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From: grunau@husc2.UUCP (grunau)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Re: Lotsa Questions About 1040's
Message-ID: <999@husc2.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Oct-86 14:03:55 EST
Article-I.D.: husc2.999
Posted: Wed Oct 29 14:03:55 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 29-Oct-86 22:21:51 EST
References: <8610290658.AA09337@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: grunau@husc2.UUCP (justin grunau)
Organization: Harvard University Science Center
Lines: 50


First, about the IBM emulator:  there are currently only two that I am aware of
(I would like to know what this ANTIC one is supposed to be).  That is, the
software emulation by Paradox, and the hardware one, as yet unreleased, by
Atari.

(a) Paradox:  obviously, software emulation is slow.  However, it SHOULD be
possible to get absolutely everything to work right, if you think of everything
people will try to do.  The programmer who wrote the emulator claims it will
run everything, no exceptions, including the famous benchmark, Microsoft's
flight-simulator.  He says it is about 70% of the speed of an XT.  He says he
has it running on his ST with the PC files in a partition of his hard disk (!),
that he has compiled and assembled a lot of stuff on it, using PC-DOS compilers
and assemblers, and that the only place where it is really slow is in doing
direct writes to the screen, since those have to be patched.  Importantly, 
such direct writes are SLOWEST in text mode:  graphics are much faster!  This
is because of course text writes simply involve poking an ASCII value into the
screen memory, which of course does nothing on the ST (you have to find the
bitmap of the character at that ASCII address in the font, and then plot that).

He insists, though it is a mystery to me how it can be true, that you can only
run his emulator from one of the 5.25" drives they sell:  NOT from any other
5.25" drive (i.e. you cannot for instance put the emulator startup on your
hard disk:  you MUST have the floppy to boot from).  Everything else CAN go
on your hard drive, as I said above.  I don't know how a floppy can detect
what drive it is running on, frankly.  He says they have a year warranty on
the floppy drives, and mail-order they sell for under $200, which is good,
assuming they are good drives, which the warranty would imply.  The emulation
software itself sells mail-order for about $40.

(b) the ATARI emulator has been demoed right and left, and some people claim
to have SEEN it run the flight simulator at a 30% speedup over the XT.  Those
"in the know" say it has been about 95% compatible at past demoes.  The
emulator was supposed to be released in September.  Then it was pushed back
till after Christmas;  now they are saying maybe not until Jan.  The inference
to be drawn from this is that if it was 95% compatible when demoed in Sept.,
they can only be holding it up in order to make it 99.9% compatible.  In
theory, it should be possible to make it as compatible as any clone.  No
one at Atari is willing to talk about it, nor can anyone find out whether it
will come with a 5.25" drive.  So that's a big unknown.

Secondly:  modems.  The Avatex has two versions out:  the 1200 and the 1200HC.
They both do 300/1200 baud, and both are Hayes compatible, with the former hav-
ing an almost complete subset (lacking, prominently, the hangup command that
would make it possible (a) to run a BBS, or (b) to dial up your computer from
a remote site and then not leave your telephone tied up and impossible to
phone again);  the latter is 100% compatible.  Mail-order, it is easy to
get the former for about $80 and the latter about $130, w/o cable.  Good
prices!  I have not heard anything bad about them (nor anything spectacularly
good).