Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!netsys!scooter!neoucom!wtm
From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Emulators
Summary: Atari PC Transporter
Message-ID: <1367@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 88 19:51:57 GMT
References: <389@ga.ecn.purdue.edu> <4959@cbmvax.UUCP>
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 36


 I believe (one of) the IBM emulator(s) for the Atari ST is called "PC
Transporter".  I think there might be more than one IBM emulator
packages.  The guy that lives across the street from me has an ST,
and I've seen him using PC transporter.  It really is much better
than Transformer for the Amiga, the which I use.  I had trouble
running the PC Magazine PC Labs Benchmark disk test under
Transformer, while PC Transporter breezed through it.

One thing that makes life a bit simpler on the Atari side of life
is that the disks are 720K just like IBM, even when the Atari is
running TOS.  In fact many TOS system calls are exact analogs of
MSDOS INT21 calls.  Only minimal work is needed to convert from DOS
to TOS.  Trapping the direct writes to IBM-specific chips that
aren't in the Atari is the hard part.

Actually, the magic sac Macintosh emulator would have been tougher
to do, since the Atari disks do not have electronics to write in
GCR format.  I haven't seen magic sac, so I don't know if it can
read mac disks .. it seems like it would be fairly hard to do,
given the hardware on the ST.  In some ways the Mac  emulator would
be easier, as the instructions are native 68K and don't have to be
run as p-code.  Also the mac display isn't all that different from
the ST's monochrome bitmapped display.

I do believe that if somebody really wanted to get serious about
writing a PC emualtor for the Amiga that a pretty decent job could
be done.  Transformer doens't really seem like it ever got real
far beyond a beta release.  It would be neat to be able to have a
way to multitask Transformer under Amigados.  It seems like it is
plausible that one could provie multiple 640K MSDOS windows.  Even
Windows 386 can't do that, as it has a 390K root segment that is
always resident in the lower 640K of memory; that sort of crimps
the style with things like 1-2-3.

--Bill