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From: filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: atari
Message-ID: <71.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Date: 27 Oct 89 15:24:44 GMT
References: <2458@nigel.udel.EDU>
Organization: R Pentomino
Lines: 32
X-Claimer: I >am< R Pentomino!

In article <2458@nigel.udel.EDU> C05089@AKRONVM.BITNET (don) writes:
>atari is messed up and should not be down loaded!
>the file some how was messed up before i sent it out!
Well... it wasn't exactly messed up, you just used a dumb uuencode program.
The uuencode you used uses the space character for the 6-bit value "0".
Somewhere along the way, one of the systems transmitting the program chopped
off trailing blanks.  uudecode on the Amiga is apparently smart enough to
interpolate the missing characters; UNIX uudecode isn't.  I programmatically
modified the file on my UNIX host, adding spaces to lines to make them all
the same length.  I was able to uudecode, download, unwarp, and boot the
results.  Unfortunately it wouldn't do anything useful with the TOS 1.0
single-sided boot disk I fed it.  So: IS this a real emulator, or is it just
an elaborate hoax?  Have you actually run it and gotten TOS to boot?

Amiga systems I tried it on were: A1000 with 2.5MB, A500 with 1MB and fatter
Agnus, A2000 with 3MB and fatter Agnus.  In all cases the program got to the
point where it said "Wait for the drive to chatter and the screen to clear,
then insert a bootable ST disk".  At that point the screen glitched randomly
with messed-up sprites (as you can see if you adjust your screen too far to
the left and run a program that uses sprites).  When I inserted the TOS disk
it made booting noises for about 8 tracks, "chattered" the drive, and
repeated.

Has >ANYONE< had any luck with this?  From Don's upload or any other source?
Maybe "atari is messed up" means that it was bad before uuencode made it
worse?  30K (warped) seems suspiciously small for something that's supposed
to trick TOS into running on Amiga hardware ... especially when there are
several standard AmigaDOS files on the disk taking up part of that space.

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