🚀 go-pugleaf

Five things.
 
1) there have been some questions about using a trackball or joystick
   with the atari-st.  If you put a joystick into the mouse port it
   will work but not correctly.  The mouse seems to send pulses
   while the joystick sends a continuous signal therefore to make
   the joystick work you have to push the joystick in the desired
   direction once for each pixel.  As the wico trackball tries to
   imitate a joystick it is not very useful.  Note it may be possible
   to make the trackball work by ripping out the circuitry that
   converts the trackball output (I believe it is identical to
   a mouse output).
 
2) there were also some questions about the speed of the atari-st
   dma port and floppy disks.  The dma port is a fast 10-megabit/sec
   but hard disk drives are normally only 5 megabit/sec.  Therefore
   you are limited to the drive transfer rate.  To add to the
   problem the atari does not buffer input so that leads to ...
   slow floppies.  The atari floppies read only one sector/revolution
   rather than 9 sectors/revolution the optimal speed (at least
   with file copies and program loads).  Some simple calculations
   show 2560 bytes/sec instead of the possible 23040 bytes/sec.
   I have been working on a track buffer to help this problem but
   it will have to wait until spring break.
 
3) There have been problems with file transfers across the net.
   It might make sense to use arc for all transfers as it has
   error detection built in.
 
4) does anyone know where I can get uniterm v1.6f on a BBS or
   something of that sort.  If possible I would prefer something
   near upstate-NY.
 
5) does anyone know how to reach the minix info group other
   than uucp?  I only have access to arpa and bitnet.
 
thank you
 
michael decorte
 
l40a@clutx.bitnet
Clarkson U.
Townhouse A46
Potsdam, NY 13676
(315)-268-3744
BIX: dmichael
 
[the opinions are solely my own and are in no way connected to
 Clarkson U.]
 
[yes there is a Santa Claus.  Just look out my window, there is
 his house right next to the red-striped pole]