Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fernwood!apple!well!dsmall
From: dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Spectre and other Mac emulators
Message-ID: <14802@well.UUCP>
Date: 3 Dec 89 09:39:42 GMT
References: <6078@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Reply-To: dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 50


The referenced note contains several suggestions to Spectre GCR.


1. On Multifinder reliability, we have just recently (since releasing 2.0/)
discovered that Multifinder is reading from location 0. This causes havoc with
its memory mangler; it means a dangling pointer (address = 0 ). Once we
fixed that, Multifinder grew rock-solid; we ran it at Comdex for five days
straight, and could only crash it with a specifically non-MF friendly DA.

	This is the same bug that crashed Microsoft Word 3.02, which now
does "Page Preview" properly and doesn't run out of memory. I've chased it
for a year and half now; it's good to win at last.

2. Shutdown should work; if not, we broke it between beta and release.
Restart can't work, as it executes a RESET instruction which clobbers the ST
hardware. However, a fix for that is in the works for the 2.5 release (along
with the multifinder/word 3.02 fix).

3. I agree, we should let you format Spectre disks from inside Spectre. We
didn't only because of space reasons; getting 832K mode up, which is the
tightest memory squeeze, with GCR inside was very very hard. For instance, we
had to delete all Translator One support code, and that didn't help enough.
We hope to do this, however.

4. Macintosh true SCSI support is very tricky. While we're researching it,
no promises there. There are timing and emulation issues that resemble
Vietnam.

5. Sound improvements. We're already working on true 60 hz sound, so the pitch
is correct. We're also working on ST-E DMA sound, which will give sound with
little to no slowdown (!). System 6.02 and above changed the ground rules for
sound, but we hope to have that working soon; it's a matter of figuring out
why sound works on a real Plus, and not on a Spectre -- a comparison of
traces, really.

6. The GTS-100 drive we bought just for this is currently in with a major
drive guru being prodded; we hope he can come up with a fix. We'll let you
know
wehwhen we know something.

The current 2.5 version, unreleased, also has an online configuration page
(press HELP and it pops up; press function keys, and various options toggle),
and many other goodiesgoing into it. Doug Wheeler is doing an outstanding
job hacking on it, and is even (*shudder*) cleaning up my code.

	Basically, it sounds like we're in agreement about where Spectre
should go in the next few months. Hope you like 2.5, when we release it.

	-- thanks, Dave Small / Gadgets