kogden

The only time I ever saw Diamond GOS on real hardware was when someone was demoing the product at a NOVAtari user's group meeting when I was like 8 years old. People seemed pretty impressed but by that time ST's were dropping in price like mad and used Mac Plusses started becoming affordable. The lack of anything but a basic paint program and buggy text editor kinda sealed it's fate. I don't think it ever really had a prayer as a commercial product. Maybe if released in 86 or 87 it might have had a chance to thrive for a while. Didn't stop me from unsuccessfully trying to talk my dad into buying me a copy. Are the cart versions of Diamond any faster than the disk version? Seems a little on the sluggish side. Would have been hard to get real work done with.

Rather than have the 8-bit do the heavy lifting with TCP/IP, why not just use the "Internet Modem" functionality built into APE/SIO2OSX and just connect on Port 6667 and deal with only the Application Layer IRC protocol from the Atari? This way the same code could be useful with Lantronix Serial<->Ethernet adapters. I understand the "cool factor" of a full IP stack running on the 8-bit but really very little hardware exists to make it usable for most folks as 850's and R-Verters aren't always easy to find cheap. Setting up a SLIP server on the PC side is a lot of work for most folks as well. Internet Modem functionality works out of the box with SIO2OSX and APE as far as know. ISP's generally don't use SLIP anymore so it's not like you could hook up an XM301 and connect these days. Not trying to knock anybody's hard work, this is very cool!

I don't remember a version of dBase for the A8 but there were a couple database packages. Unfortunately the only one I remember is SynFile+. Those that had an ATR8000 or Indus CP/M setup could certainly run dBase II in some form. There were all kinds of CP/M versions.... I had one for my Osborne I which is unfortunately dead. Anyone else remember an actual release? Were there any comparable packages to dBase II for the 8-bit? SynFile is kinda neat but I don't know if I'd put it in the same league.

I agree for the most part, the original 8-bit release and the 5200 release are the best versions. I never liked the 2600 and liked the Star Raiders port for it even less. The ST version was not horrid but they could have done a lot better. It didn't feel near as intense as the original game. The 5200 version was pretty cool. Some minor graphical changes in the map icons and more precise flying with analog joystick. With an aftermarket auto-centering joystick I was an ace on that thing. --Kevin

The Sony I have isn't an LCD, it's a heavy 32" CRT HDTV. The LCD is a cheap 19" LCD TV with a bunch of video inputs. I have an old Panasonic CT-1384Y 14" CRT video monitor as well but it's slowly dying. I will happily post results.... might be Friday before I can order a PAL ANTIC though. Car needs brakes. --Kevin

Awesome! I'll have to grab a PAL Antic now. Thanks guys. B&C or Best are really the only places to find one aren't they? Hopefully it'll work with my 32" Sony CRT HDTV. Would look great. I can get into "Service Mode" to make some tweaks if I have to. --Kevin

Sounds like Sijmen himself volunteered above..... at least to try to implement MBR support. I would happily stuff his OS on an EPROM and have it switchable with a stock OS at that point. Full APT support would be even better but if MyIDE partitions and APT can at least coexist "the right way" with a proper partition, that's a big leap forward. I'm looking forward to seeing that GUI running :-)

I deal with MS systems a lot as they make money but I don't use them personally though I have a Win7 VM I run on occasion for games and a couple of utilities. No Mac or Linux port of IL2-Sturmovik unfortunately. It's not so bad, Wikipedia actually has a good article on it that breaks it down pretty well. There's large chunks you likely don't need. 440 of the 512 bytes is all x86 boot code for example. Maybe some of the routines you used for the FAT32 formatter could be reused for some utilities to move files back and forth between FAT32 and MyDOS? Thank YOU for looking into this!

I'm getting bummed seeing all these really slick demos and games I can't run on my real hardware. I've been thinking of slapping a PAL Antic in one of them. I'd just get a PAL machine but PAL monitors are hard to get here and I don't really have the space. Has anybody had much luck with LCD's or a CRT HDTV with this? From what I've read in past posts, it sounded like it only works with antique screens with manual VHOLD adjustment. Is this the case or is it a little more versatile? Is a TV or video monitor NOT working this this modification more common than one working?

It's more than just a re-badging, while there is a LOT alike between the two, I'd say SR2 is about 75% the same as TLS, 25% of the game is quite different. There's no shields in TLS and you have to go to the sun to refuel/repair right? My son really likes playing SR2 and the last starfighter. I never cared much for either. Star Raiders kinda made you feel like you were actually piloting something. More like an open-ended sim. SR2/TLS feels like an arcade space shoot'em up on rails. Not a terrible game but definitely not worthy of being called a Star Raiders sequel. The original Star Raiders was a very immersive game. The damage model was great too and really added a lot to the gameplay experience. Being able to limp the beat-up ship back to base with no attack computer, damaged LRS, no subspace radio, no photons, flickering shields and sputtering engines was awesome....quite a challenge too but doable. I can't believe he managed to squeeze all that game into 8K. Definitely a work of art. I swear if someone finds a commented source listing for it, it should be etched onto a sheet of gold and hung in one of the Smithsonian museums.

I'll take it if you write it! That would actually be a big help with the cartridge interfaces for folks that want to boot something other than SDX at times, use SIDE-Loader and still have a relatively normal disk layout that standards-compliant OS's on the PC end won't vomit on. Would make writing apps to manipulate Atari filesystems on the PC side a little safer and easier. Sorry for ranting on your loader thread candle :-) Sijmen's choices with MyIDE disk layout aren't your problem or side loader's. Now an actual on-topic question.... would it be possible to integrate FAT16 support in SIDE-Loader for folks who got burned the same way I did while formatting but don't understand what happened? Would it be a lot of work? Not really critical at all but it might be less painful for some initially.

So if I formatted a CF card on a PC or Mac with a real MBR, 128MB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the disk, 128MB APT partition next with the rest unallocated, this drive would likely work fine with the current MyIDE OS as it would use the unallocated space and ignore the space used by the standard MBR partitions? I hate doing such a thing but it might be a workable temporary kludge until MyBIOS starts using APT or at least using the MBR. I use SDX most of the time but I want to be able to boot disk-based DOS as well. Booting ATR images would be nice too. --Kevin

Using the MBR might also make writing cross-platform utilities for reading/writing the Atari partitions a lot easier without as much voodoo and headscratching involved. Now, if I formatted a CF card on a PC/Mac with a MBR and 128MB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the disk with the rest unallocated, would this drive work fine with his current firmware or would a mess be made?

APT really does work great and plays nice with the rest of the world. It's an example of how it's supposed to be done. If a PC OS treated HD's the way that the MyIDE OS does, people would be up in arms. Using the MBR like you're supposed to is really the only way to do this "right". Even if he chooses not to adopt APT....if he just used the MBR to define a "MyIDE" partition that just represents what chunk of the disk MyIDE is allowed to use. He can write to, format, divide the space in that partition up any way he wants. APT and MyIDE could even coexist on the same volume then without much fear. This would also make backing up the Atari side of things easier. It would not take a whole lot of effort, in fact the way he did things was probably the hard way. You don't need to format the FAT32 partition from the Atari. Kinda pointless. Looking for a MyIDE partition ID in the MBR and just using the start and end as the range he can read/write to might have been easier in the long run than trying to cobble together a non-standard mutant disk. It would certainly be cleaner.

OOPS After reading up a bit I realized my issue wasn't quite the same but it is probably something that should be noted for mac users trying to use SIDE loader on smaller CF or DOM modules..... At least as far as OSX 10.6 is concerned. I'm using the MYIDE.SYS SDX driver w/ APT, not the Mr. Atari's firmware. No more drinking and posting. I never had much luck with the stock MyIDE firmware. I had to use the MyIDE tools from within Parallels for the brief period I used it. OSX usually wants a valid standard MBR or GUID partition table or it wants to make one for you if it's not a CD or floppy. A proper MBR will definitely increase chances of compatibility. A lot. I'd actually like to be able to use his newer OS so I can boot things like MicroSpartaDOS, RealDOS, MyDOS etc but I'm not going to boot a VM on my mac every time I want to read the drive to throw a few games on the FAT32 side.

A little more elaboration: After reflashing my MyIDE with SDX 4.4.5, I told FDISK on the Atari I wanted a 128MB FAT32 filesystem with 384MB for Atari partitions. No formatting was done on the Atari side yet, just partitioning. Was undreadable on Mac at first so I clicked cancel on the dialog that showed up and opened Disk Utility. I formatted the FAT32 partition fine on the mac side (LEAVE THE REST OF THE DISK ALONE!) and could put files on it but no luck on Atari side, nothing would read. After plugging the disk back into the Mac I noticed with the partition selected in DiskUtility it said FAT16 at the bottom of the window....DOH! There is no way to force FAT32 from the GUI DiskUtility.app on small partitions. You must use 'newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/<device>' from the CLI. Period. The device path will be something like '/dev/disk2s1'. Disk Utility will always use FAT16 for tiny drives. After formatting the FAT32 partition properly from the CLI on the mac and slapping some games on there *BAM!* SIDE Loader worked beautifully after being launched from SDX. Of course then I had to format Atari partitions and put SIDE-Loader on there first. MacOS X is not FreeBSD though, it just uses a huge chunk of the userland utilities and provides a BSD API among others. OSX is a bastardized CMU Mach/MacOS/BSD UNIX hybrid. There are HUGE differences. Not very stripped once you install the Developer DVD and Fink/MacPorts either.</device>

I HAD THE SAME ISSUE! You have to format the device from the command line: newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/<insert your disk device here> You can use the df command if you're unsure what the device name is to see a list of disk devices and their mount points. Basically what's going on is DiskUtility is seeing the small size of the FAT32 partition and assuming it's a floppy or tiny HDD that it thinks would be better served by using FAT16. SIDE Loader will choke and will just display a couple filename slots with garbage characters. Like I said, use the df command to help figure out what device it is and use the "newfs_msdos" command. The "-F 32" parameter forces it to use FAT32 even on small disks. You can't do it all with the GUI....not even with OSX. Certain diskutil functions can only be called with command line parameters as well. --Kevin

oops I resucitated a dead thread by accident....sorry guys.

Oracle didn't invent SQL, they just had the first widely available commercial SQL database. SEQUEL was a trademarked name taken by someone else and IBM changed it from SEQUEL to SQL for their R-System database pretty early on years before Oracle saw release. SEQUEL syntax in it's original form is not quite the same as SQL92 syntax much less anything newer than that. I'll concede there. On a noisy radio, shouting in loud environments, or reading a number to someone over the phone I avoid it as well.

Zed-eighty around here, and in the UK. Should be the same in .au too. That's not too different from the US. We refer to it as a "Zee Eighty" or "Eighty Eighty" for the original Intel version. Again, for most of us Zee-Eighty is easier for most of us to say quickly and naturally here. Now I understand what I was reading when I was looking at ZX81 info. It seems a lot of folks across the pond referred to them as their little "Zeddy". Was confused until now. I was expecting more endearing terms like "waste of good cassette tapes" but apparently a handful of people actually liked them. Poor bastards. I wouldn't punish my kids like that. It's just wrong.... maybe even abuse. The ZX81 is the only machine I've ever touched that made the Atari 400 keyboard look incredibly desirable. LOL I'll stop now......

Everyone I have ever met who has owned a 6502-based machine here in the US refers to it as a "Sixty Five Oh Two" and refer to the series as the "sixty five hundred series" as "six thousand five hundred" takes too much effort to say. I have never heard it referred to differently by anyone before. No.... I have never left the US. As for the 68K's..... The only way I've ever heard them read was: "sixty eight thousand" "sixty eight oh ten" "sixty eight oh twenty" "sixty eight oh thirty" etc. These speech patterns roll off the tongue much easier for us yanks. Most techs here would think you're either new in the field or a pompous douche for saying "six five zero two". It's also harder to say "six five zero two" as quickly or naturally as "sixty five oh two". That would be like insisting everyone called the 386 an 80386DX. Here they were always referred to as the "three eighty six" vs "three eight six" or "eight zero three eight six". Now I have heard "eight oh three eighty six" once or twice. Now I'm not making fun of anyone or insisting they're wrong, just pointing out some culture differences. Things might be different there. Most people here say "oh" here because they're lazy and it saves uttering a syllable. Has nothing to do with typing. Most fellow Americans I've ever met use "oh" in place of "zero" for most things unless they are reading a license plate tag, serial number, etc. If there's no mixed numbers and letters...."oh"="zero" usually. As for the SQL/Sequel thing...... IBM developed a db lang called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language) for their early RDBMS efforts before the A8 ever existed. SEQUEL turned out to be someone else's trademark so they renamed it SQL (ess queue ell). By the time the first commercial RDBMS shipped, it was already called SQL. Personally, people calling it sequel around me at work drives me nuts. Ess Queue Ell is correct. SEQUEL sounds goofy to me and they changed the name on purpose before most people who call it "SEQUEL" were even born. QUEL is a valid though dying database language, SEQUEL is not. Anyway, figured I'd add my 2 cents....

These days I'd have to say the 600XL is my favorite due to the size and fun hackability. All of the XL's are really cool looking. My 600XL has a very solid keyboard too. -BUT- The 130XE is a close second as it was my first computer I truly got to call my own. When I was a kid I would have told you there wasn't ever a better computer on this planet. I don't think my parents saw me for a month when I got that thing for Christmas.

I think I'd leave Star Raiders gameplay alone if it means altering the graphics. An elite port would be kinda cool but I never really got into elite much. I would love to see a new space game written though.... maybe a Star Raiders "sequel" with wireframe 3D. Written with 128K machines in mind and fast math routines. The thing I loved about Star Raiders was its simplicity and free-form gameplay. There's no such thing as a 5-minute game in Elite. In Star Raiders you can hop right in and start blowing things up. The damage model was cool too. Easy to fly as well. No need to worry about ship orientation. I would LOVE to see a commented dissassembly of Star Raiders just to see how it was put together and play with it. I thought about modding it for use with an analog joystick for more precise flying and maybe using a paddle as a throttle control wheel. Screwing with the 5200 version might be a better idea for that. So far the only other 3D-like space game I've found for the Atari 8-bit is Shadow Hawk One which is pretty slow and I can't figure out how to turn the engines on. We could definitely use some more good space games. The ST had tons of them....StarGlider, Elite, Deep Space, Star Raiders, etc If any A8 game needs some speed tweaks and a code overhaul, it's Flight Simulator II. Talk about incredibly unresponsive. I can't believe they bundled it with the XEGS. Did anyone ever release a better flight sim for the 8-bit?

An SDX FAT32 driver would be really slick. For some reason my Mac didn't want to format the partition as FAT32, it wanted to use FAT16 as it was a 128MB partition. Using "newfs_msdos -F 32 <device>" from the command line took care of it however. Any plans to add the ability to load from an SDX partition in SIDE Loader?

Is there a way to move files between the FAT32 and SDX partitions at present? Not whining or anything, just would be great to not have to rig up a USB IDE adapter and yank the flash drive off the cart to move some XEX files to the FAT32 partition that don't run under SDX for me for whatever reason. If not, how much of an undertaking would it be? Are the FAT32 routines used in SIDE loader written in a reusable fashion? I might be willing to take a stab at something like that. SIDE loader is awesome BTW. Works great on my MyIDE (SDX, not stock BIOS) with a transcend module. Thanks! --Kevin