markr@seqp4.ORG (Mark Roddy) (05/02/90)
I don't understand the incredibly negative comments regarding the developers program at atari. For an investment of $300 five years ago I have received a continuing stream of documentation, information, and software. The quality has improved steadily since the infamous "Hitchhiker's Guide to the BIOS." I suspect some of the gripers either are bothered by something else (like their investment in a system with a dubios future.) Now I _do_ understand griping about the inability of Atari to bring the TT to market. I read an interesting article in "Computer Shopper" (of all places) regarding this. The claim was made that the reason that the TT has been sitting in Atari development since at least early '87 is that backwards compatibility with 68000 based software has been nearly impossible to accomplish because of some decisions on how to implement the TOS interface in the original systems. In particular, the article claimed that the "Line F" interface is bogus for 68030 systems. The current versions of TT systems attempt to run ST software by "patching on the fly" Line F calls with more normal '030 traps. Needless to say, this has some problems. I say scrap the TOS interface and sell a cheap '030 X-windows Unix (tm) system. -- -Mark Roddy seqp4!markr@m2c.org m2c!seqp4!markr