Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SPARTA.COM!steveg
From: steveg@SPARTA.COM (Steve Goldstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: What an Atarian is; Business users and the ST
Message-ID: <8904071554.AA03835@Fourier.sparta.com>
Date: 7 Apr 89 15:54:50 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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I fall into the hacker/hobbyist category of ST user, as it was mentioned that
most of us seem to be.  I've had my 1040 for a little over a year now.  I've got a Supra 30MB hard drive, both monitors, and the SPECTRE 128 among other things.

Here are a few comments/answers/questions to current discussion topics that I 
have not seen addressed:

Re: ANTIC - the initials stood for Another Television Interface Chip

Re: Business users and the ST - How important is parity RAM to business users?
           the ST has no parity, so if RAM starts to go bad, you may have a
           corrupted spreadsheet or database before you find out about your
           memory.  Does the Mac have parity?  I would think anyone using their
           computer for accounting/bidding etc would insist upon parity.

Re: My current project
    I'm about to try and port an application I wrote for work (using Turbo
    Pascal on an AT clone w/VGA graphics) to the ST using Prospero Pascal.
    Most of the code is fairly standard, however there is quite a bit of 
    graphic specific code as well.  In particular, I'm doing a lot of 
    pixel oriented operations.  In looking thru my GEM docs, I find a get-pixel
    routine, but no put-pixel (the closest I can find is a put-marker operation
    with a marker type as point).  I'd like to have a GEM interface to this 
    program, but I fear I will kill my graphics speed by going thru the VDI.
    How safe is it to mix line-a calls with GEM?  What I guess I'm really trying
    to say in all this rambling, is: What's the best/fastest way to get a 
    pixel from the screen, change its color based on it's old color, and put
    it back?  Any help/comments would be appreciated.

            -- Steve Goldstein  <steveg@saic.com>