ivan@rzsin.sin.ch (Ivan D. Reid) (09/11/89)
I don't know why people want a disassembly of the new ROMs from Atari. Surely the thing we want is the source listing! Disassembly suffers from possible bugs in the disassembler (DIS.TOS posted last year has one non-serious bug that I've found) and also that any comments are added later by a second party. Any comments in a source listing show what the programmer thought he wanted. I would support a source listing for reasons similar to some already mentioned -- to help discover discrepancies between what the docs say and what the ROMs do. For example, everyone still copies the info from the original developers kit on Ongibit() and Offgibit() -- it's in the latest Laser C for example (including the German translation). I spent a lot of time long ago trying to get these routines to work (to control DTR) and finally found that the docs were wrong by looking at that 5th generation photocopy of the source code the local dealer had sold us as a "developers kit". Anyone trying to use these functions is still doomed to failure until he uses the source instead of the docs! ivan