t68@nikhefh.hep.nl (Jos Vermaseren) (06/12/88)
With all the anticipation about forthcoming products that get delayed all the time, it was a surprise for me to see some new ST products that I hadn't heard about. Yesterday I visited my Atari dealer and he had just received: 1: A 68881 coprocessor board by Atari for the Mega (it has to be put in the internal expansion slot). The price was quoted as Dfl 480,-- (divide by 1.9 to get the number in dollars). There was absolutely no documentation with it (apart from the docs for installation), but somebody told me that there has been some agreement that Atari follows the same memory mapping as the coprocessor sold by Weide electronics (for the 520 and 1040). This was however a rather vague story which should be verified. 2: A 5 1/4 inch floppy station to be used with the ST series for a price that is also way below what is currently asked by third party vendors (quoted price was Dfl 350,--, but they had to check up on that). I was told that there is a program by which one can select whether to make MS-DOS compatible formats or just a TOS format. This leaves me with a question: Why is there so much noise by Atari about all kinds of hardware that they cannot deliver for quite some time in the future, while at the same time some useful products come out quietly via the backdoor? Should I take a course on marketing to understand this? Anybody from Atari c(d)ares to comment? Jos Vermaseren