areeve

1 assembled for me, as well.

Thanks all!

Is it me or is the link to download this via the Google share dead? I get a 'the file you requested does not exist' error.

I'd like to get one of the last 20 too. $40 is the total cost shipped or is that just a deposit? Please PM me with what I need to do. - Thanks, Alan

I don't recall that programs on that disk being in BASIC... FWIW I had one of these when I was a kid. In a nutshell, I joined a user group and they guy that ran it saw the ads for this amazing new Atari disk drive and helped to spread the word. I don't know how I convinced the parents to get me one at $450 if I recall and then the number of calls my Mom made to Mr Manz (sp?) over there before I finally got it. Anyhow, yes... it was a tank of a disk drive... and had two key features for me... access to custom formatting disks and a built in RS232 printer interface. I learned a lot about disk formatting theory with that drive and the printer interface was nice EXCEPT it didn't work well at all with programs like the Print Shop. Two ESC chars in a row and it would go nuts thinking that was a custom command... so it would be printing along... hit that bit pattern and suddenly my sign didn't look too nice. It also had the issue that timing holes were needed to format a disks... so one couldn't just punch the other side and flip the disk over. However, the funny other side of that was in EA's later years they used a track skew for copy protection... the one where you'd hear the drive head crank back and forth for half an hour... well, the MFM disk drive copied those like they weren't copy protected because it used the timing hole for formatting so tracks were all skewed correctly by default on it. Funny. Anyhow... I sold it... but kept in touch with the gentleman that ran the user group and he recently gave me most of his old Atari stuff including a dual MFM disk drive. I'd love to get those docs and that utility disk back... but it looks doubtful. I can't imagine there were many out there to being with.

Sure, but what I am seeking is the Utility disk that came with the drive and the documentation on how to use it. It had tools for doing custom formatting, fast disk copying, track dumps... etc.

I recently got a Micro Mainframe disk drive however I don't have the paperwork / documentation or the utility disk it came with and I'd love to get both. Anyone out there have either of those such that I could get a copy?

I'd like to purchase an SIO2BT as a plug... what do I need to do? - Thanks, Alan

Yes, I lived in Warrenville. I used to visit some of the local user groups such as SCAT and there was also one in Wheaton that really helped me get started with the Atari as it provided a bit of a community. No, I didn't write a CAD program. I did write a program called News Station for basic Desktop Publishing and to fill a gap as Springboard wouldn't release an Atari version of the popular Newsroom software. I was around 18-19 when I did Diamond GOS and about 14-15 when I started writing and selling Atari software with the Super Reevekey (a CX 85 keypad handler) being my first commercial product. I also did some work with 'The Rat'. The guy that did that... don't recall his name right now, but I do recall he was in Reading, PA... contacted me and I added Rat support to our Business Manager software. Basically what that amounted to was a mouse cursor on the title screen because the Rat was basically a modified Radio Shack mouse and was jumpy with the X/Y data it fed back to the computer. I tried to work with that data and stabilize things which I did, but that meant lost sensitivity. I recall he took out some big ads at the time. The Atari ST mouse was so much better although it was tricky to get it to work and my method was a bit of a hack as I used many DLIs to keep up with it. I think David Sullivan's GOE did it better, but then he didn't use P/M graphics as I did which I think was also better as CPU time was at a premium. You might want to make this a private email, but which High School did you attend and when? I could have used more friends as there weren't too many High Schoolers that wanted to just sit at home and play on their Atari computer at the time :-)

I hope you don't think any offense was taken in reading that... I thought it was funny. I don't recall distribution, but I would guess a good 1/3rd or more of the cartridges that shipped had the 3.0 ROM. But that is entirely a guess. Some things are fuzzier than others and one thing I found funny in returning to this stuff a week or so ago is that I had planned to do a 'Diamond C'. Knowing what I know now, at that time I was WAY off in knowledge and ability with respect to writing any sort of Atari 8-bit C compiler. Diamond Write was the last full app released and that was a struggle. It was slow due to limited processing power. Drawing bitmapped fonts on the screen was costly. I would also say my knowledge of data structures as a teen wasn't quite there yet either with respect to writing a word processor and that would have helped, too. I had Mr Merrill telling me of Atari's great interest and had I any real business knowledge I'd have understood that Atari wanted to sell computers and the problem with the Atari 8-bits was once you bought one there wasn't much of an upgrade route to keep selling the same person more computers. PCs had and have the whole expansion slot thing going on and compatibility across CPU speeds so there is a desire to upgrade piecemeal there. Atari wanted 8-bitters to buy an Atari ST so I don't buy Atari had any real desires for Diamond GOS. I know one memory I had with my Mom when she helped out at a World of Atari show in Anaheim was giving Sig Hartman 4 copies of Diamond GOS in hopes that would help. He tried to politely refuse all 4 as he just wanted one or two, but she insisted as she tried to help me. Never heard anything from that. Surprise, surprise. I also recall doing the whole memory driver thing which was actually pretty clever for my age. I don't recall that ever really going anywhere which is sad. Whether it could have is another question as it was slow having to bank switch to do a memory copy. Memory lane.

Just FYI for the group at large, I did have a couple people respond with addresses so I'll be sending the disks out on Monday (hopefully) and hopefully there will be positive news within a few weeks. - Alan

RE: versioning... that just wasn't something I even thought about back then. If an update was basically bug fixes I probably didn't spent the time I should have updating the About dialog to reflect even a minor version upgrade. A binary compare of the ROM image is probably the way to go. There was certainly no upgraded label to differentiate between versions and I definitely recall shipping chips and allowing people to swap them out in the cartridge shell as they were all socketed. I do have another older image if anyone wants that one, but those are all I could find on that CD. I have since found many of the old floppies that had my Diamond GOS source code on them and tried to read them with my Kryoflux with mixed results. For one thing some are apparently on Atari's goofy Enhanced density format and the Kryoflux software only supports FM/MFM ATR images so it's ignoring the extra sectors. Others are on MFM. I don't have an Atari setup and I can't say what the results of this would be but I'll throw this out there... If there is still genuine interest (as isn't these some better GUI project for the Atari 8's going on now... thought I read something about that?) I'll mail the 10 or so disks with Diamond GOS related source code and such on them to someone that has an active Atari set up that could possible extract the MFM and Enhanced density data for all to enjoy. You have to have an Atari 8-bit currently set up to read both of those disk formats and be able to post the data here when you're done. I'm not guaranteeing anything. You might find that you can't read the disks. You might find you can read everything, except one critical source code file. I just know I'm not going to be setting an Atari system up any time soon to do this. If you're interested and have immediate access to such hardware send me an email with your mailing address and the person geographically closest to me will get the disks. I do recall my development environment consisted mostly of an MIO so I used to run everything off of one of those and then back it up periodically. I don't recall how I used to build the ROM images... I recall it was 8 8K banks at $a000, but I don't recall how I'd go from the Mac/64 assembled binaries to the 64k image. That may have even involved a PC utility as all the chips were burned on a PC based EPROM/PROM burner. I still can't find the CD that I thought I archived stuff to, but I also can't find several things since a move we made 8 years ago ranging from MtG cards to PSX games so ??? Maybe it's in the landfill with all the ET cartridges for all I know :-)

LOL! I guess that's how rumors get started... oh I read on the Internet that only 10 copies were ever sold. And I seriously doubt sales would be better now than then. I think now people just want the stuff for free to tinker with. I'll try and answer some of the questions in here for those that care and based on my memory... after all it has been 25 years and I was just a teenager then. Diamond GOS definitely has commercial release on disk, but that version was very limited. When presented with a path to make this a cartridge that addressed many of those problems and made the product far more usable. I think the cartridge version probably sold about 500 copies. That's a guess. It may have been 300... it may have been 700. We were dependent on ICD for the cartridges and ultimately the product met its end when ICD informed us we could place one last cartridge order. We had been ordering about 100 or so at a time and weren't about to purchase 1000 or whatnot so that we could guarantee the longevity of the product given that many were just migrating to the Atari ST or Amiga instead of trying to get more life out of their Atari 8-bit systems. That's what you get when you're solely dependent on another vendor for cartridges. The whole "ST Jr." version is pre the non-ST Jr version. That was when Shelly Merrill was 'helping' to market the software. When I went my own way I got rid of that stuff as I didn't own the rights to that logo. That's another reason I don't know for certain what the sales were. I don't really recall differences between the various cartridge versions. I do recall a lock up issue on the first cartridge version and providing ROM chips for the fix, but whether that was 1.0 -> 2.0 or 2.0 -> 3.0 or 1.56 -> 1.89 (just kidding) I don't recall. I don't have any problems sharing the ROM or source code, but what people don't realize is that I don't have that stuff just sitting around on my PC waiting for me to upload it. It's on some old disks and a CD (I think and hope given the likelihood of bit rot) somewhere. --- Updated... was looking through some of my old CDs and found this. Don't know if it's the last Diamond GOS ROM, but it's the oldest one of that archive CD. No source code yet and it's late. DIAMOND2.ROM

I believe a handful of very simple desk accessories were written for it. I recall Matthew Ratcliff writing some rudimentary color changer among others. That one just sticks out because I believe he did the ANALOG review. No doubt about the fact that it would have been nice to have more for it. Obviously my resources were limited. I recall one of the best purchases made for the development environment was a 1 megabyte MIO that Tom @ ICD gave me a good price on so that he didn't have to carry it back from a tradeshow. That really accelerated things. And yes, if you spoke to a woman re: Diamond GOS support that would have been Mom. There were two really good ideas that were in Diamond GOS... the first was the memory driver concept that would allow a standardized function call to copy data to and from bankswitched memory regardless of the brand of the extra memory. Most of the memory upgrades were pretty useless as most apps didn't take advantage of them. The other was device indepence of the memory driver and I think I started trying to do that in Diamond Write with printers. I appreciate the compliments, but there was plenty that was done wrong too. I know there were plenty of promises made that didn't get executed as I wasn't much of a businessperson in my teen years. I was also quite upset when I had the plug pulled on the cartridge format I was using by ICD after putting all of my eggs in their basket. They had, in my opinion, a much nicer bank switching mechanism than did Atari simply because Atari's blocked out 8k of memory. I also remember being criticized by David Sullivan because I didn't use all 64k of the bank switched cartridge and the media buying that as some issue. Like I'm going to code until it's full.. and then announce that there's no more space to improve the product. They were good times through and certainly a very good experience. It's been fun reminiscing as I'm a pretty nostalgic person in general. - Alan

I can't really accuse Mr. Merrill playing both sides of the fence. He released his Electronic Cookbook (Did David Sullivan write that? I don't recall. If I recall it was written in Action!). I recall that he called me out of the blue indicated that David wasn't producing like he wanted and I had a working product at the time so he wanted to market mine. I remember he had me thinking I'd be doing a cameo appearance on David Letterman, the product would be in Sears, and it would be bundled with Atari's computer because of all of his connections. And then I got the call from David Sullivan offering to team up as well. Did I ever grow a big head out of that :-) Suddenly, everyone wanted to be my buddy. Well, Mr. Merrill succeeded in getting it in some of the stores that I sure couldn't and that was quite impressive to me. We had it down to where people were ordering directly from him. I would buy the cartridges. Burn them. Send them to him. He'd print the manuals. He'd ship the orders. And he'd collect the cash. What's wrong with that picture? But he gave me some story about advertising costs... etc which may have had some truth to it, but it wasn't agreed upon at the time. My mistake. Then I started getting some calls from retailers / customers telling me that he was a sleaze... quite literally. And then after many months of not getting any money, yet paying money for the cartridges I pulled the plug shortly before the World of Atari show in early '89 (I think). At the time the plan was for him to go, but a last minute change put me and my Mom there. It was interesting seeing some retailers at the show with Diamond GOS boxes that has no cover (just a plain white box) because he shipped an unfinished product to them to make a quick buck. I felt bad for said retailers and it probably hurt the whole effort to promote Diamond GOS. Then about a year afterwards when Diamond Write had been released he sent me a box of printed manuals, cartridge labels, ...etc (i.e. parts) with a sob letter saying that in all fairness I should give him the software so that he can fulfill his orders. Needless to say I have to assume that there were many people that lost their money on that deal, but I can't be sure. Maybe he did the right thing and gave them their money back. I also remember reading in some Atari user groups newsletter about my lack of scruples when I had never dealt with said person which coincided with the Shelly Merrill fun. As for the product line, I was probably way over my head with respect to knowledge to write all of these products. Diamond Paint was fairly easy (and I don't recall all of these bugs I'm reading about with the exception of an issue with earlier Diamond GOS ROMs where it would crash because of Vertical Blank vs the back switching on the cartridge problem), but Diamond Write was quite complicated (and admittedly buggy) because it's quite time consuming rasterizing non 8x8 fonts on a bit mapped screen. Lots of ROLs and RORs (assembly code). I also hadn't written a word processor before and the concept of having a block of editable linear memory in which characters could be deleted and added... etc was challenging at the time. And then there was the memory constraint. At the time I was a second year Comp Sci student at Northern Illinois Universty and didn't have nearly the knowledge that I do now. As for the other products... in retrospect I don't know how I would have done that flying solo. - Alan P.S. I have purchased both Atari Flashback units. Nice job and keep 'em coming. I'm a big fan of retrocomputing and have several hundred Atari 2600 games including some pretty rare ones like Out of Control from Avalon Hill. I got that when I first moved to the Atlanta, GA area and saw an ad in the local classifieds for $2 Atari games. I went to check it out and it was an all black area and I couldn't find the apartment so I asked some guys that were playing basketball and they directed me to the apt and as I walked off they shouted racial obcenities at me. I was pretty scared wondering if all of my car's tires would still have air in them when I got back, but I had more important things on my mind. Anyhow, the lady pulled out this box of games and I purchased 9 and gave her a $20 and said keep the rest. She INSISTED that I take ten. Very nice lady. And then 3 years later was where I learned that this bunch of games are among the rarest in my collection. I only wish they were in a bit better condition.

For those interested, Diamond GOS was 'dropped' when ICD informed us that we had one, last chance to order their cartridges. Being dependent on their platform and not loaded with cash to purchase a large quantity of cartridges made for one quick decision... I did read in another post yesterday, and I can't find said post for the life of me, where someone claimed Atari didn't bundle it with their systems because we (Reeve Software) wanted too much money. Perhaps I minterpreted that given Shelley Merril's involvement in the whole picture, but Atari could have had Diamond GOS to bundle with their systems for pretty close to nothing. Atari NEVER pursued such an option. I'm not taking a stance on whether that was good or bad for them, but it does make it clear that they didn't want to sell more Atari 8-bit computers... they wanted to sell Atari ST computers. I was about 19 at the time and not quite as wise to the ways of the world :-) - Alan