willi@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Gary A Williams) (03/08/89)
Does anyone out there know what the deal is with Spectre GCR? Is it a hardware device or is it some sort of software trick? Is is supposed to be any more reliable than the ill-fated Translator I? willi
Xorg@cup.portal.com (Peter Ted Szymonik) (03/10/89)
Spectre GCR will be shown at World of Atari but will not yet be for sale at that time. GCR is a hardware cartridge with a drive cable. The cart is chained into the drive chain and enables the internal and extrenal drives to read and write MAC disks DIRECTLY (out of box) at (get this) 1:1 Mac speed!! Its is also much more reliable than Translator and the entire Spectre GCR package will probably cost less then the Translator alone! Peter Szymonik (all from info gleened from the Gadgets by Small RT on GEnie)
dlm@druwy.ATT.COM (Dan Moore) (03/11/89)
in article <1271@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>, willi@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Gary A Williams) says: > Does anyone out there know what the deal is with Spectre GCR? Is it a > hardware device or is it some sort of software trick? The hardware in the ST (17xx series FDC) can only uses MFM encoded disks, the Mac uses GCR. The Mac also uses variable speed drives which spin at 300 to 600 RPM, the ST (and most other computers) use fix speed drives which spin at 300 RPM. The Spectre GCR is a hardware device (an ST cartridge) that allows the ST to use GCR formatted disks. It also takes care of simulating the variable drive speed the Mac uses. The hardware does require a lot of custom software in order to work. > Is is supposed to be any more reliable than the ill-fated Translator I? The "Translator One(tm)" is a fairly reliable product. Very few of the problems people have are actually due to failures of the Translator. Most are caused by the large variations in the brands of floppy drives Atari has sold. Some of the drives Atari sells do not spin at the correct speed (300 RPM) and thus will not work with the Translator, others have electronics that prevent the data from a Mac disk from being read since it doesn't "look" right. STs also have a lot of noise on the floppy disk interface which can interfere with the GCR data on a Mac disk. The Spectre GCR will remove most but not all of the limitations the Translator One had. It will not be as sensitive to variations in drive speed, or to problems caused by the noisy floppy interface Atari used. Drives with electronics that prevent Mac data from being read will still not work though. (NOTE: There is a simple fix for some of these drives, Gadgets by Small will announce details on that when the Spectre GCR is released.) The Spectre GCR will be much faster than the Translator since it won't be limited to the data rate of the MIDI ports. Reading and writing disks with the Spectre GCR will be just as fast as a real Mac. Dan Moore AT&T Bell Labs Denver dlm@druwy.ATT.COM dlm@druhi.ATT.COM