lshum@utzoo.UUCP (Jerry Zarycky) (04/05/84)
I was wondering if anyone had any more news/rumors about the expansion capabilities of the XL line. In this month's (April) COMPUTE!, Bill Wilkinson writes in his Insight:ATARI column about a supposed April Fool's joke. He writes about an intelligent peripheral interface (card cage) which could support high-speed modems, parallel printer interfaces, music synthesizers, parallel disk drives (which would run app. 10 times faster than the current serial ones), and even a winchester hard disk drive. He claims that this system would be second in expansion capability only to the Apple II systems. Has anyone heard anything about this expansion interface? As a side note, if one bought one of the current serial disk drives, is it possible to take advantage of the increased speed of the parallel port, or is the "serialness" an inherent property of these disk drives? Replies to the net would probably be most beneficial. Jerry Zarycky USENET: {cornell,uw-beaver,linus,ihnp4,allegra,decvax,floyd}!utcsrgv!drz {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!lshum CSNET: drz@Toronto ARPA: drz%Toronto@CSNet-Relay P.S. Has anyone seen Robotron:2084, Pengo, or Donkey Kong Jr. for the Atari home computers yet???
dont@tekig1.UUCP (Don Taylor) (04/06/84)
X Isnt this the same guy who described the Cobol cartridge to plug into the atari, last april issue? The whole thing was a joke, and I think the very last line of the article said so. The basic situation is that using the 19.2k baud provides a serious upper limit on the I/O rates. This is not as bad as might be expected, as most micros are obtaining about 5k baud even when using a parallel interface, if you dont believe it, time downloading about 20k bytes into the box and see what happens. The floppy firmware is just not tuned for the real speed that the controller can support. There was consideration of a parallel interface to the atari line, but looking at the advantages, the idea was shelved. (This was an independent hw outfit.) To upgrade the current drives would require ripping out the disk controller card in each drive and replacing it, not a cheap option. Don Taylor