jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (07/06/87)
A friend of mine is very interested in the possibility of buying an Atari ST and Magic Sac as an alternative to buying a Mac. Can anybody give me a current status report on: (a) Software that will and will not run with Magic Sac; and (b) Estimated price and availability date for the rumored Data Pacific Macintosh-compatible floppy drive for the ST? Is there any other source for an ST drive that can read/write Mac disks? Any other information on advantages or disadvantages of an ST with Magic Sac would be appreciated. -John Sangster / jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa
ravi@mcnc.UUCP (07/09/87)
> > (a) Software that will and will not run with Magic Sac; With the new release of the driver software, the compatibility problems are rapidly disappearing. I've found that most Mac PD stuff works just fine. Here's a short list of the more popular stuff that I or some friends use regularly (ie. programs that don't just fire up right, but work well under extensive usage): Versaterm (& Pro), Kermit, Freeterm, Termworks. Mac240 does not work. MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite (it's the shakiest of the lot), MacBillboard, one of the other '*paint' programs, MacDraft. ReadySetGo. PageMaker supposedly works, but I haven't seen it. Excel. Cricket Graph. Plus all the usual goodies like Binhex, Packit, the zillion or so DA's you find around to do everything except give you a backrub.. I've found that for most of the PD or shareware stuff, if something doesn't work, one can find another DA or whatever that does exactly the same things, and that works (this is really true). In short, anything written "properly" seems to work great. Things that address hardware directly fail (eg. Mac240 probably goes to the serial chip), but even there Dave Small seems to have put in some ingenious hacks. It's been so good lately that I'm often in Mac mode for a week or so at a stretch (frankly, the Mac grows on you; it's everything the ST could have been, and now is - I'm tickled as hell!) > (b) Estimated price and availability date for the rumored > Data Pacific Macintosh-compatible floppy drive for the ST? Dave said he'd hoped for May, then said he'd been foolish to say that because he hadn't anticipated some problems. But he's actually finished it I think, and it's in the pipeline; certainly before summer's end. >Is there any other source for an ST drive that can read/write Mac disks? I seriously doubt it. >Any other information on advantages or disadvantages of an ST with Magic Sac >would be appreciated. Well, it isn't a Mac, so it'll act up and die sometimes, but I'm very satisfied (especially now, with the newer releases). Don't use anything less than rev 4.2 of the driver software (4.32 is out, but it's beta, so wait for 4.5). If you have specific needs, like word processing or picture making etc. it's great. I have a small set of stuff I need it for, it works great for that; most people I know have found it to work for what they needed. You could always check first, but at $150 a shot, it's not bad at all.. -ravi