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From: rosenkra@hall.cray.com (Bill Rosenkranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ROM disassembly for TOS -- A suggestion.
Message-ID: <4709@hall.cray.com>
Date: 14 Sep 89 03:36:14 GMT
References: <8909091247.AA16274@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <9531@chinet.chi.il.us> <1640@ns.network.com> <4669@hall.cray.com> <1992@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Reply-To: rosenkra@hall.UUCP (Bill Rosenkranz)
Organization: Cray Research, Inc., Mendota Heights, MN
Lines: 38

In article <1992@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> gl8f@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
=Atari distributes source for the BIOS and XBIOS in the dev kit docs.

i know, i have it. it is commented but rather poorly organized and virtually
unreadable n-th generation copy. the comments are typical hacker "insider"
comments (like i know everything about the machine already...).

=From what they've said, they DON'T OWN the source to the VDI, AES, and
=GEMDOS. I have gathered this from comments made here and elsewhere.

i know they don't own AES/VDI (this is "GEM" from DRI) but i thought
GEMDOS might be at least part atari. the original dev kit docs contained
dri cp/m-68k docs for most of the gemdos (hence its great similarity to
ms-dos, another successor). it mostly calls bios stuff, doesn't it?

=They have been fixing bugs by decompiling pieces of it. [If I'm wrong,
=someone please correct me...]

this is interesting...atari has to fix s/w the same way we do...hmmmm...:^)


=So, that's the big problem. Perhaps.

perhaps...

but what stops me from pointing my disassembler at the ROM (FC0000 or some
such) and crank away for 192k? i don't get comments and i get lots of
illegal instructions (where imbedded data are), but i get the code. anyone
can do this and many HAVE. the only thing is i and a zillion other people
just had to waste 3 zillion hours better spent on writing applications
to help sell computers to make atari stockholders more money to...

=------
=Greg Lindahl
=gl8f@virginia.edu                                             I'm not the NRA.

-bill
rosenkra@hall.cray.com