bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) (07/28/90)
Hello: Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany. There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone?
davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) (07/30/90)
In article <4985@uafhp.uark.edu> bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes:
Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany.
There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone?
Speaking of the ST, anyone heard anything on the "Stacy". Is it just a
portable ST (that's what it looked like in the ad) or something new?
--
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David Masterson Consilium, Inc.
uunet!cimshop!davidm Mt. View, CA 94043
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"If someone thinks they know what I said, then I didn't say it!"buffa@sardaigne.inria.fr (Michel Buffa) (07/30/90)
In article <4985@uafhp.uark.edu>, bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes: > > > Hello: > > Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany. > There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone? Well, I got some disks with a bunch of small programs compiled on them, like IFF-Converter, and so on... I guess they had been made by pirates, but they are very useful. On one of them There was a preview of the chameleon ST-EMULATOR and on the other one another ST EMULATOR, the MEDUSA one I think. The first one worked well in the three resolutions, but it was impossible to write on the atari disks (it was a preview). Most of the softs I tried were very simple and they worked !!!!! The second one was more finished, and I think it was a cracked version of the medusa emulator. With this one, everything I tried worked well, even complex programs like platine st, quantum 2.0,... and it was very fast. I could run it only in high black and white resolution. I can't say more as the disks didn't contain any documentation (like most of these compilations made by pirates). I read that the medusa emulator works well only with a special hardware card. Here is a repost of a transcription of the test of the medusa emulator in a German magazine: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a quickly done translation of the first review of Medusa, the Atari ST emulator for the Amiga 2000. Please excuse the probably rough English. I don't believe that I'm required to produce Marketese ;-) I have left the prices in Deutschmarks since this news group is quite international. Most people are probably aware of their exchange rates with the Dollar, so here is the exchange rate for Deutschmarks to Dollar: 1 $ is roughly 1.67 DM. New perspectives from an Atari in the Amiga Atari ST Computers are technically inferior to the Amiga in Video and Audio. Despite this, they have won a quantitative and qualitative advantage in areas like text processing. After inserting Combitec's emulation card Amiga users can employ the powerful software of the seemingly weaker computer. Following Readysoft's emulator A-MAX another emulator makes new worlds acessible to the Amiga. Instead of trying to imitate the Apple Macintosh, Combitec's Medusa tries to emulate the Atari ST as closely as possible. Somebody imagining the emulator as a complete Atari ST on a plug-in card will be surprised. On the small Medusa card for the 100 pin Amiga-slot he will nmainly find two logic components (PALs) that enable the Atari ST software to use Amiga hardware. WIth this the purchase of Atari hardware is superfluous und possibly ensuing copyright problems are avoided. Medusa requires an Amiga with at least 1 Megabyte RAM and a diskette drive. Combitec recommends a 2 MByte RAM expansion to be able to work with programs that require more memory. The emulator uses the entire Amiga memory without problems. Also used are all interfaces, the diskette drives (read and write-compatible with original Atari 720 KB drives) and certain hard disks. Printers and plotters can be used, too. The owner of a well equipped Amiga owns also a well equipped Atari. After inserting the card Medusa can be started immediately. The software can be loaded directly from diskette or hard disk and is not copy protected. The Amiga part of the software consists primarily of the Medusa program - the emulator proper - and the installation software that is needed especially for using a hard disk. The Atari operating system TOS (Tramiel Operating System) - not included in the package - can be stored on hard disk and be loaded from there. Owners of a Combitec filecard or a Combitec AutoBoot card can create a bootable parttion of their hard disk for the Atari ST. A short and clear installation program facilitates TOS installations on Amiga diskettes or hard disks, theassignment of Amiga diskette drives to the Atari, the creation of an Atari partition on hard disk and the adjustment of video refresh. The problem of getting the operatin system of the emulated computer is prevailing among emulators. For the Macintosh emulator A-MAX the original Macintosh ROMs are required, but cannot be delivered with it for copyright reasons. For Medusa this problems can be solved relatively easily: For one the dealers are seling Ataris TOS as a diskete version for 15 DM, and a program called "GetTOS" is delivered with Medusa that, started on an original Atari ST, reads the TOS out and writes it to diskette. This diskette can be used for the emulator directly or as a medium for the hard disk installation. Sources for the diskette TOS are referred to by Combitec on request. Combitec points out that the legal questions have to be checked out before copying the TOS. In doubt Atari has to be asked for permission ! For the test the TOS version 1.0 was available on diskette. According to Combitec the capability is planned to put the ROM-TOS into sockets on the Medusa card. Since TOS can be loaded from hard disk in a few seconds, this plan was shelved for now. In daily use this solution provides greater flexibility since users can choose between different TOS versions that can all be stored on hard disk. After installation a typical Atari desktop screen appears on the Amiga monitor. Since HiRes mode is pre-selected it is an interlace screen. The characteristical flicker is somewhat abated as the refresh frequency of the monitor (1084 et al.) can be increased from 25 Hz to 31 Hz or even 35 Hz for better devices. This facility does not require a special Agnus chip. In LoRes or MedRes logically the double of the HiRes frequency can be used, up to 70 Hz. This represents an absolutely stable image. One has to experiment to find the ideal value: an accessory included with Medusa (a program that can be reached at any time on the Atari ST) allows the variation of the setting from the emulator. If the screen is showing a wild image instead of the normal screen the monitor cannot keep up. Very useful in this procedure is the feature that allows to switch back to the standard Amiga setting (this is always working) at any time. "Signum! 2", the extremely successful scientific text processing package, is an important program to find out about compatibility and flawless function of the emulator. Texts could be processed and printed without perceptible difference in speed. With the progres of the test this impression got firmer. Programs like Calamus, Arabesque, Tempus and Tempus Word, STAD, GFA-BASIC, Adimens, Psion Chess and Turbo C ran without problems like on the original ST. Even the software accelerator Turbo-ST ran and helped Medusa to a fantastic text output speed. As the shareware performance program Qindex ran, too, it was possible to test the speed of Medusa: 95 to 98 percent of the original speed were attained. Under Turbo-ST Medusa peeked to 1160 percent of an original ST without Turbo_ST. But the limits of the emulator became visible, too: third emulations like Aladin, the Macintosh emulator for the ST computer, did not run. Many games did not run likewise. This is pointed out in the manual, because if a program assumes certain hardware prerequisites that are not present in the Amiga - like the original ST diskette drives with index hole controlled hardware - and uses this hardware circumventing the operating system, this environment cannot always be emulated. Combitec expect direct user participation on enhancing Medusa because of a one year, no-cost update service. The manufacturer says they are dependent on cooperation with manufacturers of hardware and software to support more hard disks or software protected by dongles, like that in the midi market, to make Medusa workable. As said, Medusa works without problems with memory expansions, diskette drives and hard disks. Flicker fixer cards do not disturb the emulator likewise. But it is not possible to use the emulation if 68020 or 68030 cards are installed. This is not because of Medusa, but because of TOS: The present TOS versions run with the 68000 processor only. Combitec is waiting for new TOS versions, like that for the long announced Atari TT. There are already deliberations to run the Atari as a screen on the Amiga. To speed up the emulator, a card called "Piccolo" is announced that with provide a 14 MHz 68000 and 256 KByte to 1 MByte memory. The memory is designed with SRAM so that switch-off resistent storage of Kickstart or TOS in fast RAM is possible. (J. Sprave/rg) The Combitec development "Medusa" is sold by MacroSystem, Gahlenfeldstrasse 6, 5804 Herdecke, Germany. Phone +49/23 30/80 11 32. The price is DM 498. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The German version of this article was published in Amiga Welt 6/90, pp 50/51. This translation does not reflect the opinions of the translator, who is only a reader of that magazine and in no way related to either the publisher or Combitec or MacroSystem. I did this translation because many people have been talking about Atari emulation on comp.sys.amiga. I do not want to purchase this system myself and please don't flame me if you don't like the contents of this article of the rough cut translation. -- | lchristoph@Sun.COM (Internet) | Disclaimer: | | ...!unido!sunmuc!lupe (German EUNet, "bang") | My employer has a | | lupe@sunmuc.UUCP (German EUNet, domain) | non-exclusive license | | ...!suninfo!lchristoph (Sun Germany customers) | to my opinion. | ------------------------------------------ Michel Buffa: Projet Robotvis, INRIA, France Internet: buffa@sardaigne.inria.fr Surface Mail: Michel BUFFA, INRIA - Sophia Antipolis, 2004, route des Lucioles, 06565 Valbonne Cedex -- FRANCE Voice phone: (33) 93.65.78.39, Fax: (33) 93 65 77 65 ------------------------------------------
terry@helios.ucsc.edu (Terry Ricketts) (07/30/90)
>In article <4985@uafhp.uark.edu> bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes: > > Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany. > There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone? The emulator you are refering to is called Medusa. It is supposed to be a hardware-software combination. For the last month there has been a software package by that name making the rounds of the bbs's. It appears to be PD but since there was no documentation I can't say for sure. The software seems to run. At least a TOS screen comes up on Ami. But since I have no ST disks to check it with I have not gone any further. If anyone knows for sure that it is PD & if others have an interest in it I could send it on to Xanth. | Terry Ricketts | Internet: terry@helios.ucsc.edu | Senior Electronics Engineer | loel@helios.ucsc.edu | Lick Observatory Electronics Lab | Phone: 408-459-2110 | University of Calif, Santa Cruz |
seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) (07/31/90)
In-Reply-To: message from cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET I just got a copy of it... It works fine, except I have no software to test on it. Then the inevitable question came to mind, "what would I run on it?" Sean //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// UUCP: ...!crash!pnet01!pro-party!seanc | ARPA: !crash!pnet01!pro-party!seanc@nosc.mil | " Fanatics have their INET: seanc@pro-party.cts.com | dreams, wherewith they | weave a paradise for RealWorld: Sean Cunningham | a sect. " Voice: (512) 994-1602 PLINK: ce3k* | -Keats | Call C.B.A.U.G. BBS (512) 883-8351 w/SkyPix | B^) VISION GRAPHICS B^) \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
buffa@sardaigne.inria.fr (Michel Buffa) (07/31/90)
In article <5533@darkstar.ucsc.edu>, terry@helios.ucsc.edu (Terry Ricketts) writes: > >In article <4985@uafhp.uark.edu> bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes: > > > > Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany. > > There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone? > > The emulator you are refering to is called Medusa. It is supposed to be a > hardware-software combination. For the last month there has been a software > package by that name making the rounds of the bbs's. It appears to be PD but > since there was no documentation I can't say for sure. The software seems to > run. At least a TOS screen comes up on Ami. But since I have no ST disks to > check it with I have not gone any further. If anyone knows for sure that it is > PD & if others have an interest in it I could send it on to Xanth. What is the emulator you are speaking about ? How do you run it ? Medusa is definately not public domain, it's sold in Germany. Well, I tried two different emulators. I tried to run softwares, and they WORKED ! The emulators I tested WERE NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN ! They were compiled with other softs on a disk with 50 different utilities. The name of the disk was CD147 I think. The CD's serie are disks compiled by pirates with a lot of compacted utilities. Don't blame me. I'm not a pirate. Somebody just gave me this disk and said: hey, do you want to try the st emulators ? May I had that these compiled disks are very useful too (They contain pirated software, and that's not good, but they also contain the best of the public domain utilities, compiled in a very efficient way) So, the first one I tried was the CHAMELEON emulator. It was a beta version, so it was impossible to write anything on the atari disks. It reads directly atari disks and run in three different resolutions (i had to press F1, F2 or F3 at launching time to choose the res.). I tried degas elite and it ran. It crashed several times too, and didn't work with 1 meg chip Ram (But ran with Quickship) I never heard about this emulator before... The second one was a cracked version (only software) of the medusa emulator V2.1a I don't know if it is an alpha or beta version, but it works very well. It reads directly atari disks, and runs only in the black and white hi-res mode. I ran without problems Signum 2.0, platine st, script, and some other softs. The only problem is that with only One Meg, A lot of programs pop the requester "Not enough memory to run this application". This emulator seemed very bug-free and there was no speed difference with a real atari st. ------------------------------------------ Michel Buffa: Projet Robotvis, INRIA, France Internet: buffa@sardaigne.inria.fr Surface Mail: Michel BUFFA, INRIA - Sophia Antipolis, 2004, route des Lucioles, 06565 Valbonne Cedex -- FRANCE Voice phone: (33) 93.65.78.39, Fax: (33) 93 65 77 65 ------------------------------------------
lupe@alanya.Central.Sun.COM (Lupe Christoph - Sun Germany Consulting - Munich) (07/31/90)
bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes: > Not long ago there were words about ST emulator for Amiga from Germany. >There are PD versions which work, I hear. Any more info on that, anyone? Medusa, the Atari ST emulator for the Amiga 2000 is out and receives favourable reviews. I have not heard of PD versions. Medusa includes a tiny board with a few PALs to make the hardware look more alike. Ever heard of PD hardware ? ;-) -- | lchristoph@Sun.COM (Internet) | Disclaimer: | | ...!unido!sunmuc!lupe (German EUNet, "bang") | My employer has a | | lupe@sunmuc.UUCP (German EUNet, domain) | non-exclusive license | | ...!suninfo!lchristoph (Sun Germany customers) | to my opinion. |
terry@helios.ucsc.edu (Terry Ricketts) (07/31/90)
In article <8552@mirsa.inria.fr> buffa@mirsa.inria.fr writes: > >What is the emulator you are speaking about ? How do you run it ? Medusa is >definately not public domain, it's sold in Germany. > > The emulators I tested WERE NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN ! They were compiled >with other softs on a disk with 50 different utilities. The name of the disk >was CD147 I think. The CD's serie are disks compiled by pirates with a lot of >compacted utilities. Don't blame me. I'm not a pirate. Somebody just gave me >this disk and said: hey, do you want to try the st emulators ? May I had that >these compiled disks are very useful too (They contain pirated software, and >that's not good, but they also contain the best of the public domain >utilities, compiled in a very efficient way) > >The second one was a cracked version (only software) of the medusa emulator >V2.1a I don't know if it is an alpha or beta version, but it works very well. >It reads directly atari disks, and runs only in the black and white hi-res >mode. I ran without problems Signum 2.0, platine st, script, and some other >softs. The only problem is that with only One Meg, A lot of programs pop the >requester "Not enough memory to run this application". This emulator seemed >very bug-free and there was no speed difference with a real atari st. > This makes me very suspicious that the program I got is the one you are referring to. The BBS's I saw it on are usually very careful not to allow pirated software to be uploaded. Since there was no documentation with this program it may have sneaked through. The lack of docs made it very difficult to figure out how to run it. There were a set of 3 programs & I had to try various iterations of them in sequence (with each iteration causing my machine to crash) before I stumbled on the right combination. I think at this point I will not pass it on any further, and will notify the BBS's I saw it on that they possible have a pirated copy on their boards. I guess I won't mind erasing it myself too much since I can't find much use for it (not having any Atari disks). I am sorry to see someone get ripped off this way before they even get a chance to get their commercial version out the door! I would appreciate it if no one else would ask me for a copy, since I am getting rid of mine. Terry | Terry Ricketts | Internet: terry@helios.ucsc.edu | Senior Electronics Engineer | loel@helios.ucsc.edu | Lick Observatory Electronics Lab | Phone: 408-459-2110 | University of Calif, Santa Cruz |
johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (John Flanagan) (08/01/90)
In article <lupe.649428113@alanya> lupe@alanya.Central.Sun.COM (Lupe Christoph - Sun Germany Consulting - Munich) writes: >bbs00203@uafcseg.uucp (Mario Amigo) writes: > >Medusa, the Atari ST emulator for the Amiga 2000 is out and receives >favourable reviews. > >I have not heard of PD versions. Medusa includes a tiny board with a few PALs >to make the hardware look more alike. Ever heard of PD hardware ? ;-) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Ever heard of the LUCAS and FRANCES boards? That's exactly what they are -- public domain hardware. Not that the Medusa stuff is likely to be PD. It sounds like the BBS versions are pirated. It also sounds like it would be very difficult to use even the commercial version ethically, unless Atari licenses TOS for use on non-Atari hardware. John Flanagan Center for EUV Astrophysics johnf@ssl.berkeley.edu University of California (...!ucbvax!soc1.ssl!johnf) Berkeley, CA 94720 Manners Maketh Man. (415) 643-6308