Maury Markowitz

Ah-ha! Thanks. Maury

Of all the BASIC's I've found only four work: Atari BASIC (rom image), Microsoft BASIC 1.0 that I found on some other disk, TurboBASIC XL 1.5 (mislabled) and Frost BASIC 1.4 (cut down Turbo). The emulator ran the Ahl bench in Atari BASIC at the same time to within a few seconds at 6 minutes, 46 seconds. A second run was 30 seconds faster, which is interesting. Anyway the emulator seems to be close enough that _relative_ speeds are OK even if the exact numbers aren't. Then I fired up Microsoft and the time dropped to 1.34 for every run. Much faster! However the RND function doesn't work and always returned 1. Do I need to seed it? The math was less accurate too. And then I moved onto Turbo. 38 seconds! Almost TWENTY TIMES as fast as Atari BASIC! Better accuracy as well. So I need working copies of... MS 2.0 OSS BasicA, BASIC XL, BASIC XE There's images for these (and lots of others) on the 'net, but they don't run. Does anyone have working versions?

Well I've tried everything, and I still can't figure it out. I mapped in the hard drive and tried 'SAVE "H1:BENCH.BAS' and that says "error- 130" whatever that is. Then I used the "new disk" function to make a floppy image in D1, and tried 'SAVE "D1:BENCH.BAS' and got the same error. Do you know what this error means? Maybe this is the best way. Maury

Thanks Allan. Maury

I used to have a little utility app on the Mac that let me easily move files on and off ATR's. Is there such a beast for Windows? I'd like to download the TurboBASIC docs off the disk and into a modern format (HTML likely) but my attempts to print it (thinking this would make a file) and such have failed. Maury

I have Atari800Win Plus 3.0 and it's much better than the win based emu's I've used in the past. However I'm stumped on one issue that should be trivial... how to save a BASIC program? I thought I would use the cassette emulation, but I later found that it simply doesn't write to them. So that's out. I then tried to use 'SAVE D:BENCH.BAS" but that said something about "not supported". I never had a disk for my Atari, so I'm at a loss. So I was wondering if someone can help? Do I need a DOS to be loaded to operate the disk? If not, how do I create a blank disk image I can use? Or can someone send me one?

This is excellent news, making the UI under Cocoa means that you can use basically unmodified Unix source, so it should be much easier to keep up to date. Maybe I can do an OpenStep port of his work, I'll ask. I just got my OpenStep machine running again after all these years. What an OS! Maury

Yeah, so much for all the stories about plastic remaining around forever. Did you know what you actually find when you dig into a landfill? Paper. Serious, you can pull out newspapers and phone books in pristine shape. Meanwhile the plastic is all degrading. Maury

As a lark, I'd like to run some classic BASIC benchmark programs on various Atari BASICs. Seeing as I don't have an Atari to run them on, I'll have to do this under emulation. Can anyone comment on the accuracy of the speed of the emulators? I can imagine a case where the emu runs certain things very fast and others slower, but average out. Or alternately (and more likely) the emu speed is linked to frame rate. Both could potentially skew the results of a calculation-only task. Also, which BASICs should I use for this? I was going to do BASIC A, B and C, as well as the OSS basics and Turbo BASIC. I wouldn't mind trying the two MS BASICs and others. Does anyone have a list of all BASICs on the Atari? How about OS upgrades? Does anyone have emu-able images of OS's with the various upgrades applied? Maury

Certainly the speed of the drives would have improved, but I really question how much of an advantage that would have been. I can't imagine many people buying a $xxx box so they can spend even more money to plug in the drives. Consider the horrid drives on the C64. If people can live with those, they could live with the SIO. Remember, you already paid for the SIO, its free. A reasonable solution would have been an additional SIO perhaps, and certainly the later DOS versions improved things greatly. Absolutely. But again, this is for a tiny tiny part of the Atari using population. People didn't buy Atari's to do 80-column word processing. It would have perhaps made it more interesting if it were built in, but can you really imagine someone buying one, and an expansion box, and the card AND a monitor just to get what the Apple gave them standard? Ditto. With the XL's coming with 64k anything more than that would be once again for the hacks. Now of course the Atari market had a lot of hacks, because it was such a great machine for that. But if the idea is to improve the market, the 1090 is selling to the wrong crowd. Its not entirely clear what the right solution would have been, but history strongly supports the point that external expansion solutions WILL NOT BE USED. Simply consider the right cartridge slot in the 800. Few users means few users. Unless you can come up with a staggeringly obvious must-have feature so that every single user with an XL would have one, no one would develop for it. Now there is an entirely other reason for releasing the 1090, and that's because NOT releasing it pissed off a lot of people. Maury

Yup, the 400 and 800 both did this, although I'm not at all sure why. They removed it from later machines. Now for real fun. Attach two similar machines together with an SIO cable, then try to turn one off... The idea was that both of the slots were mapped into memory, so when you plugged in a cart it "became" some memory in the machine. They simply mapped the right slot into a different set of locations. The idea was that the 800 could thus have up to 16k in the carts instead of the normal 8. However what really happened is that since the 400 outsold the 800 by a whole lot, almost no one used the right slot. That's because if you did, you were basically giving up on 80% of the market. It's classic case of an idea that's only obviously bad in retrospect. The carts that were available were pretty neat though, some excellent additions to BASIC and a great ML monitor for instance. The problem with the slots in the 800 is that they weren't real slots, they were really just funny-shaped cartridges. Like the cartridge slots they were mapped into different chunks of memory. In order to use the slots for anything else you had to include software that talked to your card by poking and peeking the right area of memory. And if the user put it in a different slot it wouldn't work, because it was in another area of memory then. I know there was an 80-column card for it, but it didn't include any RAM so you needed one of those larger than 16k upgrades first. Even then you had to cut a hole in the case to run the cable out. Very annoying. Compared to all the things they got right, I find the 800's weirdness somewhat mysterious. Maury

Oh it looked fine, no complaint there. My complaint is that it was physically junk. My 520 was so feeble that it would droop a couple of degrees if you held it in the air by one end or the other. It creaked and groaned when you typed on it, and would work its way apart if it was moved a few times -- requiring me to open it up to re-seat the ROMs. I think the best machine they ever did was the Mega. Tough,, good looking, reasonably good keyboard on a cable... I liked most everything about the Mega and thought it should be the basis for all future machines. But I guess it cost an extra 50 cents to make it, so that was that. And frankly, the TT's case *sucked*. YMMV, as always. Maury

You're right I think, it is primarily asthetics. However I can't help but love my 8-bit for just those reasons. ONE port to the peripherals, a case built like a tank (I had a 400) and the overall coolness of the machine in general. The ST was "functional" and nothing more. I don't know, I guess I'm an art-iste! :-) For sure. More annoying, perhaps, was all of the great GEM and TOS replacements that kicked butt. They could have bought any one of them at any time, offering a massive upgrade. But Atari was always bad on software. Look at the original BASIC. Slowest BASIC of all the home computers (a Sinclair was faster, sigh), buggy and feature light. They could have easily dropped a new version into the XL's. Maury

Out of curiosity, where? There's great books on the history of Apple all over the place, is there one on Atari? I'd love to read it! BTW, the best book on Apple isn't about Apple, it's the bio they did on Steve when he was still at NeXT. MUCH more detail about what was going on in the company than things like West of Eden. Maury

I guess that makes sense, but I don't understand why they wouldn't pipe it to the TV like they did on the XL's. That had to add a few points to the production cost. That's my feeling too, but it's too bad in a way. It certainly would have made programming easier, and faster too I'd bet. Maury

Thanks! Maury

Yeah, on that point it does make a lot of sense. Maury

True, but that is sidestepping the issue a bit... That's my feeling too, but I'd love to know for sure. Hmmm, sounds interesting. True, but I still find it somewhat curious. Like why there was a keyboard speaker on the first machines. I get the feeling they were thinking of doing something that they never got around too. Another mystery is why they didn't use X and Y offsets for smaller sprites, instead of the Y-only offset the Antic had. I assume this was because it made the circuitry easier to design, but it seems like a trememdous waste of RAM and programmer time. Maury

Does anyone know why the GTIA only handled 5 sprites? It set aside memory for 8 of them, but only used the lower chunk. There must be a story there. Maury

Oh, no need to appologize for my inability to read! Basically because the story is broken up too much. There's little snippets here and there, but nothing that reads as a complete history. You can hunt about and find some neato facts here and there, but I get the feeling there is a tremendous amount of stuff locked up in your brain that I'm missing out on. The 1200 story is the one I find the most interesting, yet there are only little tantalizing hints here and there of what must be a story of a little more than zero skulldrudgery. Also I have to admit I find the constant boosterism a little grating at times, but that's just me. Well how about we try this... I do write a lot, long historical naritives. I'd love to take a crack at this story, and have to some degree already: http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/other_stuff...tari_8-bit.html Scroll down to Sweet 16 and tell me what's wrong. I'm sure lots of it is wrong because what's there is pieced together from ybits on your page and a few e-mails. I'm sure it's not the whole story, and might be completely wrong. Maury

It was expensive only for a very brief time though, after something like six months it was already down to $299, about the same as the 400 was selling for during the sell-off in '81. Absolutely, it was the dump-n-burn strategy. And it worked, sort of. But this is how it always works, commodities have that effect on markets. Well I don't know about that. The SID was certainly better than POKEY, and while the graphics were never as clear as the Atari due to the analog side, the modes themselves were arguably even better. And the keyboard was certainly an improvement over the 800, let alone the 400! I won't argue that they were "better", but they certainly weren't trash. Impossible. I think you're underestimating the market. Technical excellence means almost nothing to the market, name means everything. IBM had the name, not even Apple could compete. I have to disagree. Cards were the blood of the Apple and PC because they HAD to be. The Atari had enough in the box to stand alone (as did other similar machines like the TI and 64). What exactly did the 1090 get the _average_ user? Nothing. So in other words it would be used by the hobbiest and fringe. That's unlikely to do a lot for the _platform_ as a whole. Maury

I was in a similar boat, but for different reasons. I lived out in the country and had no money, facts which combined to make me largely out of the loop - no internet back then! I was also 17 and in the middle of the platform wars "mine is bigger than yours" game. As a result when the ST's were coming down the pike it was "natural" for me as an Atari guy to get one. I couldn't think of doing anything else, nor afford it. Sadly my blinders were fastened on so tightly it was years before I realized what a pile the ST was. Mine in particular required periodic "resetting" of the ROM with the infamous Atari Twist. So to those wondering about the cheapness of the case on the 130, let me assure you that the ST was EVEN WORSE. The "brilliance" of JT's Commodore was simply undercutting everyone else. As always this lasts until the market as a whole is pushed into the commodity level and your margin goes to zero. At this point you typically go belly up because you have nothing left for R&D. There's a reason Commodore kicked him out, he was bankrupting the company. But being the one-trick pony he could only pull the same thing at Atari, cut prices on the parts and ship them out by the boatload. This was a foregone conclusion. Maury

Consider this: TI had a basically identical system for the 99/4. They sold so few that during the crash they started giving them away for free if you bought anything that plugged into one. Sales remained very close to zero. I really can't imagine that that 1090 would have been any different. It might have if it was a part of the system all along -- an external version of slots that were internal on the 800 or something -- but as others have pointed out this would have been one of those things you don't develop for because "no one has one". Maury

I find the AHS almost impossible to decipher in many cases, and this is one of them. Can someone out there explain the story of the 1200XL? How is it that the Sweet 16 morphed from the 1000/1000XL into the 1200XL? Why did they remove everything from the 1000's, and then put them back into the 600XL/800XL? I'm sure there is a story there somewhere. Maury

I remember when the ST's first his the streets there wasn't much software for them, and I had even less cash to buy anything with (1st year university). I vaguely remember a game that I wanted for the machine but never got. Basically it _looked_ like Q-bert. That is the screen had a 3D surface of hexegons on it, where you and the "enemies" moved from hex to hex to change their colour. The reviews noted it wasn't realtime, but included some level of thinking. Does anyone remember this game? Reviews/comments? Maury