (besides Broderbund after the acquisition)? I ask because a couple of other publishers had similar characteristics.

[MikeSilva]

No, the drives were not Atari, just regular IDE drives, lined up on their sides. And I'm not aware that they ever duped disks for any other companies.

 

Mike

[ijor]

No, the drives were not Atari, just regular IDE drives, lined up on their sides. And I'm not aware that they ever duped disks for any other companies.

 

 

I see. So you had to slow down the drives to the nominal Atari drives RPM (288 vs 300). Or you compensated the frequency with the on board clock.

 

I was going to say that you also ignored the disk index, as Atari drives do, because I can see that the tracks are not aligned. But of course, if you recorded on multiple drives at the same time, then you didn't have much choice!

 

I assume you implemented a dummy index pulse based on a timer (again, as Atari drives do)? At least for the regular tracks because the WD FDC won't format a track without the pulse.

[MikeSilva]

 

I'm going to disappoint you by tossing the "I don't remember" card now. For example, I don't even remember if I was aware of the difference in motor speeds between Atari and standard drives (!), but we certainly didn't change the speed of the drives. And I don't remember anything about handling the index pulses, sorry! I just remember that it all worked.

[ijor]

I'm going to disappoint you by tossing the "I don't remember" card now.

 

That's ok, don't worry. It is understandable, and even expected, of course. Thank you very much!

[Atari8guy]

On 3/10/2016 at 11:40 AM, Marius said:

I still use this more than fabulous spreadsheet in my music school. My entire administration is done in this package. I have a professional business and everything is done in Syncalc. It simply works.

 

My wish would be this:

 

A file version of this spreadsheet that can run in SDX and also works with directories. That would be a huge improvement over disk version.

 

I own an original copy including manual of this excellent program btw.

It's extremely powerful. Only downside is that 90K storage limit. I have to spread my administration over several floppy disks now. In my administration this means every quarter of a year I take a new disk.

 

on my a8 I have a brother laser printer, and I print with smallest font. This is extremely sharp, and it is amazing to see how much data can fit on a single page.

Did a full file version ever appear?

[luckybuck]

Yes:

https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SynCalc

but only the 1985 version as atx image, not file, is genuine.

You can find out for yourself very simple, try to import a VisiCalc file from the file version. If it fails, then the version is not genuine. Quite simple.