Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!landon
From: landon@Apple.COM (Landon Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: Problem with AMAC
Message-ID: <39276@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 7 Mar 90 18:02:45 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 62

> Has anyone else noticed that AMAC really begs for a hard drive? My guess
> has always been that Old Atari Eng. had a hard disk in development and
> AMAC's flavor (ever try and use it on a floppy, single-den no RAMdisk?
> It was all there was for a looooonnnngggg time) came from the fact that
> it was used in-house.

No.  Actually we used Data General MV/8000 ("Eclipse") minis, and ran AMAC
as a cross assembler.  Pretty fast turnaround, except for the 9600 baud
downloads.  At night, turning a 16K game around took about five minutes.
During the day ... forget it.

[I once tried to use AMAC on a 32K Atari 400 with a single 810 ... and went
back to using the Assembler/Editor cartridge.  Whoof!]

I wrote twenty or thirty thousand lines of AMAC before moving on to more
powerful and more obscure assemblers, and never ran into any serious
problems.  But it is likely that the in-house version of AMAC had some bug
fixes that did not make it to customers.  The Atari consumer engineering
department was like that -- basically clueless as far as customer support
was concerned.


One of the better (faster) development systems I've ever used was a two
machine setup that Jack Palevich and I whipped up one summer:

	Development 800			Target 400/800 (slave)

	+-----------------------+	+---------------+
	| Axlon RAMDisk		|	| Debugger or	|
	| SynAssembler		|	|  emulator	|
	|  + screen editor	|	|		|
	|			|	|		|
	| X: device driver =============> X: slave ROM	|
	+-----------------------+	+---------------+	

The two 800s communicated with a two-wire or ten-wire cable hooked to both
systems' joystick ports.  The protocol automatically adjusted for the number
of wires present -- downloads were faster with more.


We used the Synapse assembler because it was fast, and we'd written a simple
Emacs-style screen editor so we didn't have to deal with line numbers.  It's
amazing what you can put up with (no macros, no operators other than '+' and
'-') for the sake of speed.

The SynAssembler could direct the object code to any file, so by resetting
the target system, and then assembling to the 'file' X:, the code was
automatically downloaded and run.  We got "one-button" five or ten second
turnaround time, and the development system never, ever crashed.



This was in 1983.  A year ago I dragged all my 8-bit equipment out of the
closet and tried to make it work.  The RAMDisk was dead, the 810 wouldn't
read anything, and the screen was too small.  But it was fun while it
lasted.
-- 

-----------------------------------------  "Mmmph!  Urghurmph!  Grugmph!"
Landon Dyer, Apple Computer, Inc.          "What's he trying to say?"
Development Systems Group (MPW / DSG)      "I dunno -- someone shoved a
NOT THE VIEWS OF APPLE COMPUTER              lawyer in his mouth."