Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!bellcore!tness7!ninja!sys1!hal6000!trsvax!johnm
From: johnm@trsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: About Atari's, Mac's, and IBM's
Message-ID: <226500010@trsvax>
Date: 15 Apr 88 17:44:00 GMT
References: <5419@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Lines: 43
Nf-ID: #R:ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU:5419:trsvax:226500010:000:1896
Nf-From: trsvax.UUCP!johnm    Apr 15 12:44:00 1988


>  Now I am finally looking at Ataris, but I have some questions
>that I hope you can answer:
>what is the processor?
The Motorola 68000.  The same processor used in the Commodore Amiga and the 
Apple Macintosh.  (Comparable to the speed of an Intel 80286, which means
you would have to buy an IBM AT clone to have the same power.)

>What is in the attachment that makes it a mac?
The attachment that "makes it a mac" is called Magic Sac and it was created
by David Small (who sometimes posts here to the net).

You have to buy a set of Macintosh ROMs from someone who does Mac upgrades from
the old 64K ROMs (the kind you would want) to the newer ones.  They will have
some available that they can sell you to put in it or you can go to mail order
to get some.

Because they both use the same hardware and you've got the ROMs with the code
for Quickdraw (a misnomer if ever there was one) and other Mac routines its not
too hard for the cartridge to handle the rest.

>How well does it emulate IBMs?
According to my friends, "Excellently!"  I cannot judge because I do not have
PC Ditto.

>Does it communicate through the SCSI interface of the mac?
Not to my knowledge.  What is it you want to communicate?

>How upgradable is it?
Be more specific...

You can add a variety of memory boards, battery supported clocks, hard disks,
video and audio digitizers, and all of the usual stuff.  Then there are the 
more esoteric items like the accelorator board (not yet release) which will 
increase the speed of ALL programs 45 to 85% or the liquid crystal 3d glasses.

>What is the maximum memory capacity?
Memory upgrade boards are available that can take a 1040ST (with one meg of ram)
to 4.5 meg (if you can afford what memory chips cost nowadays :-).

>Can it use a Paged Memory Managment Unit?
You mean like swapping memory out to disk?  No, there is no micro with that
facility that I know of.