rb@ccivax.UUCP (rex ballard) (09/13/85)
I hope I get flamed on this, I hope I am wrong, and I hope that something can be done soon, but, After looking at the cartridge pinout on the 520-ST in the back of the Owners manual, I realised that any hope of ram expansion without tearing into the box itself were dashed. D0-D16, A1-A15, UDS, LDS, +5, Gnd and two ROM-SELECTS were all that appeared to be drawn out. Two pins were used for ground and two for +5. I suppose for $800, I shouldn't really expect a 7 slot backplane, but they should have brought out at least 7 of the other address pins, and R/W pins, a 50 pin rather than a 40 pin card would have enabled expansion for anything but Co-processors (bus is already kind of busy). I guess everybody has to screw up something. Even the "Doorstop Sinclair" was more 'open' than the 'ST'. One of the "Expansion options" for the ZX-80 was real cute, A ribbon cable with 6 "slots" on it. Expansion cartridges were just "Stacked Up" and plugged into the ribbon (RFI was a bit sticky, but aluminum paint helped that). On the flip side, the "Hard disk port" looks an awfull lot like a 488 bus to me. Anybody tried interfacing any 488/HPIB peripherals to it? If all that is needed is a RAM disk, the RAM drive could be stuffed on the hard port. Went to an Atari users group meeting, only one of the 16 owners was even remotely less than satisfied. He was the only one without a developers kit and was "getting tired of running demo's". Seems that the developers kit would make a great RETAIL product. (does anybody from ATARI read this net?) One publisher appears to be delaying the release of their software until the OS is put in ROM. Appearently, they want to go jumping into the BIOS/BDOS the way Lotus did. Can't anybody write a KOSHER program? Do Un*x programmers write APPLICATIONS that HACK UP the KERNAL? (not OS drivers, but the applications which don't use the standard interface, ie: jump into the kernal) How come the ST takes less time to load it's OS into RAM than it takes a MAC to boot up from ROM? Someone read an article in the users group (newspaper) that said AT&T was going to OEM ST's. Will they run UNIX? How about a GEM/UNIX combination? Anybody heard of any Smalltalk-like devopement for the ST? (These opinions used to be mine but I'm giving them up for adoption)
davecl@orca.UUCP (Dave Clemans) (09/17/85)
This is a summary of some notes from Compuserve. The 520 can be upgraded to at least 2MB internally (all decoding is in place, etc.). With extra decoding and improved cooling you could reach 15MB. However, GEM would probably have to be modified to know about more than 2MB. There will be a 1MB expansion board announced in about a month. I think that the company is called "Dynamic Software Design". dgc
ravi@eneevax.UUCP (Ravi Kulkarni) (09/26/85)
In article <1738@orca.UUCP> davecl@orca.UUCP (Dave Clemans) writes: >This is a summary of some notes from Compuserve. > >The 520 can be upgraded to at least 2MB internally (all decoding is in >place, etc.). With extra decoding and improved cooling you could >reach 15MB. However, GEM would probably have to be modified to know >about more than 2MB. There will be a 1MB expansion board announced in >about a month. I think that the company is called "Dynamic Software Design". > >dgc Actually the ST can be currently expanded to 1Mb so maybe you should call it a 512k expansion board. The memory controller can handle up to 4Mb in two banks of 2 Mb so when 1 Mbit chips come out its likely that the ST's can be upgraded to 4Mb with some hardware hacking. -ravi -- ARPA: eneevax!ravi@maryland UUCP: [seismo,allegra]!umcp-cs!eneevax!ravi