Diamond GOS on 8-bit disk?

[Gunstar]

No sign of v3 ROM yet?

 

How many people have any version of it on cart? I think we need to locate Allen Reeve and get him on here, find out what he still has left of it all.

[flashjazzcat]

I'll drop him a line again, but I'm not overly confident I'll get a reply.

Edited February 20, 2012 by flashjazzcat

[Gunstar]

The irony of Diamond's legacy is that if Allen Reeve were to release the Diamond system again today, with AtariAge and it's community he would probably have 100 times the sales he had back at the end of the A8 era...

[flashjazzcat]

Oh well - perhaps wealth beckons for me after all.

[Gunstar]

I think he sold like ten copies, and I meant 10 times, not 100. But regardless, an Atari 8-bit desktop that's really useful with cool apps, and more than two, will sell better today with us nostalgia freaks then back in the late 80's and early 90's when th world was moving on.

[areeve]

I think he sold like ten copies...

 

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

Edited April 20, 2014 by areeve

[fibrewire]

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.

 

Extremely interested in everything you have to talk about. I have some of the software on disk if you'd like

[_The Doctor__]

I had v3 that came as an upgrade in the mail, as far as anyone I have talked to... never saw a new cart with anything new written on it.... this might be why there was and article saying v3 never had anything to identify it as being such... I don't think a new cartridge run ever happened... so I just looked at it as ver 2 upgraded... You will only find v3 by doing compares of v2 cartridges until you find the one or two that are different..... this can probably be confirmed now that reeve is here... I hope this jogs the memory

Edited April 20, 2014 by _The Doctor__

[areeve]

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 :-)

[bbking67]

Thanks for making Diamond GOS, I enjoyed playing with it in the day and I still have it! I sure wish I had kept an ST mouse!

[+MrFish]

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.

 

Hi Alan, It's good to see you back on here again. I'm involved in the modern GUI development project that you speak of. You can get a little more information at the following links:

 

Atari 8-bit GUI - Information

 

Atari 8-bit GUI - AtariAge Thread

 

Regardless of the GUI that's being created, there is always a great amount of interest in the work that you've done. In fact it's Diamond that's provided so much of the inspiration for what we're doing. I think even, initially Jon (FlashJazzCat) was interested to begin the project with your source code as a basis (with your permission, and of course availability of the source code). Aside from our admiration of your work in general, there is always a great amount of interest in original Atari software from it's commercial days, for historical, collecting, and just pure reverence for the earlier days of developing computer software. Developing today we have a lot of tools and insights which obviously give us much appreciation for those who developed with more limited options. So I think many, especially those who run the database/archives at Atarimania.com would be highly interested in any artifacts you're willing to put forth. I'm sure somebody will volunteer to help you out in getting things transferred.

 

I've heard Curt Vendel say several times that he definitely has a copy of the Diamond version 3 ROM and/or cartridge. I don't remember him ever claiming that it says "Version 3" in the about dialogue. But he seemed very certain as to which version it is that he has. He'd formerly promised to post up a copy of it, but he's not done so yet. I know he's busy with a lot of projects, and maybe even would have a hard time locating the software amongst all the other wares he's housing. So I don't put any high expectations on seeing his copy any time soon. But I'm highly interested in getting the story straight on the final version.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

here is a short text from comp.sys.atari.8bit from 1998 regarding Diamond GOS V3:

 

"Read this postings from Alan Reeve:
diomond2.rom: Diamond GOS 3.0 ROM

From: areeve@mindspring.com (Alan Reeve)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: Diamond OS
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 14:27:55 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <36426373.840855@news.mindspring.com>
References: <70pmka$gks$3@nets3.rz.RWTH-Aachen.DE> <19981023231438.17631.00000309@ng110.aol.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: user-38lcocb.dialup.mindspring.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Server-Date: 4 Nov 1998 14:29:08 GMT
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451
Xref: fermi.tro.net comp.sys.atari.8bit:9669

Ok...the GOS 3.0 ROM is in the binaries newsgroup and the file is
called DIAMOND2.ROM so don't think it's the 2.0 ROM. That's the just
name on my Atari archive CD-R.

Also, keep in mind that you need the original Diamond GOS super cart
with its PLA chip to use this image. It will do you no good with a
standard cartridge.

And for those that don't know what Diamond is...it's a programmable
GUI environment created around 1988 for the Atari 8-bits that offering
moveable windows, mouse support, and all of that type of stuff.
Unfortunately there weren't too many apps made to take advantage of it
so the programmable aspect really didn't end up helping too much.
Reeve Software did release a Paint, Write, and News Station for it (I
think we released a Diamond News Station?), as well as a developer's
kit. Anyhow...hope the 3.0 ROM helps...I'm an emulation fanatic and I
certainly appreciate what 'Yogi' did a couple years ago with
maintaining the big Atari 8-bit archive (I contributed many files
myself) and I love to see this stuff kept alive for the history books.

- Alan

From: areeve@mindspring.com (Alan Reeve)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Here's the Diamond GOS 3.0 ROM - Diamond2.rom (0/1)
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 00:42:26 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
Lines: 7
Message-ID: <363fa26a.16871149@news.mindspring.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: user-37kb6qc.dialup.mindspring.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Server-Date: 4 Nov 1998 00:43:40 GMT
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451
Xref: fermi.tro.net comp.sys.atari.8bit:9650

Here's the final Diamond GOS ROM image...precisely 64k...burn it to a
27512 and you'll be set. As usually I take no responsibility for any
side effects in doing this. You're free to distribute it...add it to
Atari archives...make emulators that work with it...whatever... Sorry
if anyone is bothers with binaries in this newsgroup, but it's only
64k.
- Alan

 

Maybe it helps to find the V3 ROM...

[+MrFish]

According to that, it sounds like the one Alan just posted. I just did a file compare with that ROM and the one I've had in my archives for years, and they are the same. Being that he posted the ROM being spoken of to that newsgroup in 1998 it would be no surprise if that is the primary versions that's being passed around these days.

[+CharlieChaplin]

And errm,

 

here is everything I have about Diamond GOS - be warned: this is totally chaotic, unsorted, a mess, whatever you name it... (dozens of files on various disks from different collectors).

 

Maybe someone can a) create a collection of the disk version of Diamond GOS with all tools, apps, etc. that work with this disk version and b) create a collection of all tools, apps, enhancements, files, updates, etc. that work with the ROM versions - but well sorted on 90k/130k/180k DOS 2.x disks.

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

Diamond1.zip

DIAMOND2.zip

diamond3.zip

[flashjazzcat]

Yes: you might recall Alan that you contacted me about three years ago out of the blue offering the source code if you could recover it. My reply having gone unread for some years, however, I decided to write a GUI from scratch. Nice to see you back, though.

[+MrFish]

here is everything I have about Diamond GOS - be warned: this is totally chaotic, unsorted, a mess, whatever you name it... (dozens of files on various disks from different collectors).

 

My collection is pretty well organized, including files, disks, ROMs, and Docs. I'm pretty sure I don't have everything out there though. Thanks for posting what you've got. Here's my collection for those interested:

 

Diamond GOS - Collection.zip

[fibrewire]

 

My collection is pretty well organized, including files, disks, ROMs, and Docs. I'm pretty sure I don't have everything out there though. Thanks for posting what you've got. Here's my collection for those interested:

 

Diamond GOS - Collection.zip

 

This has tons of stuff i've never seen - thanks for this!

 

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.

 

If nobody else bites on this, I DO have and active setup that can read these images, however i don't have a 1050, only several 810's at the moment.

[+bf2k+]

I have several active A8 setups with multiple types of 1050's (Happy, USD and stock) and can certainly read them if they are readable. I would be glad to help recover these.

[Gunstar]

 

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.

 

 

Glad to see you around Alan! I loved using Diamond back in the 90's, mostly paint and for a desktop though, as the write program was too slow for my typing speed, so I would use diamond to load of Textpro or other. Anyway, my comment about probably only ten copies being sold I was referring to the V3.0 upgrade chip, not the totality of all diamond software. I thank you for posting the images, as I lost my diamond 3 cartridge (and ALL my other Atari carts and disk collection) when I moved back in the late 90's. I sure wish I still had the cartridge, but all I have left is the manual.

[areeve]

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

[areeve]

Glad to see you around Alan! I loved using Diamond back in the 90's, mostly paint and for a desktop though, as the write program was too slow for my typing speed, so I would use diamond to load of Textpro or other. Anyway, my comment about probably only ten copies being sold I was referring to the V3.0 upgrade chip, not the totality of all diamond software. I thank you for posting the images, as I lost my diamond 3 cartridge (and ALL my other Atari carts and disk collection) when I moved back in the late 90's. I sure wish I still had the cartridge, but all I have left is the manual.

 

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.

[Gunstar]

@ Alan R.

 

If I remember correctly, weren't you living in Warrenville, IL, at the time? Or am I remembering some other Atari hardware/software author? Did you also do a CAD 3D type program for the 8-bit Atari? Or was that some one else? In any case, I owned that as well. But if I am remembering correctly then:

 

If I'd known back then that you were just a teenager, I would have looked you up as I was too, and I lived close by, in Wheaton, at the time. Maybe we could have become Atari computer buddies. I figured you were some 20 or 30 something man, since it never occurred to me that a teenager would undertake such an endeavor and get so far with it as you did, in actually shipping product and software and interviews in Antic, etc.

 

I might have even interviewed you for a magazine as at the time, I was just starting to spread my wings as a writer, and had a regular column in (FR)Antic newsletter (from a user group based in Texas, I was a by mail member) and also had an article published in, IIRC, Antic magazine and also one in Atari Interface Magazine (American version from late 80's to early 90's).

 

I of course kept up with all your developments starting with the disk version of Diamond and upgraded to every version from then on. I started out, long before Diamond, buying 'The Rat' mouse and software, but was very disappointed in the text-based window desktop it provided and was excited to actually get Diamond to use with my Rat-mouse! By the time I'd ordered the V3 upgrade chip from you I'd moved to Wisconsin...

Edited April 27, 2014 by Gunstar

[areeve]

@ Alan R.

 

If I remember correctly, weren't you living in Warrenville, IL, at the time? Or am I remembering some other Atari hardware/software author? Did you also do a CAD 3D type program for the 8-bit Atari? Or was that some one else? In any case, I owned that as well. But if I am remembering correctly then:

 

If I'd known back then that you were just a teenager, I would have looked you up as I was too, and I lived close by, in Wheaton, at the time. Maybe we could have become Atari computer buddies. I figured you were some 20 or 30 something man, since it never occurred to me that a teenager would undertake such an endeavor and get so far with it as you did, in actually shipping product and software and interviews in Antic, etc.

 

I might have even interviewed you for a magazine as at the time, I was just starting to spread my wings as a writer, and had a regular column in (FR)Antic newsletter (from a user group based in Texas, I was a by mail member) and also had an article published in, IIRC, Antic magazine and also one in Atari Interface Magazine (American version from late 80's to early 90's).

 

I of course kept up with all your developments starting with the disk version of Diamond and upgraded to every version from then on. I started out, long before Diamond, buying 'The Rat' mouse and software, but was very disappointed in the text-based window desktop it provided and was excited to actually get Diamond to use with my Rat-mouse! By the time I'd ordered the V3 upgrade chip from you I'd moved to Wisconsin...

 

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 :-)

Edited April 29, 2014 by areeve

[pirx]

 

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 :-)

 

Ha, this is possibly the universal issue here

 

Fortunately,

[Gunstar]

 

Ha, this is possibly the universal issue here

 

Fortunately,

Then you have the occasional closet nerd, like me, who fit in with the "normal" crowd in High School, peaked, as shown in my early twenties in college, and I'm at the cross in the graph now...I expect to climb in the graph with life satisfaction in my later years...I'm a late bloomer with some stuff I'm working on now, that will make me rich in the next few years.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Gunstar