Welcome to the Atari Spectre 128 !
[This is the text of the original Gadgets by Small newsletter, released September, 1988. A second newsletter is in the works at the moment. If some of the information is a bit out of date, that's okay; it still serves as a good introduction to the Spectre.
-- Thanks, Dave Small 1/88 ]
Welcome to the Spectre 128!
Yes, it's done, and yes, it's available now. It's the Spectre 128. It's the fastest, most compatible Macintosh emulator available today, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Welcome to Gadgets by Small, Inc!
And since we're introducing our first product, we thought we'd introduce ourselves. Gadgets By Small is a Colorado corporation. It's President is Sandy Small; it's chief bottle-washer is Dave Small, who's writing this newsletter, too. Add to the mix Eric (6) , Jennifer (5), and James Small (5months old now), and you've got the makings of, err, chaos. Anyway. Dave and Sandy Small are longtime Atarians (going back to 1981) who've decided it's a good idea to give ST owners access to the all the Macintosh software available today.
My first try at this was the Magic Sac, released through Data Pacific in September, 1986. Now, it's two years later, and Data Pacific and I have gone our separate ways (as of March 1988). I've got two years of experience with Mac programs, and now I've come up with some completely new programming which lets you use the 128K ROMs in your Atari ST. This product, the Spectre 128, makes your Atari into a MacPlus*... except that it's 20% faster, and has a 30% bigger screen than a Mac!
Since I've got all that experience, you could say that the Spectre 128 starts out at version 7.00; you can get all the improvements that have gone into Magic Sac versions 1 - 6 for the past two years (they are all in the Spectre) plus all the new things Magic Sac doesn't have!
Gadgets By Small has a few other products in development, too, scheduled to come out late this year. I can't talk about them yet, but I will in future newsletters.
Just to let you know that we do have a good track record, Sandy and I have done some other products -- the Integrater*, which let Corvus / Axlon Ramdisk owners become 100% compatible with the Atari 8-bit, and the L.E. Systems* disk drive, the fastest floppy drive ever released for the 8-bit. (For quite some time L.E. Systems drives were used to mass duplicate disks by the leading 8-bit software firms, because they were so fast).
Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that the new Spectre 128 offers what we do best: compatibility and speed. We've always liked "pushing the envelope", and we intend to keep it up. (If you're looking for a hint about our new products, remember compatibility and speed). Our products have inspired many imitations, which is the best sign we know of that we're on the leading edge of the possible.
Sandy and I also write articles for several magazines, from our starting place, Creative Computing (may it rest in peace; it was a neat magazine) to ANALOG, START and Current Notes, these days. Thus you're going to find that our manuals (and newsletters!) are written for people, and that we try to have some fun with them. Life's too short to be boring, and who needs boring with HyperCard?
I'll leave off here; we've got lots to cover, and not too many pages to do it in. Welcome to the new company, the new Newsletter, and some neat new products!
What are the advantages/disadvantages of the Spectre 128?
I thought I'd take a minute, and tell you in plain English what the Spectre 128 will do for you -- and what it won't do. Then you can decide if it's for you. I'll go into a little detail, to make things clear, but I'll try to avoid technobabble, okay?
The Spectre has two big things going for it, and a host of minor ones. The big things: 128K ROM compatibility, and speed. Let's take compatibility first.
To talk about 128K compatibility, I have to tell you some history, about the 64K and 128K ROMs, so you understand why the 128K ROMs are so important.
The 64K ROMs
As you may know, there's already two Macintosh emulators on the market. One is the Magic Sac, one is the Aladin (from Germany). I wrote the Magic Sac. Now both of them are good in what they'll do, but they're getting obsolete; they're based on the Apple 64K ROMs.
ROMs? "ROM" means "Read Only Memory"; it's a pre-programmed memory chip, much like the ones used in Atari game cartridges. The 64K refers to the size of the ROM, in this case, 64,000 bytes long.
Apple uses ROMs to store the critical, inner guts of the Macintosh programming. The ROMs handle stuff like screen drawing, icons, the operating system, and whatnot. Really, the ROMs are all that's special about the Mac; move the ROMs to the ST, and the Mac's functionality moves with it (as we've proven).
The first version of the Macintosh (1984) contained the 64K ROMs. Since the ROMs were expensive to make, Apple crammed code into the ROMs in every way possible. It was a miracle of software engineering. But they sacrificed nonessentials -- error checking, a good serial driver, and so forth. And there were lots of bugs in the 64K ROMs.
Apple then started releasing new Systems software, part of which contained patches for the bugs in the ROMs. Then there were patches to the patches. By the time Finder 5.3 had come around, there were so many patches it was getting ridiculous, and hard for Apple to maintain.
The 128K ROMs
Later, Apple released the 128K ROMs, which were twice as big as the 64K ROMs. Since they now had more room to work with, they included lots of good stuff, like error checking, a good serial driver, faster drawing routines, and lots of stuff that used to be read off disk all the time (which slowed the system down), like the Chicago font.
These 128K ROMs were so much better than the 64K ROMs that they became the default standard. They were included on the Mac Plus, and older Macs could be refitted with them, becoming 512KE machines. After Finder 5.3, Apple gave up and dropped support (all the patches) for the 64K ROMs. This is why Magic Sac/Aladin don't run with anything past Finder 5.4, which was released in 1986.
For a while, software developers tried to keep compatibility with the 64K ROMs, since there were a lot of 64K ROM Macs out there. But it was a losing battle. Even such giants as Ready Set Go!* had bugs in the 64K version, but worked okay in the 128K version.
Then, the Mac Plus sold and sold, making the 128K ROMs the majority of ROMs out there. Machines with 64K ROMs were retrofitted with 128K ROMs. And one by one, the software developers dropped any pretense of trying to support the older, buggier 64K ROMs. Such programs as HyperCard, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, and Cricket Draw, which are at the forefront of the Mac's success, all assume you've got 128K ROMs, and won't even try to run with 64K ROMs.
Even the new MacPaint 2.0 and MacWrite 5.0, from Claris, require the 128K ROMs. That ought to tell you something about Apple's attitude towards the 64K's.
Thus, the first thing you get with the Spectre 128, and the most important, is 128K ROM compatibility. We run all those 128K programs. We keep our customer data in HyperCard on the Atari ST -- that's how reliable and crash-free Spectre is!
You also get future compatibility. When new programs come out, there's a darn good chance they'll run on Spectre 128, since it's 128K ROM compatible. There is less and less chance new programs will run on MagicSac, with its obsolete 64K ROMs.
HyperCard
It's hard to separate truth from hype in HyperCard. Mac owners, to quote Sheldon Leemon, equate HyperCard with the discovery of fire in terms of importance. Every Mac magazine has had HyperCard on the cover; all of them now have monthly HyperCard columns. There are three separate HyperCard-only magazines; and "Stackware" (HyperCard software) is now a popular software category. There's been a lot of nonsense hype in all of this. And because of the hype, many people have dismissed Hypercard as "Hypecard", without giving it a close look.
But the fact is, HyperCard is a darn useful program, and one that can change how you use a computer. If you'll accept that it is just a tool, and is what you make of it, the potential uses are amazing. When I show people HyperCard, either their eyes glaze over, and they say "that's nice", or their eyes really light up, and they want to learn all about it. When I saw it in the January MacWorld (1988), my eyes lit up, and I saw all sorts of possibilities. It's one big reason I did the Spectre 128; I wanted HyperCard on a big screen with a fast hard disk.
So, I got our home Mac upgraded to a Mac Plus, so it could run HyperCard; it requires the 128K ROMs and 750K of RAM. (I choked a little bit at the cost.) Then, I showed HyperCard to my wife. Her eyes lit up: she has ideas for HyperCarding genealogy, for instance, and lots of other stuff.
HyperCard is not a database, or an address book, or an appointment calendar. Those are HyperCard "stacks" (programs), which are included with HyperCard as examples of what you can do. HyperCard is a programming tool, with a built-in language called HyperTalk*; it's an exceptionally easy to use language to build Mac programs. And HyperCard can be programmed without even writing a line of HyperTalk, if you like; just by pointing and clicking, you can build perfectly good programs.
Remember the first time you tried a painting program, how intuitive it seemed? HyperCard is like that in a programming language. And it does things that amaze me, speaking as a programmer.
Example time. Let's say you're building up a mailing list for the Spectre 128. You want a way to sort it alphabetically, so you can print it out sorted by last name. (If this example sounds true to life, it is.) So, you go find a "SORT" button in another Hypercard program. (This button, when clicked on, sorts a stack alphabetically by last name.) You COPY the SORT button to the clipboard (just like copying clip-art to the clipboard). Then, you PASTE the SORT button into your own program.
The SORT button pastes in, all right -- and so does all its functionality. So when you press that SORT button in your new mailing list program, your stack sorts. If you're a programmer, think for a moment of the implications of this.
Some HyperCard wizards I know of have over a thousand buttons, stored with all their functionality, in their library. This gives them incredible programming power.
You can edit and customize any HyperCard program, and borrow tools, such as buttons, from them.
It took Sandy a week, starting from no knowledge of HyperCard, to write a functional and useful mailing list / customer database program. We use it for our company's mailing list and customer database. And, she can extend it, if she needs to, very easily; adding a new field for a FAX #, for instance, took about five minutes.
Look, writing Mac programs used to be hard. The Mac has been called "the most difficult to program personal computer" with good reason. It takes a year of pure learning just to get up to speed on the "Toolbox", ROMs, the way the Mac does things, and whatnot. Then, you have to program in "C" or "Pascal" to get performance, and those take quite some learning, too.
Compare a year of programming to COPYing and PASTEing a SORT button, and you'll see why HyperCard has such momentum.
HyperCard has been accurately called the "Basic for the Macintosh". It's a language that non-computer wizards can use to build Mac applications.
With Spectre 128, you can use HyperCard on the ST. You can download the hundreds of stacks available, and run them. There's everything from databases to phone logs to accounting to games. You can modify them however you like. And you're going to find that with Spectre, you can keep the HyperCard toolkit on the screen at all times, a trick you can't do withthe Mac.
You probably won't think it's the same as the discovery of fire. But if you've ever wanted to write a program, or set up a database, you'll probably agree that it's darn useful.
Speed
The Spectre 128 is fast. Very, very fast.
All of the numbers I'll give you as speed benchmarks have been independently arrived at; I'm not just hyping my own product here. And it's not the sort of speed that often shows up in benchmarks, that a user doesn't really notice or care about. It's useful speed, stuff you'll notice the first time you use Spectre.
Screen operations are four times faster than other Mac emulators. This means screen redraws and the like are much quicker. Furthermore, there's a "zoom box" that expands a window to fill the whole screen, or shrinks it back down to its original size (much like the ST). If you're curious, this is all pretty much Apple's doing -- optimizations in the 128K ROMs.
I took my time and optimized the Spectre for speed. I spent quite a few hours tuning the Spectre so that the disk operations run at top speed.
Hard disk operations are up to ten times faster. For instance, duplicating a 500K file on the Magic Sac took two minutes, 29 seconds. It takes eight seconds flat on the Spectre. Starting the system into Mac mode takes nine seconds, and that's into a HFS volume; those of you with Magic Sacs are used to more like thirty seconds. That's a speed difference you're going to notice right away.
Floppy disk operations average out to be three times faster than MagicSac. (Floppy read isn't that much faster; it was at the maximum possible limit in Magic Sac. But floppy write is ten times faster. So it averages out to about 3 X, with the Mac's operating system overhead).
I realize that the claims seem a little wild. So, in the first version of this newsletter, I explained exactly how all this was done, in great technical detail, so you could see for yourself why it was reasonable that things had sped up so much. Alas, the first version of this newsletter was 16 pages long. I don't want to bother you with our problems, but each 4 pages copied and sent out costs us about $200. Thus, the tech notes had to go; it's been moved to the Spectre manual.
A brief statement of how I did it was this: I turned loose the ST hardware to do its absolute best, and made sure nothing interfered with it. The ST has some problems, admittedly; but raw CPU speed has never been one of them. Also, it helped that Dan Moore works with me; Dan and I have lots of experience speeding up the ST. We did the Twister* disk formatter for the ST, which doubled the ST's disk drive speed, as well as Meg-a-Minute Backup*, which is the fastest backup ever done for the ST. We applied that experience to the Spectre.
So, if you're tired of the slow speed of Magic Sac, check out the Spectre; you'll never sit there waiting for the disk drive again.
The Serial (Modem) Drivers
Next, the serial driver. The Magic Sac wasn't very good at modem programs; only a few worked. This is because on the 64K ROMs, there were really two serial drivers, the low-level "get&put" a character to the modem chip handlers. The one in ROM had big problems; the one on disk worked much better, but was only used if specifically called up. The more functional one, which was loaded off disk, was never fixed for Magic Sac, and any program that used it, like SmartCom, or Red Ryder, or MacTerminal, crashed.
On the 128K ROMs, Apple included the good serial driver only in ROM, and it's all fixed for the Spectre 128. Thus you can run all those modem programs you've wanted to. The telecomm portion of Microsoft Works operates now; so does Red Ryder, and so forth. Many other programs that crashed in quirky ways because of the serial chip have also stopped crashing.
HFS Support
The Magic Sac sort of supported HFS, which is the current Macintosh disk layout, through a kludge known as "Hard Disk 20". As the soul who had to make Hard Disk 20 work on the Magic Sac, I'll tell you that I heartily hated it. Hard Disk 20 was full of genuinely weird bugs that caused problems far down the road (usually untraceable), required a small "MFS boot partition" to use an HFS partition, and lots of other mickey-mouse stuff. Installing an HFS partition the first time was an incredibly complicated process; ask anyone who's done it. I recall devoting most of a newsletter to the process when I was with Data Pacific.
You can get rid of ALL that nonsense now. The 128K ROMs have HFS built into them! They can directly boot up HFS floppies. You don't need any MFS boot partitions anymore.
Disks Are Compatible
All your old Magic Sac format floppies and hard disks will work fine with Spectre; I've kept the Spectre compatible. There are plans for a new, higher speed format for HFS floppies, but that's not done yet.
Hard Disk Surprises
Dan Moore is doing a few favors for me on the hard disk drivers. You can now have up to 12 Spectre partitions on your hard disks, not the four you were stuck with before. And each partition can be up to 32 megabytes long, not 16 as before; you'll have to format using Supra's 3.20 (or later) formatter, that will let you go past 16 Mbytes. The adventurous can tweak the partition tables to 32 megabytes by hand right now, but this is only something to do if you really know what you're doing; it's a painful experience to zap a whole hard disk full of stuff.
Translator Compatible
Lots of people ask if the Spectre is Translator compatible. Yes, it is; the Translator works just as well as ever on the Spectre.
Things You've Seen Before
As usual, the screen is 30% bigger than a Mac, and the CPU is 20% faster than a Mac Plus. The ST I'm writing this on is visibly faster than the Mac Plus I have in the next room.
I write a lot, so I tend to base comparisons on things related to writing. And I'll tell you, you haven't lived until you've laid out a newsletter on the ST's big screen, with a fast CPU and fast hard drive. No more scrolling around to find out how things look. Less redraw time with the high speed. That's why this newsletter was laid out with Ready Set Go!, on the Spectre128, with a 20 meg hard disk, and printed on an Apple LaserWriter.
Oh, yes, I did it under Finder 6.0 / System 4.2. I did mention that Spectre's compatible with every Finder and System, including the latest, didn't I? The Magic Sac stopped at Finder 5.3, which is a couple of years old now.
MultiFinder
Apple's released a neat new Finder called MultiFinder. It allows you tohave a number of different programs loaded in memory, all at once, just a mouse click away from executing.
MultiFinder runs on a 4-megabyte ST under Spectre 128. However, it's not very stable yet; if you're interested in the details, it's because MultiFinder disables my "zerostore handler" -- that's the code I did for Magic Sac 4.32 that finally started curing the crash problems when Mac programs do illegal things. Thus, MultiFinder only works with well-behaved programsat the moment..
This will change in Version 2; there's just not time to get it thoroughly beta-tested before the Glendale release.
In my testing, I've loaded eight Mac programs, had them all running at the same time, and still had 1.5 megabytes of free memory to use ... that's a lot of fun!
Support
If you get the Spectre, sooner or later you're going to have a question about it.
Support is increasingly becoming the issue when buying software. If you can't figure something out, can you get help? One of the reasons WordPerfect* took over the IBM word processing market was superb technical support.
We're particularly strong on support. We've been offering the best support you can find for the last two years, as thousands of Magic Sac users know. That's not going to change with the Spectre 128.
As Magic Sac users migrate to Spectre, support will move with them.
Right now, you can find support for the Spectre on BIX, Compuserve, Delphi, GEnie, and Usenet networks, which many people have access to. (Generally, it's in the same place as the Magic Sac support; we're trying to make the upgrade as easy and logical as possible for you.) By the way, you'll also find many, many other Magic Sac users out there, and usually all it takes to get your question answered is to look through previously answered questions! And they're nice to beginners; everyone remembers when they were Magic Sac beginners, and we're all starting out anew with the Spectre 128.
You will also find nice public domain libraries, hints, and other good stuff online. It's an excellent idea to get a modem and check into this; online users get good things faster than anyone else.
As for program bugs, well, we're not perfect. The Spectre will undoubtedly have bugs; if we said anything else, you'd know we were kidding you. What we do is fix those bugs as quickly as anyone finds them. We've been known to fix bugs in the Magic Sac, and upload a new version of it for your use, within 8 hours of the bug report! We'll be happy to carry that tradition on with the Spectre.
Supporting customers is our lifeblood, and we know it. Support means people saying that Gadgets backed them up when they had a problem. It adds up to word-of-mouth advertising. Since we're a small company, and can't afford a deluge of ads and press releases, it's in our best interests to support you to the best of our ability.
But in truth, it's something we enjoy doing; every time we bring up a new Mac program on the ST, that's the first time it's ever been done -- and I love to "push the envelope". A case could be made that I did the Magic Sac because I was tired of people telling me it was impossible.
And I've made many friends on the online networks; that's important to this hacker!
Spectre Version 2.00
Incidentally, Spectre version 2.00 is being worked on right now. (Spectre version 1.0 is pretty much "frozen" now, while we test it, so you get the most tested, reliable version. The Beta testers will have hammered on it for a month before you see it, so there should be very few problems left).
2.00 will give you more neat stuff, that I'll tell you more about next newsletter. If you can't wait, I'm working on sound support with Dan's help (I need a very tight interrupt handler, and we're playing "Weird Ways To Do It In Less Cycles"; I'm adding a way to accelerate floppy drives ANOTHER 50%, called Sector Predictive Reading (it'll probably make a good START article since the technique could also work in ST mode ); I'm working on the Atari laser printer, MultiFinder, and of course, my hidden dedication page.
Don't miss the hidden dedication page in version 1.00!
Personal note: After discovering I was getting a little burned out on computers, I started spending a day each week just having fun with them. It helped a lot. Some of the stuff you'll see on the Spectre, as well as that dedication page, are the result of my fun days.
The Beta Testers
When you use the Spectre, you're probably going to notice that things work. No surprising little crashes, no problems. What problems there are, you'll know about from the documentation, so you can avoid them. The Spectre 1.00 is far more solid than Magic Sac 1.00 was, putting it mildly -- I've got two years of experience doing this, and I know what to look for. Again, you could say the first Spectre is really version 7, since it starts where Magic Sac version 6 left off.
A lot of this stability is due to the Beta Test team. These are people, usually people who own both Macs and STs, who help me out by testing the Spectre 128 software before public release. When they find problems in a program, they report it to me; I go see what's wrong, and fix it.
I don't possibly have the time to run nearly a thousand Mac commercial and PD programs, and test them, but between the Beta testers, it gets done. Thus, the application you want to use has probably already been checked out. If it's on the Spectre Compatibility List, it's definitely checked out.
We have a compatibility list that the Beta testers put out, of programs that work or don't work. Sometimes only one minor section of a program fails (such as choosing "Appletalk" under Chooser); if this is the case, we'll document a workaround. The Spectre 128 isn't a perfect emulation, and can never be; while it takes some doing, it is possible to write a program that crashes the Spectre 128 and still works on a Mac. But the compatibility is so high anymore that the "doesn't work" list is confined exclusively to programs that not only make mistakes, but make them so badly that they're usually unstable on a real Mac, too.
One way to say it is that the Spectre 128 is more compatible than the MacII. It runs more Mac software.
The Beta testers do this as volunteer work; while they do get a free Spectre, given the hundreds of hours they've put in, that's pretty slim pay.
I felt it only right to acknowledge their names on the back cover of the Spectre, but there wasn't room for the full names, so here they are. Thanks again, people.
The Spectre 128 Beta Testers
Name
GEnie Signon Mark Booth
STACE Jeff Greenblatt
JNG Dr. Bruce Rogovin
B.ROGOVIN Norman Walker
SACTESTER Douglas Wheeler
D.N.WHEELER
Without these people, the Spectre 128 wouldn't be half as good as it is. If you're ever on Genie, you might drop them a note and thank them for all the help they've given this project.
Other Good People
There's lots more to this business than writing 68000 assembler. Sandy deserves a lot of credit. In addition to keeping track of three howling dervishes -- excuse me, children -- Sandy designed the Spectre circuit board, the packaging, got the parts, and lots more; she's President of Gadgets by Small, Inc. Dan Moore helped me out with the "C" code that starts this thing up. My friend John DeMar (as in ST-Talk Professional; it's great! <-- unsolicited endorsement) gave me access to cartridge cases. Bruce Rogovin called me more than a few times this summer, urging me to do the 128K ROMs. Mark Booth, Darlah Hudson, and Sandy Wilson sponsored the GEnie conference that really convinced me that people wanted this product. Dave Groves and Ron Luks up on Compuserve helped me get the word out for this newsletter. Mark Booth's run the GEnie area for a long time. And there's many, many other people who have contributed to this effort. I just wrote the code... the credit is shared by many people.
The 256K ROMS
Some of you may know that Apple has released new ROMs in the Mac SE and Mac II, called the "256K ROMs". Does this mean the 128's will one day be obsolete? It's a reasonable question; we feel the answer is "no".
The largest installed base of Macs is the Mac Plus, and those all have 128K ROMs in them. You can't upgrade a Plus to an SE, either: this is important, because the Plus is the big installed base in the US. And most of the added capacity in the 256K ROMS is unused, anyway, in truth; 56K of it is used as a digitized "slide show" of the Mac SE's development team! (No kidding!). A bunch of the 256K ROM has to do with color for the Mac II and Mac-II specific stuff, such as NuBus "slot "device drivers, that has absolutely no use on the ST.
Hence, don't be worried; for the machine we're on, with the 68000 processor, the 128K ROMs will be the standard of compatibility for a long time indeed.
Some people ask if we'll support color with the 256K ROMs (since they handle the Mac II's color). I really don't think so, since the memory mapping is fully different, and the color mode is supposedly handled by 68020-only instructions in the processor.
Incidentally, the Spectre 128 will work just fine on a 68010 or 68020 machine. Apple's 128K ROMs were clearly coded with this in mind; for those of you technically minded, they took special care of stack frames and the like to ensure compatibility. If/when Atari introduces a 68020 or 68030 box, you can bet I'll make it compatible, too. Let's hope for a large screen, 68030 machine...
MIDI Support?
The ST is doing quite well as a MIDI machine. So we get the question all the time: Will the Spectre 128 support MIDI?
Well, no. I wish we could. If it was just a problem of getting bytes to and from the MIDI port, I could do it. But the Mac MIDI programs tie themselves into the Mac hardware extensively, using the "VIA" timer chip on the Mac to exactly time the rhythm of MIDI bytes going out. And there's no VIA chip on the ST to tie into!
Thus, to make Mac MIDI work, I'd have to rewrite the low level portions of each individual MIDI program, and I just can't do that. On the other hand, it might well be possible to persuade the Mac MIDI software manufacturers to include an ST low-level driver, to make their products fully Spectre compatible. This would open up a large marketplace for them at much lower cost than a full rewrite for the ST.
Weird coincidence department: the President of the largest Mac MIDI software developer is my former Patrol Leader in my Boy Scout troop. No, please don't say "It's a small world.".
Apple LaserWriter
First off, we support the Apple LaserWriter right now. As I said, I'm writing this newsletter on the Spectre under Ready Set Go, and printing it on the Apple LaserWriter.
It's not as easy as with the Mac; it's a two step process instead of a one step process. Basically, instead of sending directly to the LaserWriter, you instead create a disk file of the printout (in PostScript), then use any modem program to send that PostScript file into the LaserWriter. It's no big deal. Check out the Spectre manual for details.
I do hope to make it this back into a 1-step process in Spectre 2.0, but since we've got a viable workaround, I'm not too worried at the moment.
Atari's LaserPrinter
As for Atari's Laser Printer, well, that's a whole new ball game. Atari has been very helpful in getting me a laser printer to work with, and with software technical support for it. It won't work with Spectre 1.00; there isn't enough time for R&D before release 1.0. I envision three levels of support for the Atari printer:
- Screen Dumps (should be done pretty quickly),
- Quickdraw-level support (exactly like the Apple Laserwriter SC or the General Computer Personal Laser Printer),
- PostScript support (via the Imagen Postscript driver).
Those should be integrated into upcoming versions of the Spectre. So, don't "count out" the Atari laser printer!
While I have nothing at all against dynamite Atari desktop publishing programs, such as Publishing Partner or TimeWorks, they don't have the overall integration with other programs (via clipboard, etc.) that the Mac offers by its design, nor the sort of installed machine base that inspires huge, costly programming teams. Programs such as Adobe Illustrator or PageMaker are on the very edge of desktop publishing development. With Spectre 128, you'll have the option to use the best possible tool, be it an Atari or a Mac program.
When full laser printer support is in, the Spectre will form one very good desktop publishing system.
Accelerator Boards & Full Page Displays
Will I support possible 16 Mhz accelerator boards? Yes, as soon as I can get one; I think only a few timing loops will need to be "tweaked" to make it work. Will I support full page displays? Yes, as soon as I can get one; all I have to do is tell the Mac OS what size screen it's running on, and it will adjust fully automatically.
I can't purchase either one of them at the moment, though; they're not out.
If you're at all into full screen displays, you should buy the Mac program Stepping Out. It's a poor man's full page display. The screen becomes a "window" into a full screen page, that you can scroll as quickly as you can move the mouse; it is absolutely great for full page applications, such as Ready Set go! Highly recommended! (I'm using it now).
Another excellent resource that's not to be missed is The Macintosh Bible. It's available at local bookstores, and is crammed full of Mac information not to be found anywhere else -- stuff like recovering disks that have been damaged, and so forth. Excellent, excellent.
You Need 128K ROMS
As usual with Mac emulators, we do not supply the Apple ROMs that are needed to make the product work. This isn't anything new; this is necessary legal policy.
You'll have to get a set of Mac ROMS yourself. Fortunately, these are widely available from resellers of Mac equipment and the like. I'd suggest checking out Computer Shopper; last issue, I saw three sources of 128K ROMs. The price seems to vary, but is definitely higher than the 64K ROMs, be forewarned. It's a classic case of "you get what you pay for"; the people supplying the ROMS knows that the 128's are far better than the 64's.
We're Compatible with 64K ROMs
Want to upgrade to the 128K ROMs someday, but don't quite have the money for the ROMs yet? You'll be pleased to hear that the Spectre is fully 64K ROM compatible -- just plug 'em in and go. Of course, you won't get the neat features of the 128K ROMs, nor 128K program compatibility, but you will get some advantages of the Spectre: much higher speed and functionality. This is a pretty smooth upgrade path if you're on a tight budget.
Hence, with Spectre 128, you get BOTH 64K and 128K ROM compatibility, for only a slightly higher price.
The Magic Sac is NOT compatible with 128K ROMs, nor is it possible to make it compatible. You can't just plug the chips into a Magic Sac and go. It's an architecture problem.
Here's the story: The cartridge slot gives you access to 128K of memory space total; that's hardwired into the ST's MMU chip. On the Magic Sac, 64K is devoted to the ROMS, and 64K is devoted to the clock, for 128K total. Thus, there isn't room for 128K ROM chips to fit in! If there was 192K in the cartridge slot, yes, but there isn't, and it can't be put in there without some major butchery to the ST's circuit board.
The Spectre 128 features an advanced circuit board that devotes all 128K to the ROMs. We didn't skimp on quality, either. You get gold edge connectors that resist corrosion -- and cost us five times as much as the usual tin connectors. (Also, with tin connectors, you have to periodically clean the corrosion off; you won't need to do that with the Spectre.) You get high quality decoupling capacitors that aren't found on the Magic Sac, and were the cause of some Magic Sacs not working on certain ST's. We solder mask the boards to eliminate tiny solder shorts that cause flakey operation.
In short, we do things right, although it costs us more up front. The ST executes around a million instructions per second, and if only one in a million fails, the ST crashes; with a high speed bus like the 68000 offers, you've got to use quality parts. That way, the Spectre runs and runs and runs. It'll probably outlast your ST.
With the advent of the Mega ST's with built-in battery backed up clock, and with the ICD and Supra people offering automatic clocks on their SCSI hard disks, (not to mention the clock-ROM chip or the kit to alter your keyboard clock), we didn't feel a clock was necessary on the Spectre 128. Quite frankly, the clock we could afford to put on the board wouldn't have been very accurate in the first place; it wasn't that good on the Magic Sac, either. We decided to put the money towards quality, and not towards a clock.
Dealer Orders
We're interested in working with dealers; in the two years that Mac emulation has been possible on the ST, it's emerged as a strong sales feature for the machine. It's good to be able to offer a machine with ST, IBM, and Mac compatibility. Dealers often help us, by catching simple customer problems at the store, and we like to return the favor. Please call us at (303) 791-6098 for our dealer pricing.
Apple Hard Disk Compatibility
I thought I'd close off our first Gadgets newsletter by telling you that if you just make a SCSI compatible cable, the Spectre is fully compatible with Apple hard disks. That's how compatible the Spectre is! That's right; we specifically look for an Apple "signature" on the first sector of the hard disk, and if we find it, we set up the Spectre properly to work with it. You can mix and match ST hard disks with Apple drives as well; I use that combo on my development system.
I use Seagate ST-225 drives for transporting data; while they're not as fast as some, at 65 msec, they're rugged. I've broken many other hard disks, but never a 225. Anyway, I commonly plug in the drive to Sandy's Mac Plus, copy some files over, bring it back to my office, and plug it into my ST. Works great! Our customer list was moved to the ST that way.
Given the slow speed of the Translator, this is also an excellent way to read in a large quantity of Mac floppies to a hard drive -- just do it on aMac!
I recommend using a ruggedized drive so you can carry it around and not worry; also, it's a good idea to park the disk heads (use Shutdown on a Mac, and PARK on an ST) before moving it at all.
Well, thanks for reading, and we'll talk with you next newsletter -- or hope fully sooner!
-- Dave and Sandy Small
Spectre 128 $179.95 note: call for current shipping charges
from:
Gadgets by Small, Inc. 40 West Littleton Blvd, #210-211
Littleton, Colo 80120
Phone: (303) 791-6098
Phone Hours: 8:30-2:30 PM, Mountain Time. Monday-Friday
FAX: (303) 797-1488
All products marked with "*" are trademarks of their respective companies; the names are not intended to be used generically. Note this symbol doesn't translate properly from the original Mac document to this ST format.
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