🚀 go-pugleaf

> Anyone had experience with the Haba hard disks?  Are they more
> reliable than their C compiler?  Any other hard disks for the ST?

Yes, the 20MB hard disk from ATARI for developers. It upgrades the
ST to a realy useful tool. The mechanical design is slightly poor
(it comes in a 12" long housing, cable connector on the back, but 
the cable to hook it to the 'keyboard' is just 10" long) Inside
there is a converter from ATARI hdisk interface (sort of sasi)
to a full SASI with adaptec controller and seagate 212 harddisk.

They add the installable hard disk driver and on the hard disk
(already formated) comes a test program which reads from a file
data to be flushed on the screen (digitized from a camera in B/W)
The speed is impressing ~4 pictures/second. ( the public domain
ramdisk driver was even slower <3 p/s)

Now that Atari's on-line, I have a few (loaded) questions:

Will Atari be releasing an SCSI expansion option for the ST (Giving us
more and immediate expansion options including laser printers, shared
disk drives, CD-ROMs, WORMs, plotters, free networking, ethernet...)?

Is the 8 "slot" expansion 8 SCSI ports (giving 64 possible devices),
1 SCSI "circuit" with 8 connectors, or 8 "Proprietary DMA (yecch)" ports?

Will/Do the Atari hard disks have SCSI in/out ports for daisy chaining
devices?

What kind of "Boot" is required for the SCSI (or SASI) port?

Will there be any sort of internal RAM expansion pins (molex type?)
on the 1040 or Rev B or C 520 machines?

Are the CPU's socketed on the new machines?

Will TOS in ROM support a 68010?

VDI and AES are re-entrant right?  What about BIOS and XBIOS?

Any plans on adding full pre-emptive multi-tasking (running N applications
at once so that Paint can print while the user Draws another document)?

Any effort being made to keep software products from "stepping on each other"?

Are 'hooks' available for 1 meg chip expansion (18 pin sockets, sips...)?

Any plans for a real MMU replacement for the memory controller chip?

Which of these are reserved for the TT machines?

When are the TT machines coming?

Is high res 70hz really non-interlaced?  If so, why jump to 70hz (and
eat bus bandwidth)?  It's a beautiful display, so it doesn't really matter
whether it is or not, but I have a Ball monitor that only goes up to 21Khz
horizontal, can it be used?.

By the way, just looked at the 'ST Internals' manual from Abacus, the
improvements of TOS over CP/M are great, especially the 'C' compatibility.
Ya Done Gud :-)

These have been hot issues on the net for some time now, and it would
be nice to get some official answers.

Also, thanks for making TOS in ROM a bit "flexible", in case multi-tasking,
better version "patches", or new features become available, it appears
to be a good compromise (Get almost all the RAM, and upgrade flexibility).

In article <409@ccivax.UUCP> rb@ccivax.UUCP (Rex Ballard) writes:
>
>VDI and AES are re-entrant right?  What about BIOS and XBIOS?

VDI and AES are reentrant, wrong. We at DRI are currently rewriting both
to be reentrant and multi-tasking; whether or not Atari picks this up
is up to them. Look for a Multi-tasking GEM sometime this year. But bug
Atari to make sure they buy it from us!


-- 


Bruce Holloway
Digital Research, Inc.
60 Garden Court
Monterey, CA  93942

....!ucbvax!hplabs!amdahl!drivax!holloway
(I'm not THAT Bruce Holloway, I'm the other one.)