Spectre GCR question

[OldAtarian]

The Mac Plus can run up to system 7.5.5, albeit extremely slowly. Can an ST with Spectre GCR run any version of System 7 or is it limited to System 6 or below?

[TwiliteZoner]

The Mac Plus can run up to system 7.5.5, albeit extremely slowly. Can an ST with Spectre GCR run any version of System 7 or is it limited to System 6 or below?

 

Check out this thread. Potentially system 7.0 might run. 7.5.5 I think is a no go. I might attempt to install 7.0 or 7.1 when I have some free time.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/171534-spectre-mac-partition-migration/page__fromsearch__1

[AtariSociety]

The Mac Plus can run up to system 7.5.5, albeit extremely slowly. Can an ST with Spectre GCR run any version of System 7 or is it limited to System 6 or below?

 

To my knowledge the max os was 6.08. I think Gadgets By Small was close to getting 7 working proper but I have never heard of anyone running 7.x anything via Spectre. Would have been cool though.

 

tj

[TwiliteZoner]

The Mac Plus can run up to system 7.5.5, albeit extremely slowly. Can an ST with Spectre GCR run any version of System 7 or is it limited to System 6 or below?

 

To my knowledge the max os was 6.08. I think Gadgets By Small was close to getting 7 working proper but I have never heard of anyone running 7.x anything via Spectre. Would have been cool though.

 

tj

 

That was my understanding as well. Although if you check the thread I linked to above Dave mentions that the initial release of 7.0 gave him fits due to a bug. He goes on to say that Apple did patch it and potentially it might work with GCR. I think I am going to try this at some point. I think system 6 is actually more compatible with the early games than 7.x anyway.

 

Here are the comments from Dave.

 

 

System 7.0 had a bug early on in the boot process that took a horrific amount of work to find. I believe it ended up being a Nil pointer *read* that returned a pointer to a data structure, well, it returned the Atari ROM startup addresses. That then plopped corrupted data all over everything. It was a subtle bug way in the middle of nowhere that caused a chain reaction crash. (The zero reads were a major pain for us because, well, they never triggered a bus error, and thus they were not fun to find and fix). MultiFinder was unstable because it was doing that. The only reason we really found it was the ZAX In-Circuit-Emulator. (This is also the only reason I found an interesting thing in 68K chips ... multiply and divide fail unless the stack is pointing at valid RAM. It uses RAM for a scratchpad!).

 

I think I had to set up a multiple event trigger ... some line-A trap after this and that ... and then trace into some machine with a huge disk (probably a whopping 20 megs back then), then read to the end and find the disaster. It was really un-fun. I patched it by hand (what fun!) and let the machine run, but it crashed further in. If you remember your Mac history, the first release of 7.0 was not exactly a thrill.

 

And the tragedy, I think, is the system update fixed the zero-store and zero-read. I never tried it personally but was told the patch issued to the initial release of System 7 fixed it. I don't know myself for sure.

Edited December 7, 2010 by TwiliteZoner