antony@lbl-csam.arpa (Antony A. Courtney) (03/20/90)
I played with an Atari Portfolio today, and loved it. I have just one question before I shell out $500 for the little box: The pmaphlet the dealer had claims that the commands are like MS-DOS, but seems to be trying to not say"this is an MS-DOS compatible machine". What I want to know is: Has nayone tried writing programs on a regular PC and then downloading them to the Portfolio? Does this work? Is the thing a tride and true PC-compatible? I'd only ever want to do very portable C things which I could compile on my PC and download to it. If this is easily doable, I'll buy the thing in a second.... Thanks, antony -- ******************************************************************************* Antony A. Courtney antony@lbl.gov Advanced Development Group ucbvax!lbl-csam.arpa!antony Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory AACourtney@lbl.gov
mec@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (michael.e.connick) (03/22/90)
In article <5146@helios.ee.lbl.gov> antony@lbl-csam.arpa (Antony A. Courtney) writes: > > Has nayone tried writing programs on a regular PC and then downloading them > to the Portfolio? Does this work? Is the thing a tride and true > PC-compatible? > > I'd only ever want to do very portable C things which I could compile on my > PC and download to it. > > If this is easily doable, I'll buy the thing in a second.... Buy it then. I've written a couple of Microsoft C programs on a PC and downloaded them to my Portfolio. They've all worked fine, even a simple terminal program. The key is to only use standard ROM-BIOS calls to machine services (which Microsoft C library routines use). If you do so you shouldn't have any problems programming the Portfolio. ----------------------------------------------------- Michael Connick mec@mtfmi.ATT.COM 201-957-3057 AT&T Bell Labs MT 3F-113 (Dept. 79151)