avp@garfield.UUCP (11/03/87)
Ok, I was right on the edge of buying a Mega 4 ST when a friend of mine returned from Toronto with all this bad news about the Megas. I was hoping some people could confirm/deny some of these 'rumors' (if that's what they are!). -The new version of the ROMs is incompatible with a fair bit of software (if this is true, how much, what great programs won't work?) -The disk drives are new, and won't read much protected software (again, how much and what major programs) -Many people say 4 megs is just too much, you never need it all, it is a waste of time and money, that it's better to buy a 1040 ST or maybe a Mega 2 ST. I hope these are for the most part untrue, because I was looking forward to 4 megs of Mem with the new ROMs and the blitter. I hope some of you guys can set me straight on these things thanks, Anthony. avp@garfield.UUCP (It may be worth posting to the net, as this may be relevant to other prospective Mega buyers also)
jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura) (11/07/87)
In article <4114@garfield.UUCP> avp@garfield.UUCP (Anthony Paul) writes: >Ok, I was right on the edge of buying a Mega 4 ST when a friend of mine >returned from Toronto with all this bad news about the Megas. I was >hoping some people could confirm/deny some of these 'rumors' (if that's >what they are!). > >-The new version of the ROMs is incompatible with a fair bit of software > (if this is true, how much, what great programs won't work?) Not much doesn't work. I've heard reports of 1 commercial game and 1 public domain terminal program. Hundreds of programs were run successfully, including everything I really care about (Flash! and Cyberpaint :-). OS-9 runs without problems. > >-The disk drives are new, and won't read much protected software > (again, how much and what major programs) The one game program that has been reported to have problems was copy protected and it's thought that the copy protection had something to do with its problem. (This info is a condensation of info from BIX). There may be others. > >-Many people say 4 megs is just too much, you never need it all, it is > a waste of time and money, that it's better to buy a 1040 ST or maybe > a Mega 2 ST. Funny. I could use 4 Meg. right now. If the people you talk to can't that's their problem. Keep in mind that before the coming of "memory resident" programs, the PC world kept thinking that 128K was wonderful. In fact, right now some of them scoff at higher than 640K. Not many, but some. What things benefit from higher memory? CAD 3D. 2 Meg. will do the job for a lot of things, but it's definitely a memory eater. I have no doubt that I can overrun 2 Meg. I've seen how easy it is to overrun 1 Meg. CyberPaint. CyberPaint more than any other program is going to sell BIIIIIG MEMORY. I llllove CyberPaint! It's Wonnnnnderfullll! :-) It's just about the only thing worth doing with any ST aside from Flash! and a good modem! You'd better get a double sided drive if you don't have one. If you want a good stock market tip, buy any company that's into storage media. CyberPaint is going revolutionize the concept of Home entertainment! Get streamer tapes if you can. You'll need them! If you're in the Toronto area check out my *short* demo of CyberPaint called "Lucky Penny". It's 40 frames of stop-action digitizing intended to be run at 1/4 sec. framing rate. (10 sec. run time). The difference between this and most other demos you'll see this year are: 1. a real story line -- not much of a story, but more than the "lava lamps" and straight advertising you'll see running otherwise. 2. It *may* be runnable on a 512K machine, but I'm not sure -- time to work on the demo stopped me from pushing it further. I *could* have used more and made it better. 3. A real Television Star! Kevin Frankoff has had 2 kids shows in Canada and has appeared in numerous commercials. My thanks to him for appearing in this "short subject". He's an incredibly talented actor, formerly with Second City (stage). If I can talk him into it, I hope to get something a bit more creative in a future "short" -- now that we know the range of the hardware. OS-9. OS-9 gives you may ways to run optimally in almost any size system. The smallest systems which are useful, in my opinion are, 520ST with 2 drives (at least one double sided) or 1040ST with an extra drive. With OS-9 and 4 Meg. you can start off by preloading *all* your executables (*not* the same as using RAM disk because, like "memory resident" programs in GEM/TOS, they aren't moved around to be run -- they run where they are), *and* a 1 Meg RAM disk on top of that for data files. You'll still want another drive, but there we've wacked out a good couple of Meg already! You'll still want another drive for convenience doing backups, but it'll be less necessary. On a Mega, you'll be able to add a few serial ports and have and incoming "mail drop" under OS-9 24 hrs./day. The ability to run a BBS and still use your computer will be a reality. How about 1 line for personal "mail drop", and 1 line for outgoing calls and *2* lines of BBS? From what I've heard, there will likely be a 4 serial port card available from 2nd sources early next year. Editing Large Files: With almost any text editor, and in the case of MicroEMACS, multiple large files at one. Do I ever have over one meg. in a textfile? No, but I have had software source "kits" with over 2 meg. New text editors with multiple buffers will use this better than they do now. AI. I know of 8 Meg. sources in the AI field. Yup, I can see usage for *beyond* 4 Meg. already! I have also revised my thinking on the Laser printer/Mega ST combination. Having done a lot of work digitizing lately, and talking with magazine publishers, the combination sounds like a G*d send! Picture files cannot be sent quickly to printers across standard serial ports. Even Centronics is quite slow in this regard. I'll be interested in seeing the speed of this system. If they can beat Centronics speed, they'll move mountains in the publishing industry (note that I don't use the stupid "desktop" adjective -- just "publishing"). > >I hope these are for the most part untrue, because I was looking forward >to 4 megs of Mem with the new ROMs and the blitter. I hope some of you >guys can set me straight on these things Yes, it's worth it. I recall the silliness of 6502 machine users when we were breaking the 64K barrier. "Who needs it?" For some reason CP/M people didn't seem to doubt the advantages of larger systems quite as much. Yes, we still heard the "who needs it?" from them, but not quite as much. I've heard the same from IBM-PC users looking at greater than 640K. Answer: If you don't want it, you'll never need it. Think about that one for a while. Sounds really Zen right? :-) Have fun deciding! Cheers! -- Jim O. -- Jim Omura, 2A King George's Drive, Toronto, (416) 652-3880 ihnp4!utzoo!lsuc!jimomura Byte Information eXchange: jimomura
dclemans@mntgfx.mentor.com (Dave Clemans) (11/11/87)
There are two major causes of incompatibility with the blitter rom's
(as used in the Mega ST's)
Essentially all of the "undocumented" low memory locations have moved.
A MAJOR bug in the read portion of the floppy driver was fixed.
This bug had two symptoms that people might have encountered:
error status might not be correctly reported after a read that
got an I/O error
If running a program that used BIOS calls to directly access the
floppy (for performance), multi-sector reads were not reliable
(assuming that the BIOS listing ATARI sent me as part of the developers
kit accurately represented the old ROM's, the bug was caused by mis-using
a WD-1772 sector read command).
From what I've heard, the floppy read bug fix is what has caused most
compatibility problems; it seems some manufacturers of copy protected
software (mainly games) based their copy protection on a side-effect
of the bug. Based on my experience the other areas aren't as major;
the only packages I know of that were affected were the "twister"
formatter that came from STart and possibly GFA basic.
=============
How much memory you want depends on what you do now, and what you
might want in the future. My system (4 megabytes) normally runs
with slightly under 2 megabytes free. The rest is taken by a 800K
ram disk, a LARGE disk sector cache, a large printer buffer, auto-loaded
programs, desk accessories, etc. The whole conglomeration boots in
under 30 seconds, including the time to load about 400K of files into
the ramdisk.
There are also software packages that want memory; the laser printer driver,
Smalltalk-80, OS-9, IDRIS, etc.
dgc