Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!vanvleck!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!FSU.BITNET!PETCHER
From: PETCHER@FSU.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: mega woes, continued
Message-ID: <[gw.scri.fsu.edu].B16E2EA0.00914A12.PETCHER>
Date: 20 Jun 88 19:59:00 GMT
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Funny, my original letter (mega woes) of a few days ago got truncated.  Perhaps
some of you thought it didn't make sense the way it came out. Here is a
rendition of what I meant to say in total:

What appeared was:
>
>I am not having very good luck with Mega 2's so far.  Last December I purchased
>one, which was obviously buggy from day one.  Typically after the machine was
>                            .
>                            .
>     A story of two buggy megas out of four in our local Atari user group
>                            .
>                            .
>     ending with:
>same experience with the first machine we recieved. Both had hardware
>problems. And they were not purchased in the same store, but several hundred
>miles apart.

So I continue:

Now that I have recieved my replacement mega2 and have been working with it for
awhile, I have discovered that it also has problems.  For one, my disk drive
has the famed media change problem - whenever I take out a write enabled disk
and replace it with a second write enabled disk, the disk drive doesn't
recognize the media change!  This was reported previously on the net to be a
problem of a certain batch of Chinon drives used by third party vendors, but I
did not expect to find it in the 'off-the-shelf' mega! As it turns out, I may
also have other problems with the blitter (see, my letter on Uniterm vs. the
blitter).  Although the final analysis is not yet in, I have certainly had some
mysterious crashes lately with otherwise known to be stable programs. I run the
same configuration without problems on my 1040 at work and I know of others
running the same programs on megas without problem.  Since the mega is supposed
to be essentially just a 1040 with a little more memory and a blitter in a
different box it looks from my vantage point that Atari is going downhill (I am
a 3 year plus user of multiple ST machines with no hardware problems to date,
before the mega). Since the older machines seem to be more stable than the
newer, the main point is this:

           *** flame on ***

IF ATARI IS NOT ABLE TO PRODUCE STABLE HARDWARE, NO MATTER HOW THEY MARKET
THEIR EQUIPMENT THEY WILL NEVER MAKE IT IN THE BUSINESS MARKET.

           *** flame off ***

If I had had to depend on the mega for business I would have long ago gotten
rid of it and jumped ship to something more stable. Sometimes I think that the
instability of the machines is the reason that Atari doesn't market more
aggressively than they do.  After all, if businesses would have the experience
that I have had, Atari's reputation would not be helped to put it mildly.
Combine that with the recent discussion of marketing policies on the net (not
to mention the many TOS bugs) and Atari has a problem.  Why in our area, the
closest authorized dealer including servicing is more than 200 miles away. No
local dealer can meet Atari's requirements, although there are two or three
that would like to sell megas (and one actually does, on a trial basis).

Don't get me wrong.  I do like my Atari, and intend to do what it takes to get
a workable system.  It is still the best micro on the market for my purposes
(support in scientific research, writing, programming) and I wish Atari every
success in the business community.

Perhaps I am the victim of a wild fluctuation of statistics that occurred in
the vicinity of Tallahassee and my experience is far from usual.  I certainly
hope so for Atari's sake.

                                                     Don Petcher

E-mail:       PETCHER@FSU.BITNET, PETCHER@FSU.MFENET
U. S. mail:   Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
              The Florida State University
              Tallahassee, Florida 32312