UD140469@NDSUVM1.BITNET.UUCP (04/30/87)
Received: by NDSUVM1 (Mailer X1.23) id 4740; Thu, 30 Apr 87 00:15:19 CDT
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1987 23:30 CDT
From: Scott Udell <UD140469@NDSUVM1>
Subject: Atari, please, some definitive MEGA ST info!
To: <INFO-ATARI16@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU>
I'm one of those people who was initially kind of excited about the
introduction of the Mega ST. I own a 520 now, and wanted a machine that
could handle more memory and had full bus expansion capabilities.
Unfortunately, my excitement has been waning somewhat because of a lack of
hard information about the systems--what I've found in magazines is little
more than the original product announcements with pictures.
My biggest question mark about the capabilities of the system come in the
area of its bus expansion--I've heard at least four different configurations,
all of them conflicting somewhat, and a couple of them from different Atari
sources. Here's what I've heard:
*the bus will be internal, with room for one expansion card. An
external card cage will be offered, but you will need to pass a ribbon
cable through the case to the internal slot.
*the slot is external only, and Atari will offer single cards designed
to mount on the outside of the case (like the Amiga), and also a card
cage.
*the last, from the April 1987 Byte, says that there will be one
internal slot for a single card AND an external bus connection for
the card cage, etc.
The latest "official" Atari word I remember was in the Spring 1987 issue
of Atari Explorer in their cover story on the Megas. They seem to be talking
about the first method, with an internal slot and routing the bus out later (?)
One thing the article said that conflicts directly with what Neil said earlier
was that "'we have a 68881 floating point mathematics coprocessor board ready
to go, and a networking card is in the works.'" That was from Shiraz Shivji.
Another interesting thing that I hadn't heard before was that the Megas are
going to have a built in fan.
Next question: what ROMs will the Megas have? According to the
article in Atari Explorer:
Basiclly, we've taken the original operating system and
shrunk it dow, filling the extra space with special primitives
that work with the Blitter chip. In the process we've
improved the operating system in a number of areas--made
several routines substantially more efficiant.
For example, we've improved the speed of memory clears,
speeding up the launch of applications, fixed some problems
with the RS-232 flow control, improved some of the minor
AES functions like appltrecord() and appl_tplay(), and
fixed a minor bug in the original OS that sometimes affected
the contents of DESKTOP.INF files on the hard disk.
In addition, we've made some changes that overcome natural
limitations of the original OS, such as the 40-folder limit.
In general, the new OS is tighter and even more reliable, and
makes better use of the hardware. For example, the speed of
floppy disk formatting, reads and writes should be about 25%
faster on the new system...
That long quote was from Mike Schmall, "Atari system programmer involved in
upgrading the ST operating system." That sounds like a lot of really great
improvements, except that just about everything I've heard on the net seems
to say that these are all a long way away.
As a semi-related aside, the article said that code for the battery-clock
would also be included in the ROMS. I was just wondering how this code might
effect other 3rd party clocks when installed on existing ST systems.
Question three--just what are the current expected shipping dates. I've
heard anything from they are in production now up to they won't be out until
late fall--all of which comes from non-Atari sources. As far as I know, Atari
only let out the first announced shipping time (April) and no other. I
realize that a company can rarely make the original shipping date, but at least
they keep their customers up-to-date on current ETAs (in otherwords, Atari,
when can I buy one in the US?).
Why haven't their been any really in-depth product previews, like there
have been of the Amiga 2000? Whose doing the new developers documentation,
and what's the current eta on that?
In something related to the Megas, in the March 1987 issue of ST
Applications one of their columnests stated that the new EST highrez
computer and/or graphics system will exist as a card for the Mega's card cage.
In their next issue the same columnest said it will be standalone, and gave
some resolution figures that supposedly came right from Neil Harris (I'm sorry,
I don't have it with me at the moment). I would desperatly love to have the
higher resolutions for a project I'm thinking of doing, but would hate to have
to buy another computer after my supposedly expandable Mega to do it
(remember when Jack Tramiel *promised* that the 520 would be expandable to
any future hardware Atari brought out?).
Lastly, what are the current package prices and configurations planned?
I've hear from $1000 to $2000 for the various systems, either with or without
monochrome monitor. Is any software going to be included other than BASIC?
Neil, are you ever going to post that document describing the Megas in-full
that you said you were going to post "in a couple of weeks" back in
January?
I would really like to get one of these new machines (I love my 520),
but with such vagueness of detail, I might be forced to go with something else
to get what I want, a something else that I have the details about now...
Scott Udell
UD140469@NDSUVM1