hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (04/07/89)
I finally received my Atari developers kit a couple days ago, after a several month wait... (Can't really blame them, I guess; my order arrived in the midst of their reorganization.) Verrrrry impressive. Or perhaps daunting is a better word. This is easily a 6 inch thick stack of paper. Included docs for TOS 1.4 and the 68881 upgrade, which was nice, though I sorta' expected to also get a disk with the 1.4 code. As such, all I can do is read about it, which is all I could do a few months ago too. Sigh. I don't understand the non-disclosure policy... Here we have a wonderful machine, with tremendous potential, most of which has remained untapped for the four+ years of its existence. Why is all this stuff being kept hushed up? You'd expect, to help the machine get more users and software developers, you'd want to make system info as widely available as possible. Look at how tremendously popular the Apple II was - every single machine was shipped with a manual showing the hardware schematic, timing diagrams, a reference for machine language programming, and complete ROM listings. This was an *accessible* machine. Anyone and his brother could put together a functioning peripheral card for it, and many did. Atari, on the other hand, has had a long history of closed systems. What's the justification? The Mac is a closed system, but hell, every bookstore in the local mall has _Inside_The_Macintosh_ on sale. Is it really helping the ST to keep vital information under non-disclosures? Or, perhaps more important, is it really going to hurt to open up the system? (Surely you're not worried about clones?) Anyway... I've yet to start playing with everything in earnest, but I think I'm in love with the debugger in this package. Great docs, lots of features, (lots of features I've found myself saying "I wish I could do *this* right now" in other packages...) very nice. It's not a C source debugger, but it works. I don't know how I've survived without it. -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!