🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7367@xanth.cs.odu.edu> scott@cs.odu.edu () writes:
>
>  I love it!  I have been following this   disgustion   on the expandable
>1040st.  Now I am confused-- can the 1040 be upgraded (easily) and is this
>upgrade reliable?  And the blitter?  I thought the answers were NO, NO and
>NO (In that order).  So, to upgrade you must buy a mega, right?

Currently, the answer is YES, YES, and NO...I even have a 4 meg board
in my 520 ST (no soldering involved), although I am waiting for prices
on memory to drop before buying the extra memory chips. A blitter? Who
really cares all that much anymore. To be truthful, if Atari offered a
cheap (under $100) blitter upgrade today I am not sure I would even
install it. I think most of the users out there get sufficient speed
out of the normal Line-A calls, plus there are tools out today that
can speed up the non-blitter routines. Now, if I were multi-tasking on
the ST, it would be a different matter.

>...but it is supposed to speed up reading by 50% BUT
>even the docs say that it is NOT recommended!  WHAT IS THE DEAL?  Can any
>of these formatting procedure harm the drive by over extending a mechanism
>here or there?  Are there any real problems besides loss of data?

Certain drives can be damaged by the formatters that push you out past
80 tracks, but most of the earlier machines can handle 82 tracks fine.
Doubtful that anything else could damage the drive...Just be careful
about saving your only copies of sources to a 923K disk. If your drive
gets slightly out of alignment or the speed changes, you could be out
of luck. 923K and fast read is great for storing those demo programs,
pictures, and compiler libraries or tmp directories on.

>  My next question is a probably much easier to answer.... if I wanted to 
>port something over from a vax or a sun system and compile it on my st--
>would this be an easy task?  Can programs be easily moved? 

I do it all the time between the Sun or Apollos and my ST. I use MWC
3.0, but the GNU-C compilers are also very safe to use from a
compatibility viewpoint. I have not had as much luck going back and
forth between the Sun and Amigas, even though some of the early
development enviroments for the Amigas were based on the Sun computers
(I had the fun of having to cross-compile on the IBM PC for my early
Amiga code...not fun at all). I assume GNU C is available now on the
Amiga, so compatibility is probably no longer a problem (I don't
have an Amiga anymore).

  -Todd Burkey    "A member of STdNET-The ST developers' Network"
   trb@stag.UUCP  "UUMAIL: Rain or snow, your mail beats you home :-)"