ijor

The main reason that Magic Sac and Sepctre GCR mentioned authentic original ROMS, was obvious because that would be the only legal way. But IIRC there was some talk at the time, that even when using Apple's ROM, it still could be ilegal. Apple licensed their ROM code to the final user, for using it in their machines, not in third party emulation hardware.

The ST version is crap... Just in case it was not obvious. The usage I made of term "fabulous" was ironic.

Btw, speaking about the "fabulous" port of AR to the ST. I loaded the ST version the other day and noted something quite unusual. Most of the time, the most important place in the titles goes for the original programmer. The one who made the port usually comes in second place only (smaller leters, appear later, etc). In this case, the ST programmer appears first, and PP is mentioned only later. Guess he was thinking his port was better work than original PP's one

Ah. Mike Gustafon, yes! That sounds like the name I read as the ICD founder. As I said above, it is known that some (or all) ICD founders came from Spartan. Spartan in turn was the company that developed and sold "The Chip" and the original Archiver. Gustafson is mentioned together with Bob Puff as developers in the Super Archiver boot menu. But I doubt he was really involved. If Gustafson was yet ICD owner at that time, would be very strange he did any coding for CSS (the SA company). And the post above by themrfreeze suggests that CSS-ICD relation wasn't exactly very friendly. May be CSS just included Gustafson name because the SA code was based in his original work. May be just to avoid some potential legal problems. Spartan closed down some years before, but that doesn't put Spartan's code in the public domain.

I'm sure Gunstar didn't mean any harm. And it's easy to mix names. I mixed up Tom Hunt with Tom Hudson myself :oops) Just to clear up the ICD issue for those that are new in the scene: ICD was a very respected company for many years. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that admire the ICD founders. They sold the company at the mid 90's when the Atari market was very small. And it seems that the new owner pissed off quite some many people.

I know, that's why I specifically said the founders and orignal owners, not the current/last ones. Tom Hunt was never owner of ICD. And ICD founders weren't the ones that pissed many people. Tom Hunt is a famous Atari programmer, he made some superb software. Some of his later 3D stuff was ported to the PC and published by AutoDesk.

You can't be serious ... MIO,US Doubler,SpartaDos, SpartaDosX,Hard Disk interface,PR Connection,RTime Are they buggy, crappy software and hardware? Why they were best sellers at that time ? If so, why they are still today the most desired Atari items ? Not to mention their ST host adapter and other ST stuff made by ICD.

I'm certain they used Jay's operating system, I read somwhere about own Commodore's OS (or at least heavily rewritten). But might be I'm wrong, or might be the reference was wrong. I Really don't know.

This is not exact. They can work at the same time. They just cannot access the bus concurrently. Usually the CPU is accessing the bus all the time (at the very least once per instruction for the prefetch). So typically the CPU is pretty much halted if it cannot access the bus. However bus access is a fraction of the execution time for long shifts, multiplications and specially divisions. So in theory you might arrange code and blits in such a way that you can get quit some good Blitter/Cpu concurrency. But again, even if you could get perfect 100% concurrency, it won't be a significant boost for these games.

Somebody knows what happened with the original owners/founders of ICD? I believe that together with OSS they were the top contributors to the A8. They made all excellent products, and all high quality. Even today, their products are the most popular. But contrary to Bill Wilkinson, ICD people always maintained a low profile. As I recall, I saw their names only once mentioned in some old ICD manual. And all I know about them is that they came from Spartan (the developers of the CHIP). Would love to see an interview with them.

I can't say I know the answer, but I doubt it will be much faster if at all with Blitter. Those program are usually slow because of the 3D computation, not because of video/display speed. Besides, and except for some special type of blits, the Blitter is not much faster than the CPU. Actually, for plain sprite management the CPU can be faster. You can get an idea of the speed with Blitter, by running the game under Steem.

I meant whatever was the state of the Amiga as Jay Miner developed it before Commodore got his hand on it. I don't know the details, but I understand that Commodore made several changes. What I read is that Commodore developed their own operating system. They didn't use Jay's one.

It is easy to increase the tape SIO speed by software. And for example, Omnimon, has a built-in option for this. But doing this reliably is extremely difficult. They key point is whether you’ll load the tape using the same recorder or not. I made a software Turbo many years ago. What I learned is that it is not worth to increase the speed if you can’t increase the reliability of the whole SIO tape system. What’s the point of increasing the speed by say, a 25% if loading will fail twice as normal. So I actually made a completely different system with a “retrying” feature. If loading failed, you could rewind the tape a bit, just before the "error", and continue the loading (assuming it was a soft error that a retry could fix).

The term of "ST" was built by the Tramiels... "Sixteen Thirtytwo" is the definition, but it is the initial of "Sam Tramiel" either. My guess is, that the ATARI XL originally was intended as the enhanced 800 series. Having a look at the AMIGA chipset, you could use is with a 6502 and a clocking divider. Hmm, might be it's my english. But I don't really understand what you are saying. You use the term ATARI XL for the original Amiga design made by Miner?

Connecting an Atari branded ST hard disk to the 8-bit could be a real challenge. Many third party ST hard disks are SCSI (with an ACSI-SCSI adapter), and then it will be easier to adapt. But I don't think any Atari branded is SCSI. They are RLL/MFM as the ones for older PCs. In theory you could use an 8-bit hard disk adapter, such as those from ICD. They were designed for the same type of disks that Atari ST hard disks have. But you can't connect them directly because ST hard disks are ACSI. ACSI is not very different than SCSI, but it's not the same. And it's not just a matter of the connector. As Steve said, you'll need to bypass the host adapter.

Might be a problem with the cracks, the original runs fine with Steem 3.2 and TOS 1.0

This is correct, but this wasn't the point. Shiraz quickly designed the ST, only after the "Amiga/Atari plan" failed. As densonj said, the earlier Amiga design was supposed to be the ST. There was an agreement/contract between Atari and Jay Miner (owner of Amiga) about that. For some unknown reasons Miner broke the agreement and went to Commodore. There was a lawsuit about this. Only then, the "actual" ST was designed.

The “category” of a CPU or MPU, 8-bits, 16, 32, or 64-bits, is one thing and the bus size is another. The bus size is only one of the components that define the category. There cases that are not clear or controversial, but most cases are not. The 386 is a 32-bit processor. The fact that there is a smaller variant (38SX) with a smaller bus size doesn’t change this. The 68000 also had a little brother, the 68008 with an 8-bit bus size. That doesn’t make the 68000 an 8-bit (or 8/16) CPU. Comparing the 386, even the SX, with the 68000 is pointless. If you want, it is comparable with the 68030, but not with the ST 68000. Also, don’t confuse the processor with the computer. Many, perhaps most, PCs with an 386 had an ISA bus. The ISA bus is 16-bits but allows using older 8-bit cards. However there were 386 PCs with EISA bus which is 32-bits, and with 32-bits MCA bus. Anyway, that’s not the main system computer bus, it’s a peripheral I/O bus. The system bus, that connected the CPU to main memory and other system controllers, had the same size of the CPU. This means 32-bits for a 386DX. Something similar happens with the ST. The main data bus is 16-bits. But most peripherals are 8-bit (ACIA’s, MFP, FDC, PSG). Besides main memory, only the graphics (MMU, Shifter, etc) and the hard disk interface is 16-bits. From the point of view of speed, the architectural design of using main memory for video display is what made the big difference with contemporaneous PCs.

Ricardo, Te mande algunos detalles en PM. Saludos

This is what I remember from that system “Edu”: It was made in quite big quantities in relative terms (considering the size of the local market). I have no idea how many units survived, or exactly in which conditions. It had a quite good reasonable quality. IIRC it represented a significant competition for the original Atari even when it didn’t sell for a much lower price. “Edu” stand for EDUardo, Edward in Spanish. And again, IIRC, was the first name of the guy that manufactured the system. Don’t remember much more (sorry, it was 20 years ago and I never specialized in consoles). Regarding the multicart. Tons of multicarts were made in third world countries, years earlier than they appeared in US and Europe. For one simple reason … they weren’t exactly “legal”, but nobody cared. They were locally manufactured without getting permission to the original copyright holder (which is obvious because they usually have a mix of titles from different companies). Note that for the same reason, multicarts or tape/disk combinations were also sold for the computers, not just for consoles.

HCDC == "Happy Computers Discovery Cartridge" ? If so, not exactly. The cartridge has a custom chip that performs only the most basic function of an FDC. The rest is done all by software. Being wholly software driven is exactly the reason that you can do whatever you want. The only limits are the constrains of the drive itself, and a maximum bit rate which is a little above the HD bit rate. When the DC is active the internal ST's FDC is bypassed (except for handling the control signals). I never used the DC myself for HD disks (never connected an HD drive to the ST). There are other solutions for accessing HD disks without the DC. Yes, I forgot to mention the options. There were models with extra options. As I remember they are: - Battery backed RTC. - Switch and connectors for two extra drives. - ROM/EPROM sockets for MAC roms. - Passthrough connector for another cartridge. They are all described in the docs (which are all as text files in the original disk).

Hi Aly, The basic purpose of the DC is to make backups of copy protected disks. For this goal, is perhaps the best device ever sold for any personal computer. The Catweasel comes second close. It can also be used for accessing HD disks (with the right drive) and for accessing converting disks with formats that the ST normally can't (for example MAC). The hardware is almost useless without software. You need special software for each and every task. You can consider it being a microcontroller (it isn't) that must be programmed correctly for the goal you want. The DC comes with two "main" programs only. One is to covert MAC disks. The other is the main backup program for DD MFM disks. There is a single version of the main backup program, with two minor revisions. The latest revision is exactly the same as the first one except that it allows bigger configuration files. The only difference between 2.7 and previous versions is the documentation.

Interesting. Did you loose two joysticks ports when installing that upgrade? Because that would be the only way to make it full XL compatible. Extra RAM under the OS is not enough. It must me selected exactly the same as in the XL to be full compatible.

I thought this was quite off-topic, so I replied to Gunstar by PM. But as much as I love the Atari, most 386 PCs are way much faster than the ST or the Amiga. The problem was they were much more expensive when they were just released. Yes, they had some bottlenecks, specially on graphics. But they weren't designed for games. Nobody was going to buy them for games. It wasn't until some years later, when (S)VGA and 386 was affordable that a real game market developed for the PC. But you'll be suprised, there are some people that like "vintage PCs" and use a 386 or 486 for old games. Lot of old PC games don't run on modern computers.

First ST computers were plain “ST”, no internal floppy, no RF modulator. Rather soon the 520ST was replaced with the STm (RF modulator and video composite). I don’t know in Europe, but in the US it took a while until STfm models appear. For quite some time your options were 520STm or 1040STf. The Mega ST has a redesigned case, external keyboard, and RTC. The Mega STe, besides having the STe additions, has a faster CPU at 16Mhz with cache (both can be switched off for compatibility). Plus optional internal hard disk, plus optional HD floppy. Most ST (non STe) models don’t have a blitter. I don’t know why the 1040ST didn’t include modulator. I guess Atari considered most buyers of the “bigger” model will buy a monitor as well. If you are curious about all the models variants and their history, check Atari musem website. The webmaster (Curt) is a regular user in this forum and could give you detailed answers on these aspects. The 386 was (is) 32-bit.