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From: atwell@utah-cs.UUCP (Bart L. Atwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Testing GEMBOOT.PRG
Message-ID: <4514@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Apr-87 17:07:04 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.4514
Posted: Tue Apr 21 17:07:04 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Apr-87 05:39:57 EST
References: <8704162303.AA17594@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <617@elmgate.UUCP> <2047@cwruecmp.UUCP>
Reply-To: atwell@cs.utah.edu.UUCP (Bart L. Atwell)
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 33

In article <2047@cwruecmp.UUCP> bammi@cwruecmp.UUCP (Jwahar R. Bammi) writes:
>
>	Its taking all my will-power to resist the temptation to go ahead
>and put programs like GEMBOOT, Supra's Supboot with Auto Boot etc into
>my auto folder, instead of Atari's AHDI. I have been holding out
>saying to myself that very Atari will have their debugged AHDI with
>all of the above functionality, as they indicated over 7 MONTHS AGO!
>(i still have that article saved!)
>Neil, Landon, Alan, someone, will you please at least indicate when
>this is going to happen. Please could you also indicate when debugged
>versions Gdos, Gemdos etc can be expected. In the projects we do
>here we would really like to standardize on facilities provided by
>subsystems like Gdos, but with such poorly written versions, it is
>really difficult to do so, without using kludges that work around the
>poor implementation.

In the recent AtariFest in Salt Lake City, the official Atari Rep I
talked to said that the fixes to Gemdos would not be ready for another
*YEAR* and that the ROMS to be released with the blitter only add
blitter support and some minor fixes (like an underscore error fix).

Thus, even the MegaST's will have the same buggy OS.  Given that, I
certainly don't plan on doing a hardware "upgrade" nor do I plan to
suggest the Atari line to anyone else.  

I wonder when the folks at Atari will realize that all we really want is a 
machine that works.  

Bart

BTW, the same rep implied that with the patches to the 40 folder limit
that have recently appeared, Atari wasn't planning on releasing a fix.  Long
live GEMBOOT.