braner@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU (braner) (09/24/86)
[] Putting a language on a cartridge seems popular to some. It is certainly a potent version of copy protection, which doesn't really need a back-up. My gripe is that it is not as easy to swap cartridges as disks, so I'd rather put something in the cartridge port that would be universally useful and will be left there all the time. Sort of like that clock board, although luckily we can (?) now put a clock inside the box. My own favorite candidate is a floating-point coprocessor board. In any case, hardware, not software. (Never mind what Atari thought it made that connector for - and damn the stupid write-protection of the cartridge address space!) A program in ROM will also have bugs left in longer (or forever) - e.g. Applesoft BASIC. (Hopefully not TOS...) Also, some people like to modify their software! (I, for one, have modified the Apple II monitor ROM and will probably redo TOS eventually if Atari doesn't.) Disk versions (unprotected) are a lot easier to modify = user friendly. Then of course, if a certain language is your DAILY working environment you would like it in ROM. How about an OPTION of getting it on a cartridge, in addition to the disk version, which is more appropriate for other buyers? BTW, FaST BASIC sounds sort of like HBASIC. Is it incrementally compiled? It would be interesting to compare them, when HBASIC comes out. - Moshe Braner
ACS19@UHUPVM1.BITNET (Mike Vederman) (09/26/86)
>A program in ROM will have bugs left in longer (or forever)...
Writes Moshe Braner.
Well, if OSS is the same distributor for Action! this will not be a problem.
There were no less than 6 different versions of Action! within a years time.
All bugs were documented, and fixes were included in a newsletter, or available
on the Action! BBS run by Clint Parker. The support from OSS is nothing short
of wonderful, and any product which they can come out with would not have bugs
left in for a very long time.
The thing that made Action! so great was the environment which was created. I
would have to say that using Megamax in a 640K ramdisk has the same feel as
Action!, except that Action! code was cleaner. Still, Action! could be
produced effectively with a 128K (?) bank switched cartridge... :-)
Mikemanis@ubc-cs.UUCP (09/26/86)
In article <1095@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU> braner@batcomputer.UUCP (braner) writes: >Then of course, if a certain language is your DAILY working environment >you would like it in ROM. How about an OPTION of getting it on a cartridge, >in addition to the disk version, which is more appropriate for other buyers? Well, TDI Modula-2/ST is my DAILY working environment. Including the compiler, linker, editor, debugger, etc., etc., it adds up to about 800K (of which about 500K lives on a ramdisk). Any ideas how I fit that onto a 128K cartridge? In any case, what do I do when TDI comes out with an upgrade? Throw away my cartridge? Have a disk with ram patches? The TOS experience should have demonstrated that getting a frozen program to live in rom is non-trivial. (Apple did it, and then they realised that the Mac file system was stupid: so they had to come out with a new operating system with a file system in ram, and then a new machine with new roms.) Re co-processors: that would seem to be reasonable, but I still want the TT box which plugs into the DMA port. The 68000 doesn't coexist well with co-processors (unlike the 68020), and, although you can do it, the effort might not be justified.