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Falcon: yes or no?


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16 hours ago, zzip said:

I bought mine second hand, but it was a Seagate RLL drive connected to a SCSI converter board with an adSCSI all mounted into a custom case.  The other issue is it used internal scsi ribbon cables, and I assume the Falcon would have required an external SCSI cable?   So I would have needed something to convert the two.   Nothing SCSI-related was cheap in those days so it would have been an inconvenience no matter what.

You need to replace the internal SCSI ribbon cable with one that has the 50-pin Centronics SCSI plugs. Then you get the standard SCSI-2 cable.

 

As I mentioned, I'm not sure how well RLL drives with a SCSI convertor board work, but I assume they should work since the converter board should turn the RLL drive into a SCSI drive.

 

I don't remember the cables being expensive though - $20 or so. Then again, I'm in Silicon Valley where we had a good number of places that sold cheap hard drives, cables and parts....

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23 hours ago, Chri O. said:

The DOS based Windows (MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x.) PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code, good thing those days are over.

 

Actually, Win 95 was first one not DOS based. But with good support for running DOS SW, and that's normal, considering all SW what users may want to run.  And it was good even with Atari ST floppies - something not present at all in later revisions.

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Since SCSI with Falcon was mentioned here a lot, I need to say some things from own experience:

I attached diverse SCSI and IDE hard disks to Falcon over years. Tried with diverse driver SW, later with own. Made speed tests.

SCSI on Falcon is slower than IDE, and much slower - by some 40% . Then, to attach SCSI drive on Falcon, you need PSU for it too - SCSI drives were 3.5 inch ones (I never saw 2.5 inch SCSI drive), so Falcon PSU was not enough for them.

Above means simply that whole idea of using SCSI with Falcon is not really good. If you have some SCSI drive already - OK. But much better was to go with 2.5 inch IDE drive in 90-es. Now Flash cards, of course.

SCSI controller in Falcon  is not same as in TT, it's cheaper, slower solution, made mostly because lot of Atari people possessed some SCSI disk in those years.

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23 minutes ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Made speed tests.

SCSI on Falcon is slower than IDE, and much slower - by some 40% .

yep, the DMA for the SCSI has factory limited speed (IIRC 2MB/s - as it is done with the ACSI in the ST) and IDE is pure CPU driven. IIRC my top score for IDE was ~3MB/s and the CPU was  100% busy with IDE task. In case of SCSI  it was ~1.8MB/s and CPU was almost free for other tasks (e.g. Cubase).

So, we have something for something here.

 

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Yeah, yeah, that with busy CPU with IDE argument always coming up. But that's really not so relevant.  Most of disk access happens via TOS calls, actually in case of hard disk it is only via it (except some very rare cases, like music playback during games ? ), so all other activity is stopped. Except interrupts, of course.  It means that SW needs to wait until disk access is finished. Interrupts will execute even at 100% CPU load. I know it exactly, because I tested with diverse SW, and IDE disk access did not break exec. of code in interrupt. So, DMA mode is not really better in single task OS. And it slows down execution, because CPU must wait when DMA accessing RAM - and it has priority.

"So, we have something for something here. " - well, that would be rather for past. Today is not easy to find working SCSI drive. Not to mention shipping costs - for that we can now buy like 64 GB Flash card or more.

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6 hours ago, atarian1 said:

As I mentioned, I'm not sure how well RLL drives with a SCSI convertor board work, but I assume they should work since the converter board should turn the RLL drive into a SCSI drive.

Yeah ultimately it makes the drive look like a SCSI drive, but it was a cabling and jumper nightmare!

 

6 hours ago, atarian1 said:

I don't remember the cables being expensive though - $20 or so. Then again, I'm in Silicon Valley where we had a good number of places that sold cheap hard drives, cables and parts....

Maybe it was that cheap.  But BITD, this was slightly before the internet was mainstream and it wasn't always easy to find the knowledge to get the job done right.   I remember my SCSI set up was very sensitive about having the terminating resisistors set in the right places and it wasn't something I really wanted to mess with once the drives were working correctly.

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6 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Actually, Win 95 was first one not DOS based. But with good support for running DOS SW, and that's normal, considering all SW what users may want to run.  And it was good even with Atari ST floppies - something not present at all in later revisions.

It was still DOS-based under the hood, but it's the first release that tried to hide DOS from the user rather than being sold as an add-on for DOS.

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11 hours ago, zzip said:

It was still DOS-based under the hood, but it's the first release that tried to hide DOS from the user rather than being sold as an add-on for DOS.

I don't think that you know about what talking.

In any case, Windows is DOS too - Disk (based) Operating System ?

TOS is Tramiel Operating System ?  Or maybe: sorry, we just could not thinker anything original for OS name - The OS. And actually, there was not much original in it - same disk filesystems as by DOS - FAT12, FAT16 (not compatible over 32 MB). GUI, CPU same, very similar as by Apple ...  Still, there were some good solutions, mostly in HW design - DMA, RAM shared between CPU and video without slowdown. And slogan power without price was true.

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19 hours ago, atarian1 said:

...

As I mentioned, I'm not sure how well RLL drives with a SCSI convertor board work, but I assume they should work since the converter board should turn the RLL drive into a SCSI drive.

...

 

What Atari made was not SCSI converter for RLL drives, but ACSI .  And I don't know about anyone made such crazy thing as RLL-SCSI converter, or better said SCSI-RLL - to be able to attach some RLL drive to computer with SCSI controller - that's was just too expensive and obsolete when SCSI drives and controllers in computers appeared on market. To add that ACSI-SCSI adapter is much simpler, since ACSI is actually early SCSI .

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2 minutes ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

I don't think that you know about what talking.

In any case, Windows is DOS too - Disk (based) Operating System ?

TOS is Tramiel Operating System ?  Or maybe: sorry, we just could not thinker anything original for OS name - The OS. And actually, there was not much original in it - same disk filesystems as by DOS - FAT12, FAT16 (not compatible over 32 MB). GUI, CPU same, very similar as by Apple ...  Still, there were some good solutions, mostly in HW design - DMA, RAM shared between CPU and video without slowdown. And slogan power without price was true.

Windows 95 is based on MS-DOS 7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_7

 

Yes every OS has some kind of "disk operating system"  MS-DOS is a specific one.   Microsoft built Windows NT to be free of MS-DOS, and Windows XP is the first consumer-oriented Windows to be based on the NT codebase and be completely free of MS-DOS. 

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13 minutes ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

What Atari made was not SCSI converter for RLL drives, but ACSI .  And I don't know about anyone made such crazy thing as RLL-SCSI converter, or better said SCSI-RLL - to be able to attach some RLL drive to computer with SCSI controller - that's was just too expensive and obsolete when SCSI drives and controllers in computers appeared on market. To add that ACSI-SCSI adapter is much simpler, since ACSI is actually early SCSI .

Yes ACSI->SCSI->RLL was overly complicated.  They were definitely attached to STs.  The hard-drive enclosure I bought off somebody was configured this way.   I had a friend with a similar hard drive configuration.   I believe MFM/RLL drives were available in surplus and cheaper than SCSI drives.  Also you could attach multiple RLL drives to a SCSI<->RLL adapter.    They worked fine with ST once you got them working

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On 7/28/2021 at 4:51 PM, calimero said:

Just google about it. 
 

I switch from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 as soon as it become avaible. (Because Windows 9x was unstable piece of shit that was excuse for OS!)
 

 

Windows 2000 was probably the most stable version of Windows I had, until later updates to 10. At the start 10 was not always a pleasant experience.

 

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1 hour ago, zzip said:

Don't expect an admittance of being wrong, ParanoidLittleMan (perhaps aptly named) tends to be stubborn and reject anyone else's opinion except his own regardless of information provided he will simply argue around it, do yourself a favor and ignore him. Just my own personal observations over the years, I don't care how he responds as I have said what I wanted, I'll just grab some popcorn. 

Just a heads up so you don't waste too much time. 

Edited by OldSchoolRetroGamer
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2 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

And I don't know about anyone made such crazy thing as RLL-SCSI converter, or better said SCSI-RLL

The OMTI3527a card is just such a device, I have one and it works with my Syquest 10Mb removable hard drive

 

image.thumb.png.1b95a47f0ab5efc8bd9b4c4ccf0e06ca.png

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Great Register article. Yes Windows 95 was built on top of MS-DOS, even the pre-emptive multitasking kernel was first released for running 2 DOS programs simultaneously.

 

The iPhone and Android OS are built on top of DOS too (Unix variants) we generally need a powerful DOS Shell behind a GUI.

 

OS 12 is built on top of Disk BASIC which adds DOS Shell commands to BASIC making it possible to construct a GUI OS for the Atari 2600 capable of marshalling hundreds of programs that share data with up to a 2MB footprint:

Operating System 12 will debut at SillyVenture 2020+1 next month! :) 

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19 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

 Made speed tests.

SCSI on Falcon is slower than IDE, and much slower - by some 40% .

But SCSI on Falcon (and on TT) is DMA driven (does not spent CPU cycles like IDE)? Right? (IDE on Falcon is using what is called PIO mode?)

 

This is important becaus of D2D (direct to disk) hard disk audio recording. E.g. Cubase Audio works only with SCSI drives...

Quote

Above means simply that whole idea of using SCSI with Falcon is not really good.

SCSI was used for different devices... e.g. printers and scanners. 
 

My Mac Performa come with intel i960 NuBus card and SCSI interface for rasterising (RIP) and film printing  (imagesettings). My ex-TT also come with scanner drivers and software and drivers for Linotype... everything connected in SCSI chain. 
 

I also saw, back in 90s, that people used same SCSI hard drive connected to Atari and PC and used it to transfer files!

 

(And already mentioned Direct to disk recording...) 

 

What I want to say is that SCSI back in 90s was quite a thing. (And today IDE is much more practical but you can not use Cubase Audio...)

 

edit: I saw that Cyprian replay on a CPU driven IDE...

 

Quote

 

SCSI controller in Falcon  is not same as in TT, it's cheaper, slower solution, made mostly because lot of Atari people possessed some SCSI disk in those years.

 

Edited by calimero
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10 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Wiki is not reliable reference. Everyone can write there whatever wants.

This is argument pop-up (like “SCSI does not use CPU” :D) many, many times but it is not true. 
 

No, you can not write whatever you want. Wikipedia had it’s rules and moderators. 
 

I find Wikipedia as a good starting points like a list of links (references). Many times in “talk” pages one can find usefull information... it is far from perfect, many times I hate it, but for sure it is not a place where you can write whatever you want. (This forum is :D )

 

I did make contributions to Wikipedia so this is my experience, first hand :)

Edited by calimero
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Considering claims about Win95 - "just on top of DOS" - that simply contradicts with all what was written about it in diverse magazines what I read in those years when it was actual. Contradicts with my own experience too. 

Win 95 is made as GUI OS, and it starts in graphic mode, has some minimal requirements considering graphic capabilities - and it is not textual mode, as is with DOS.  There were many new solutions implemented (for instance LFN), and it worked with min 2 MB RAM, if I remember correct (or was it 4 ?) - that sounds as very little now, and actually was modest in 1995 too.

Forums are place where people should write own experiences in first place. Copying from diverse sources (and some do it without mentioning it) is not really useful. And errors are present everywhere. Sometimes it is only because bad formulation, shallowness, not going enough in details. Yes, people tends to like short and simple explanations, but that is often not enough to understand whole thing. And can be interpreted pretty much wrong, especially as basic knowledge in area is missing.  And yes, I dare to say that most of people at computer forums is missing some really elementary knowledge about hmmm... how computers work (what actually did not change much since 1980).

Then, I don't go in threads, discussions if I don't know that area, not sure in things.

It is really pathetic to bash Windows here, just to show self as some bigger Atari fan. The fact is that it won OS war decades ago. I liked more IBM OS/2. But somehow it went not popular. I don't think that reason was it's quality. Most likely marketing was not good, development not enough fast.

 

"The iPhone and Android OS are built on top of DOS too (Unix variants) we generally need a powerful DOS Shell behind a GUI. "

This is just completely wrong formulation. Of course that any modern OS has Disk component (or better said filesystem component). On top ?

There is no top and bottom. Disk part and GUI part work parallel. It is same in TOS too.

Edited by ParanoidLittleMan
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12 hours ago, calimero said:

This is argument pop-up (like “SCSI does not use CPU” :D) many, many times but it is not true. 
 

No, you can not write whatever you want. Wikipedia had it’s rules and moderators. 
 

I find Wikipedia as a good starting points like a list of links (references). Many times in “talk” pages one can find usefull information... it is far from perfect, many times I hate it, but for sure it is not a place where you can write whatever you want. (This forum is :D )

 

I did make contributions to Wikipedia so this is my experience, first hand :)

Moderators are not experts in area in most cases. Of course you can not write bad language and some obvious stupidity. But technical details are hard thing.

In any case, I don't like to go on Wiki pages, because some really bad examples in past. When google gives Wiki page, I just skip it.

And worst in all this is very common if not dominant copy/paste practice overall.  So, if original reference/source is wrong, it can spread over Internet as disease.   Actually, same as with Atari ST floppy images - bad ones (and I saw lot of it, some even obvious bad ones) - they were copied to many other sites, archives, and they think: "job well done!").  No, especially no for people dealing with computers.

Where is CRC in all it ?  In case of storage for computers there is always extra data added, for being able to test it by read for correctness.

Correctness by those who just copy things ? No, their main goal as quantity, not quality.  As some people here like to write 'their' opinion in many areas, but actually they don't have opinion. They just saw somewhere something ...

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12 hours ago, calimero said:

...

This is important becaus of D2D (direct to disk) hard disk audio recording. E.g. Cubase Audio works only with SCSI drives...

SCSI was used for different devices... e.g. printers and scanners. 
 

My Mac Performa come with intel i960 NuBus card and SCSI interface for rasterising (RIP) and film printing  (imagesettings). My ex-TT also come with scanner drivers and software and drivers for Linotype... everything connected in SCSI chain. 
 

I also saw, back in 90s, that people used same SCSI hard drive connected to Atari and PC and used it to transfer files!

 

(And already mentioned Direct to disk recording...) 

 

What I want to say is that SCSI back in 90s was quite a thing. (And today IDE is much more practical but you can not use Cubase Audio...)

 

edit: I saw that Cyprian replay on a CPU driven IDE...

 

 

If IDE has max transfer rate of 3 MB/sec and SCSI 1.8 MB/sec then audio hard disk recording speed is lower than 1.8 MB/sec for sure - in case of Falcon.  Let's say it is 1.5 MB/sec - then CPU load will be 50% with IDE, so no, CPU is not occupied totally, and SW can work with lower speed (what happens with DMA too, as said CPU must wait when DMA accessing RAM - that's less than 50% normally, but with higher transfer speeds is more. My disk speed test program shows CPU slowdown in DMA mode, for instance - and I don't know any other knowing that).

It might be that IDE drives were simply too slow in Cubase early years, and they were - like max speed under 1 MB/sec .

"I also saw, back in 90s, that people used same SCSI hard drive connected to Atari and PC and used it to transfer files!"

Why exclamation mark for something completely normal and simple ? I was one of them. And actually can do same thing now - have PCI SCSI adapter boards, have Atari able to access SCSI ...   Buct fat is that most of data transfers in 90-es happened with IDE drives. Because SCSI was always more expensive. In years about 1990 was typical that there was same hard drive (mechanical part) with SCSI and with IDE interface on market. And SCSI was usually 100 DEM more expensive. Like 500 DEM for SCSI, 400 for IDE version. Just because SCSI electronic was more expensive for manufacturing. That, and evolution of IDE were reasons that SCSI gradually became less and less used.

Advantages as 7 possible targets, DMA mode were not much important for average home user. And when IDE added DMA modes too, it was really no any argument to use SCSI in some home computer, or even computer for musicians. This reminds me that I repaired some Ataris used by musicians, in 90-es, even early 2000-es. There was Mega ST with added IDE adapter. Don't know has it's owner used Cubase or what SW .  In any case, I'm not sure about that Cubase will not work with some Falcon and CF card.

 

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