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From: mwm@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike  Meyer, My watch has windows)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k.pc
Subject: Re: Tiny Giant vs. PT 68K-2
Message-ID: <8710121939.AA16501@violet.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 15:39:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: violet.8710121939.AA16501
Posted: Mon Oct 12 15:39:55 1987
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>> I've written and talked to the two companies (Hawthorne and Peripheral
>> Tech.) about their respective offerings because I want a computer which
>> will do REAL Arrays without the funny segmentation thing.  My conclusion

That's basically my reason for dealing with 68K boxes. But I wound up
going a different route - the "pre-packaged for the consumer" 68k. I'm
going to put the list out again, with the Amiga and the Atari ST
added.The Amiga will be the A500.  Places where it differs from the
other two will be pointed out. I'm an Amiga fan, so the ST information
is liable to be sparse, and may be wrong. It's being included for
completeness; I hope some ST fan will re-issue the list with more
complete/correct information. Adding the Mac would be a good thing,
too.

	<mike


PROCESSOR/SPEED
	TG (aka Tiny Giant): 68000 8MHz
	PT (aka Radio Electronics PT 68K-2) 68000 8,10,12,16 MHz (how much do
you want to pay?)
	Amiga (A500) 68000 7.14MHz, 68010 works as a dropin.
	Atari (st*)  68000 8 MHz

BOARD SIZE
	TG: Fits on top of a 5.25 floppy disk drive
	PT: Fits in a Baby PC-AT case
	Amiga: Comes with keyboard in C-64 like case. The A[12]000
come in an IBM-PC like box.
	Atari: Comes with keyboard in a C-64 like case.

TOTAL MEMORY SPACE ON BOARD
	TG: 512K of 64Kx4 DRAM no info on waits, uses Fujitsu (?) DRAM
controller
	PT: 1024K of 256K DRAM no waits at 10MHz (150ns) uses discrete
propriatory design controller
	Amiga: 512K, no waits (the A1000 is 256K)
	Atari: 512K, 1024K (how much do you want to pay?), no info on waits

DEVICE COMPLEMENT
	TG: Floppy Disk controller, 2 serial, parallel, timer
	PT: Floppy Disk COntroller, 4 serial, 2 parallel, timer, battery backed
clock, 4k battery backed SRAM.
	Amiga: floppy disk controller, 1 serial, 1 parallel.
	Atari: SCSI, floppy disk controller, 1 serial, 1 parallel, MIDI

EXPANSION INTERFACE
	TG: Brings all the 68000 pins to a header for piggy back boards
	PT: has 6 PC-XT compatible slots on motherboard.  Doesn't support
memory in them but does support Herc graphics card and PC keyboard if
present on bootup otherwise uses one of the serial ports.  Hard disk
(Winchester) controllers will fit there too and be recognized by the OS.
	Amiga: Brings all the 68000 pins to a slot on the side, plus
some extra board signals. There is a standard for a slotted bus to
hang off of that expansion; either backplanes or single devices are
available. The A2000 has slots built in, plus IBM-PC slots that
require a "bridge" card to use. The bridge card also provides an
intel processor, and IBM-PC clone hardware on board. Cards in the
IBM-PC slots are useable from the 68K side of the world. The A2000
also has slots for a coprocessor and a "video processor".
	ST: none (?)

MEMORY MAP
	TG: Sparce device decoding - each device takes up lots of locations (as
far as I can tell w/o a schematic.)  They do publish their map in some
of their docs and it says things like (not a quote) "serial controller -
FD0000 - FDFFFF"
	PT: Less sparse but leaves a 11 MB contiguous area for memory expansion
without any explicit way to put memory there.  Lots of address space for
PC type peripherals.
	Amiga: Expansion devices are expected to autoconfig. They
should occupy memory space that is a power of 2, and be able to be
aligned on any even multiple of their size, with 4 & 8 meg boards
exempt from the latter.
	ST: No expansion possible (?)

MEMORY EXPANSION
	TG: Possible (Hawthorne referred to a 2MB piggy back board) by
attaching to the 68000 signals on the expansion connector
	PT: Possible but not trivial.  Pasipheral Tech said that somebody was
working on a daughter board for the 68000 and more memory.  You can't
use the PC expansion slots for mem. expansion even though 2Meg of 68K
address space is reserved for "PC address space slots" (WHY?)
	Amiga: 512K to connector on the motherboard (256K on the
A1000) (on the A500, this also has a battery-backed clock), 8 Meg of
autoconfig ram, and 2 meg of unused space that third party people have
ram boards to fit in.
	ST: none provided by Atari, various hacks to put memory in
the box are available from third party.

OPERATING SYSTEM
	TG: K-OS1 (say "Chaos" One - Joe Bartel of Hawthorne Tech is
responsible for the pronounciation) has an assembler, source for the OS,
and a compiler for their FORTH like language.  Not an extensive
utilities set.  But does read and write MS-DOS (tr Microsoft) diskettes
as it's normal format.
	PT: This is where the PT board really shines.  Their board will support
SK-DOS - a  single tasking/single user OS with LOTS of utilities.   Not
MS-DOS (tr) format but comes with utilities to read/write them.
Cache/RamDisk, full screen editor, Small C.  In addition the board can
be ordered with OS-9 for the 68K.  I don't know much about this system
($500) but it comes with a REAL C compiler.   I'm not sure but it might
be multi tasking/user. (?)  Get a copy of the 68K Micro Journal for more
info. 
	Amiga: unamed thing consisting of the Amiga Exec and AmigaDOS,
which is part of Tripos ported to the Amiga. Multi-tasking (but *not*
multi-user) message-passing os. Windowing, etc. Lots of full-screen
editors in the PD, C compilers available, Forth, FORTRAN, Pascal,
Modula-II, and more available.
	Atari: GEM - a Digital Research windowing system, on TOS - a
CP/M-like OS. Much of the software available for the Amiga is
available for the ST (or vice versa). OS/9 is also available.

BUCKS:
	TG: $395 for 128K RAM system with O.S. (K-OS1)
	PT: $600 for 1 meg board full up (fully populated) and OS (SK-DOS).
$200 for bare board and startup kit.
	Amiga: $600 for the A500; $1500 for the A2000; a television
can be used for display.
	ST: $400 for the ST512, which is complete