Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!chinet!saj
From: saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ROM disassembly for TOS 1.4
Summary: Yeah, 5 cheers for Atari developer support.  But still....
Message-ID: <9496@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 5 Sep 89 04:22:19 GMT
References: <9401@chinet.chi.il.us> <1666@atari.UUCP> <1677@atari.UUCP>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago, Ill.
Lines: 35

In article <1677@atari.UUCP>, kbad@atari.UUCP (Ken Badertscher) writes:
>   Finally, if you have a specific question about something that isn't
> covered to your satisfaction in the developer documentation, please call
> or write to Atari developer support.  They bust their butts answering
> developer questions all the time.
>
Having asked for ridiculous favors and kinds of help from Atari developer
support (and having been taken care of effectively and politely), I'll
second and more Ken's praise.  As far as one-to-one help goes, the support
staff is wonderful.
    However.....they can't help me with problems I don't understand well 
enough to explain.  One specific example (taken care of in TOS 1.4, but
this was a year ago) happened while I was adapting Steve Grimm's uupc
distribution to Mark Williams C.  I couldn't use (or even understand) his
code to get the old RS232 port settings using Rsconf().  I would have had
a hard time explaining to a support person that some public domain code 
used undocumented features in a way I didn't understand.  Solution: read the
ROM disassembly.  I'm still kinda shaky on VBL queue routines and interrupt
handlers (in principle, I understand, but..): there are examples in the ROM
disassembly.  I have some ideas for a product that would depend critically on
a CD-ROM drive being able to read non-High Sierra formats.  Can Atari's?  I
don't know.  I don't understand CD ROM well enough to ask the right questions,
but given code, I could tell how much was controlled in software, how much
in hardware.
    I'm not asking for beautiful; and definitely: what Atari hasn't promised
will stay the same will definitely change (may even change without any change
in version numbers).  But the more specifics there are about how TOS works,
the better we can use it.  And frankly, I'd be glad of an official,
self-consistent disassembly WITHOUT comments, if that was possible.  Again,
it seems to have worked for the PC (although IBM did make it beautiful).
    And please don't interpret anything I say as remotely anti-Atari.  I just
got a good strong dose of PC and MAC, and it reminded me why I like my ST so
much.  Maybe the BEST, maybe not, but powerful and friendly to BOTH users and
programmers.                      Steve J.