ya16@mrcu (Ian Powell) (01/11/90)
I found this in the Info-Mac Digest and thougt it of interest to the
Atari Community.
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Date: 14 DEC 89 14:01:53 CST
From: Z4648252 <Z4648252%SFAUSTIN.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: Emulating the Mac Plus via Spectre GCR
I've been requested to give an evaluation of the Spectre GCR,
the Atari ST Macintosh emulator.
I have access to a Mac SE FD/HD (a mouthful!) and am
constantly on both the Atari Spectre GCR Mac emulator and Mac so
hopefully, this evaluation will be of value. The Atari ST used
is a four megabyte ST equipped with a SeaGate 296n hard drive and
Atari paper-white 12" monitor. No accelerators are in use to
speed up this particular ST.
The Spectre uses Macintosh 128k ROMs and can emulate either a
Mac 512KE or Mac Plus. A key press will toggle either system.
All systems work, including 6.0.3. All ram has been surrendered
to the "Mac side" allowing some hefty applications to work
together via MultiFinder, i.e., FullWrite, Hypercard, RedRyder.
In fact, that is what is on the system right now. I'm typing
this with FullWrite, Hypercard and RedRyder lurking in
the background.
Hard drive support is a simple plug in and go via the Atari
ST's hard drive DMA port, therefore, data transfer is fast, if
not faster than the real thing, depending upon the hard drive
mechanism. External Macintosh hard drives also work.
Macintosh ramdisks work perfectly and, like the real Mac,
all but required if a one-drive system is used. This can help in
ending the Mac Floppy Shuffle.
Control Panel settings are not saved, therefore a Mac PD
utility, DiskParam, will do the job. It works perfectly and was
written by a Macintosher, Mr. Webb, who lost his Param circuit on
his Macintosh.
Because of the Atari ST's faster clock speed, graphics and
sound are noticeably faster. Sound is a touch "squeaky".
Graphics are snappier than that of a Plus and SE. Indeed, Aldus
FreeHand's self-running demo will be about four pages ahead of
the same demo on an SE after about two minutes into the demo.
Mouse handling is great and the mouse does not slow down
during disk access. Also, the ST mouse has two buttons. The left
is the standard "point and click" button, the right is a shift
key equivalent. This allows for selective file maintenance
without your having to touch the keyboard!
Floppy disk access is ok. The Spectre GCR can read Macintosh
disks directly at the same speed as a real Mac if the ALTernate
key is pressed prior to accessing the disk. Otherwise, the read
attempt will sample the disk and check to see if it is an Atari
(Spectre) or Mac disk. Pressing the ALTernate key will bypass
the check. Writing is direct and since the disk has already been
sampled when it was inserted, the emulator knows already whether
the disk is Atari or Mac. Mac formating can be done along with
duplication of real Mac disks. Again, there is no speed loss.
Some STs are having problems writing to Mac disks due to a
particular batch of drive mechanisms which think the Mac data is
noise. However, these seem to have no problem writing to Mac
disks via Spectre's own utility program. Again, the process is
fast.
Although Spectre GCR can support Atari's RGB screen, the
cheaper ($90.00 at some stores) and crisp paper-white Atari
monochrome monitor is the best. It is 12" and uses 640 X 400
resolution. There is no flicker and the scan lines are barely
seen. The display is clean and bright. The larger screen does
not increase the size of the characters, instead the user has a
greater viewing area close to that of the $400.00 Macintosh
monochrome monitor. Gray scale, I think, is the same.
Memory allocation is transparent. The user will lose about
300k for emulation overhead. The rest is all his, if he wants
it. Gee, I love this 3.5 meg or so of available memory!!!
Macintosh emulation on the Atari ST with the Spectre GCR has
reached beyond the "hacker" level. For all practical purposes
which include data I/O speed, program execution, and screen
display, the ST becomes a Macintosh Plus, thus, greatly extending
the use and power of the Atari ST and yet, with very little
compromise for either Atari ST in its host mode or in "Mac" mode.
Larry Rymal: |East Texas Atari 68NNNers| <Z4648252@SFAUSTIN.BITNET>
------------------------------swimmer@fbihh.UUCP (Morton Swimmer) (01/13/90)
Did you try to run an Atari Laser printer on the Spectre GCR, by any chance? Cheers, Morton