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From: rb@ccivax.UUCP (rex ballard)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: Re: Atari ST Hard Disks (And other expansion options?)
Message-ID: <409@ccivax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Feb-86 21:32:19 EST
Article-I.D.: ccivax.409
Posted: Mon Feb 17 21:32:19 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Feb-86 07:44:28 EST
References: <4961@alice.uUCp> <509@kontron.UUCP>
Reply-To: rb@ccivax.UUCP (Rex Ballard)
Organization: CCI Telephony Systems Group,  Rochester NY
Lines: 51

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).