[Coco] OT: Atari ST Firmware (Was: Re: DriveWire printing options )

Joel Ewy jcewy at swbell.net
Sat Dec 26 10:44:54 EST 2009


Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 26 December 2009, Joel Ewy wrote:
>   
>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>>     
>>> On Friday 25 December 2009, Joel Ewy wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> ...
>>>>> ...
>>>>> ...So the only M$ authored software here is
>>>>> whatever may be in the roms of my coco's (several) or, slim chance at
>>>>> best, in the roms of an atari ST I fumbled into possession of at a
>>>>> cocofest (one of Ron's up in PA) quite a few years ago.
>>>>>           
>>>> I believe that the Atari ROMs were done by Digital Research.  So the
>>>> Atari's TOS is inspired by Digital Research's clone (DR-DOS) of
>>>> Microsoft's workalike (MS-DOS) of Digital Research's CP/M.  Or something
>>>> like that.
>>>>         
>>> I was under the impression that Jack Tramiel(sp?) wrote that dos cuz they
>>> called it Tramieldos or something similar.
>>>       
>> That may be.  I'm almost certain DR did the GEM GUI, but maybe Atari
>> wrote the rest...  I know that the floppy disk format is very similar to
>> a DOS FAT.
>>
>> JCE
>>
>>     
> I wasn't aware of that, never having gotten the one I got at the cocofest out 
> of the box as the crt in the 12 or 13" monitor took longer to warm up than it 
> got at the fest.
>
> Does anyone know what sort of monitor it needs?  If NTSC, I still have a 17" 
> with composite inputs.  vga or better, I have a 22" samsung tv that looks 
> very nice when driven by an old liinux box with a quite old nvidia tnt card 
> in it.
>
>   
The Internet says they want RGB monitors at NTSC sync rates, so whatever 
you are using with a CoCo 3 or an Amiga should work with the proper cable. 

I've always wanted to play with an ST, but though I've acquired an 
unmanageably large collection of antique computers, somehow the Atari 
stuff has not fallen into my hands.  OS-9 disk images can be found.  I 
tried them out on one of the emulators once, and they got tantalizingly 
close to booting before locking up.

JCE




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