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Spectre GCR Manual - Atari Documentation Archive

1. 74 a m Spectre Menus The original Mac was 128K big The Fat Mac followed it was 512K A 256K Mac was apparently planned by Apple but never released there s support for it built into the Mac software one of many surprises I had while doing this project Then we had the Mac Plus and Mac SE which have 1 megabyte expandable to 4 megabytes The Atari 520 in contrast has 512K the 1040 has 1 megabyte the Mega 2 has 2 megabytes and the Mega 4 has 4 megabytes The STE is expandable from 1 to 4 meg and the Stacy only has 1 meg for now Figure 6 You can pick sizes from 128K to nearly 4 meg from this menu de pending on the amount of memory available on your system Exceptions gt 832K isa special mode It s there really for the sole purpose of let ting people with 1 megabyte ST s run HyperCard which requires 750K or so of RAM to run and 800K to really do good stuff You should not use this mode if you don t have to This mode should really have been 768K getting it to work was a real nightmare But users needed the extra 64K 768 64 832 memo ry to hack on HyperCard We definitely had to make some compromis es to make it work 75 Far Spectre Menus U This mode forces color off and forces there to be no floppy disk cache The floppy cache speeds things up radically If you re running off floppies on a 1 meg machine such as the 1040 you would do better to use the 512K mode and a 320K cac
2. Macintosh Mac and HyperCard are trademarks of Apple Computer Inc Adobe Illustrator is a trademark of Adobe Systems Inc PageMaker is a trademark of Aldus Spectre 128 and Spectre GCR are trademarks of Gadgets by Small Inc 1040 ST Mega 2 Mega 4 and Stacy are trademarks of Atari Corp
3. While not everyone can afford a modem or the network costs 5 30 per hour each online member generally Knows nonmembers and talks with them Thus each online member contacts a few offline members as well AM this is viaa loose informal network I d supported Magic Sac via these networks for two years previous to the Spectre s release This was critical to the Magic Sac s success the first versions of Interlude Six the Magic Sac had bugs and as they were reported I would fix my software often posting the new version of software online so users could immediately download it In an industry where you re usualfy lucky to get a software company to acknowledge a bug much less fix it here I was immediately available could fix bugs and get new software back to you once within 8 hours In the process I got to Know many people answered a lot of questions and had a good time There s not a lot of ST users in Denver where I live but there s hundreds of people interested in Spectre just a phone call away on the various networks The user loyalty built up through this contact is why the Spectre exists the people on GEnie talked me into doing the product convinced me there was a market for it and helped me test it It s a whole new form of society If you haven t checked the networks out it s time you did An excellent Supra 2400 baud modem will set you back just 149 If you want practically insta
4. 128 128 Demonstrators carried signs Okay I didn t work ALL summer 1987 Introduction outside my house Mobs of howling computer groupics tore the clothes from my body and EDITOR AHEM Oh excuse me EDITOR Isn t there something that you re forgetting Oh yes Readers my EDITOR here is Sandy Small otherwise known as my wife Pleased to meet you She ll pop in from time to time with corrections and to keep me from getting carried away So back to the story I knew my opinion had been wrong People wanted the 128K ROMs They d had a taste of what the Mac could do now they wanted to shift into high gear The Mac people were abandoning the 64K ROMs in droves Starting in June 1988 I came out of retirement I ordered up a set of 128K ROMs started looking them over I dusted off my Neil Young album more on this later The late night sessions began anew And I started pushing the envelope of what could and couldn t be done once again After a lot of very difficult work I got a smiling Mac icon on the screen Now sure I could have just drawn it with Degas but NooOOOooo I had to do it the hard way Welcome to Macintosh came up the 128K ROMs started up And gradually things began to work The Desktop started working The mouse One very exciting night HyperCard started working MultiFinder came up one night and ran eight Mac programs at once Gradually the system began to get stable I tracked
5. 46 es m Mac Mode There s other tricky key combinations that will force an eject that I won t get into here See the Macintosh Bible or Cary Lu s book for them They re worth the money believe me When in Mac mode and the Mac wants to eject a floppy the Spectre software plots a blinking letter That blinking A or B won t go away until you do the eject You re stuck until you do it so you might as well get it over with remember you have to play disk eject mechanism for the Mac If it wants you to eject drive A a blinking A appears at the top of the screen If it wants you to eject drive B a blinking B appears at the top of the screen If the ST sees the eject it ll tell the Mac that the eject is donc and the A or B will quit blinking at you Blinking Blinking A means B means that you that you should eject should eject the disk in the disk in Drive A Drive B If the ST does not see the eject which happens mostly with write protected disks you ll have to notify the ST that you ejected the disk Press F1 to notify it you ejected the disk in drive A press F2 to notify it you ejected the disk in drive B If you re working with non write protected disks things will usually work fine you won t need F1 or F2 However if you write protect the disks you ll have trouble Why The ST rarely sees an eject or insert of a write protected disk because of the way
6. Tom Hudson s excellent painting program Remember when you had to select the specific printer driver for it to output your picturcs to the printer It s for the same reason printer manufacturers use different codes to send dots to the printer Apple has a dot standard that almost no one but Apple uses unless you translate it to something your printer understands your printer will just get confused Various non Apple people have written printer driver software because Mac owners also have other printers than ImageWriters and want to use them Names and addresses are in the Sources Appendix HP DeskJet Drivers One VERY popular printer these days is the amazing HP DeskJet and now the DeskJet Plus These give you true 300 dpi c g same as LaserWriter or SLM804 printing off an inkjet scheme at insanely low prices I can get a DeskJet for around 600 looking at the ads in Computer Shopper 21 FD Requirements ID Naturally we started getting questions on Which is the best printer driver for the DeskJet since many Spectre owners have one Our own Mark Booth Beta Tester began a seeming life long career testing various printer drivers for his DeskJet He learned a lot of stuff about how the Mac prints things how a font four times larger than the printed font has to be available to avoid jaggies to look the best speed compatibility and whatnot He gave us a running commentary on GEnie on what was the best
7. Interlude Seven school teacher He ended up order ing a cartridge chuckling the whole time It s been really different working in an office with three Kids around Two 6 7 are school age one 18 months learned to walk during the GCR development period They can be accurately de scribed as terrorists They don t mean badly I ve already related the story of Jenny 6 years and the Mayonnaise on the MacDisk Purely innocent Take Barb Barb used to be rather a computerphobe she d seen IBM 5 only and was properly in timidated by them One day Eric 7 years came hiking in turned on the Mac as she watched popped in the MacPaint disk labeled ERIC double clicked on MacPaint and started drawing He made a nice drawing pulled down PRINT and printed it off then over to the copier machine to make some copies Barb stuck her chin out de cided she d had enough of this intimidated by computers stuff and now is the proud owner of a MacPlus I hacked together She uses it about 7 9 hours a day She does not yet have a terminal in 111 Interlude Seven stalled in the ladies room Usually we lock up the office area so the Kids can t get in However there s always that one time you forget One day we came downstairs to find xeroxes of our weird cat PyeWackette all over the floor Prints of her her paws her belly her fur They re well modern art To this day Pye gets w
8. either For your own sakes don t copy the ROMs Use original Apple 17 fs Requirements u parts ONLY You need One set of 128K Mac Plus Apple Macintosh ROMs The part number varies depending on the revision of the ROMS According to Apple there are three versions I ve tested them and they all work the differences are in code that I don t even use with the Spectre So don t sweat it okay There is not going to be one whit of difference if you use the newest or oldest ROMs The sets I ve got here say 342 0341 C and 342 0342 B on them not to mention Copyright Apple 1983 1986 They Are Not Kidding people Apple s older ROMs the 64K version are numbered 342 0220 A and 342 0221 A Sometimes the A becomes B Again the version DOES NOT MATTER Just don t mix versions on the 64K ROMs or things get confused the software thinks you have a bad cartridge since it doesn t know about that mix Mixing versions on the 128 s doesn t matter if your set has one chip with a B and one with a C don t worry aboutit We left in 64K ROM compatibility strictly for people who want to upgrade to Spectre but can t afford both it and the 128K ROMs at the same moment so that people have the option to get by on 64K ROMs for a few weeks Since the entire point of Spectre 128 is the 128K ROMs very very few owners actually used 64K ROMs
9. ing system that does sound was switched off This caused a few com patibility problems some programs insisted on using it even though it was off and crashed such as World Builder Adventure Construction Set programs Starting in version 1 9F sound was allowed It s selected from the main Spectre menu page as of this writing you can select either Sound Off as with the original Spectro Sound at 11 khz or Sound at 22 khz If you want sound use the 11 khz mode the 22 khz mode is not yet tuned up properly and sounds like a cat being tortured The Mac s hardware generates sound automatically without the CPU having to fiddle with it as a spin off from the disk controller of all things The Atari hasn t got it so casy the CPU has to work itsclf silly to make MacSound Hence you re going to notice that when Mac Sounds are playing the system seems very slow that s because up to half of the CPU is generating sound leaving only half for you This slowdown only occurs during the time that sound is actually being played not all the timc You ve only enabled the possibility of sound happening from the Spectre menu page Generally this works okay For instance a system Beep slowing the system down doesn t matter at all It doesn t work out as well in games thatuse sound a lot especially high speed reflex type games one instant while sound is being played the game is very slow then it speeds back up Games like this ar
10. or hard disks The amount of forced disk swapping you ll do will soon drive you crazy It s that way on a single drive Mac too Why Usually when this happens the Mac is looking for something from the System file while running a program a font a resource or something else Say the program needs the Times font and doesn t have it on the current disk since it s stored in the System file Well the Mac OS will ask you to change disks to one that has the System Finder it ran first and thus the Times font on it for long enough to read in the Times font Then it ll switch back to the other disk to get on with the program 51 Mac Mode p Complicating all this is that Mac programs make lots of subrou tine calls to the operating system parts of which are in System as re sources and every one of those calls can require a disk change If you can possibly arrange to have your program and the System file on the same disk you won t have to switch disks much at all except possibly to save data As you will sce this is a real hot idea Unfortunately nowadays the System Finders and Mac programs are so big they won t fit on one disk A two drive system helps lots On a two disk drive system just boot off the System Finder disk in drive A and put your programs in drive B That way the System file is always handy for the Mac to use Another very good solution is to use a Ramdisk such as Ramstart copy the System and Finder
11. Before reporting errors make sure you have the latest version Disclaimer Gadgets by Small Inc and or Doug Wheeler cannot be held responsible for any loss of data through the use of this program Doug Wheeler c o Gadgets by Small DOUG W on GEnie 124 Where d the Name Spectre Come From hen I left Data Pacific in March 1988 word SY quickly spread that the Magic Sac was dead since I was so heavily associated with it Subsequent events proved in my opinion that this was true While Sandy and I were searching for a name for this new program I was writing we had the mental image of Mac emulation rising from the dead The thesaurus we consulted listed Spectre under that meaning along with ghost phantom vapor really names you want to use and we Liked it The 128 of course comes fromthe 128 ROMs The GCR comes from Group Interlude Eight Coded Recording which is the technical name for how the Mac does disks The Atari s normal mode is Modified Frequency Modulation also Known as MFM sometimes called MFM 106 The Rock Of Colorado EDITOR You re stretching Dave That s really stretching Long after we decided on the name we remembered Antic soft ware s Spectrum 512 a multi color painting program We re sorry if this caused any confusion but given how very different the functions of the products were and the different pronunciation we didn t thin
12. If not turn the power off briskly with a graceful downwards sweeping motion of the hand and pull the cartridge out and examine it Editor Don t panic we haven t lost a patient yet and we re not about to start now We value our customers too much The ST is pretty rugged In the history of the Magic Sac and Spectre an ST has never ever been killed by one of our cartridges Don t sweat it Getting It Going Even if the cartridge is a dead short circuit it takes time many seconds for enough heat to be generated to damage chips That s why you re watching the video the ST has to come up running for the video to go on If the ST doesn t run because of the cartridge shut it off take the cartridge out and find the problem the chips won t have time enough to hurt themselves and neither will your computer Common Problems If yourcartridge doesn t work right check for Chips in backwards Board in upside down You just lost me 10 Both of these probably will kill the Apple ROMs which is why I m warning you so many times Rare Board is inserted crooked The cartridge can be pushed backwards slightly and thus be inserted at a tilted angle This shorts the gold pins across a couple of connector pins internally Note Sometimes stuff gets piled up next to my ST on the left side It ends up getting pushed backwards pushes against the Spectre and swivels it in the car tridge socket deftly screwing
13. In fact with our first release 1 51 64K ROM support didn t work right and it took people a month to notice Apple Operating System Software System and Finder The System file contains the stuff which when combined with the Apple ROMS make the Mac go The fonts type faces like Ge sort of stuff are in System as well as the Desk Accessories nifty little utilities you can pull up mostanytime You re limited to 15 DA s but that limit can be stretched with various aftermarket utilities like Suitcase II or Font DA Juggler Plus ae m Requirements The Finder is the program that makes the Desktop user interface go It s a program like any other with the ability to copy files load them and execute them and so forth Don t worry if you don t see a file named Desktop on your disk though because it is never shown it s invisible TheSystem and Finder files are periodically revised by Apple adding new features fixing old bugs and adding new bugs I said I d be honest in here They should always be kept as a pair It s important If you mix and match you re going to have the weirdest crashes yet seen on a Spectre Spectre runs every System and Finder except the very first one ever made System 0 97 Finder 1 0 from way back in 1984 Big deal As I write this Finder 6 1 System 6 0 3 is more or less current This will change with time Apple keeps trying Naturally the System and Finder are COPYR
14. and then the program tries to store into where the Pointer points location 0 64 re m Mac Mode On the Mac this works by accident Location 0 is reserved by the 68000 for the powcr on condition stack pointer and really ought to be in ROM read only memory By an accident of the Mac s design location 0 ends up in RAM read write memory so the program doesn t crash instantly Usually however a crash is in the works down the road whatever function that Pointer was needed for just failed Typically an Address Error sometime later is the fallout froma Zero Store On the Atari any zero store causes a crash since writing into location zero tries to write into read only memory and causes a Bus Error Zap the ST dies It was depressing to find out how many Mac programs screwed up in this manner Probably a majority of Mac programs commercial and otherwise have this problem somewhere along the linc In Magic Sac 4 32 I included code that attempted very hard to ignore zero stores Since they re done in so many different ways Mac programmers being creative and all it took until version 5 9 to catch most of the zero stores out there Also there were three zerostores I could not help those caused by BTST BSET and BCLR 68000 instructions EDITOR Are you sure people want to know this Dave If a program docs something like this the zero store handler tries very hard to take care of it
15. big troubles This applies ultra especially to the HFS disk operating system which the Mac uses in all the newest System Finders Sometimes you lose whatever data you ve written since the last eject Sometimes you lose the disk This happens to real Macs all the time Let me quote from one ad Fifty percent of all Mac hard disks have some degree of directory damage When we get to the hard disk chapter you re going to see you have a big advantage over Mac owners You can force the directory to be updated and the disk to be cleaned by doing an eject to the hard disk Now it doesn t really eject the hard disk the platter doesn t come whizzing out of the hard disk drive across the room but the Mac OS does go clean up the hard disk 49 Mac Mode Ta Inserting a Disk When you turn on the ST you re given two disk icons for drive A and B immediately regardless of whether or not you have floppy drives hooked up or whether they have diskettes in them On the Mac it s a different world You only get a disk icon when you put a floppy disk into the drive There isn t the same A and B icons as in the ST rather the disk icon is named whatever the diskette is named Sometimoes it s easy to lose track of which disk is in what drive Eject however will always tell you with theblinking A or B When you start up the Mac you getone icon by default it s the one you started up with If you
16. for your own sake Now for some real fun look at pin 25 on standard 50 pin SCSI This is termination power and is the only odd numbered pin on the 50 pin connector that is not ground It sometimes supplies power for termination networks Adaptec 4000 controllers don t use it they supply their own OMTI RLL 3527 controllers have a switch to let you decide whether or not to use it and so on and so on depending on what SCSI device you hook on Next look at the Termination Resistor Pack situation 50 pin SCSI Allodd pins except 25 are ground 139 Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks Atari Computer DMA Port 19 pinconnecto 19 pin Atari cable f 19 pin comect or ACSI SCSI Interface Atari BMS ICD Supra Usually inside of disk case with drive amp controller 50 pin me SCSI cable ACSI cable Atari SCSI Typical Atari single drive comedor 20 pin cable aM Hard Disk Controller Adaptec 4000 ar 4070 50 pin SCSI IH cable comnectot Twin drive onc controller Atari drive 20 pin cable in L OA mer A be nies too ao pinca Omti 3527 or others cT SE Up to 8 SCSI Devices can be put on this SO pin cable LA 25 vin Api 50 pin true SCSI sable cqunecior 50 pin SCSI to Use Supra part or 25 pin SCSI adapter make own converter Typical Mac single drive there are no dual Mac drives on one controller
17. m or Alt M The last option is Quit You can also press q or Alt Q Options Menu Desk File RAICH i y Set Drives Set Options Write Boot Run Program Figure 18 gt Set Drives This allows you to select which drive will be designated as the ST format drive and which will be the Spectre or Mac format drive d or Alt D from the keyboard You can only use Mac format if you have a GCR To select the ST drive all you have to do is click on the appropriate drive A or B see Figure 19 To select a Spectre or Mac floppy drive again just click on A or B if you wish to usea hard drive partition select HD and then answer the questions Specifying the hard drive is a bit trickier as you need to fill in the blanks yourself The first bit of information you need to provide is the SCSI device Devices are numbered 0 7 and refer to the number of the hard drive 118 Transverter Controller if you only have one hard drive leave it set to 00 Next is the SCSI LUN logical unit these are also numbered 0 7 and refer to the number of the hard drive attached to the Controller you already specified again this will be 00 in most cases Desk File PIRTIN AIR JM KM LH ip SCSI Dev 08 B SCSI LUN 88 E ER EN EA LU Part 2 Figure 19 The last number is the partition number these are numbered 0 11 and correspond to the partitions on your hard drive These numbe
18. 114 128 Hard Disks 5 9 40 41 42 49 53 54 91 92 93 98 Automounting 79 Booting From 79 96 98 Formatting 81 83 96 98 SCSI 79 80 137 142 Hard Disk Tips 142 146 HFS 2 49 52 53 82 84 96 115 145 146 HP DeskJet 21 22 I ImageWriter 135 ImageWriter Driver Inserting Chips 31 21 101 103 106 107 23 104 106 155 Index J Jeffco Com Association 5 K Key Caps 55 58 L LaserWriter 23 L E Systems 4 Linefeed Conversions Luks Ron 5 115 117 M McGee Travis 5 MacBinary 115 116 120 122 Mac 512KE 133 Mac Format GCR 23 25 26 32 39 81 82 83 84 Mac Keys 54 56 Mac Plus 3 55 75 105 133 135 Mac Plus ROMs 17 18 Mac Mode 35 40 41 Mac ToolBox 64 66 Magic Sac 1 3 5 27 34 39 65 99 127 Memory Menu 74 76 MFS 39 52 53 82 84 85 108 115 119 122 Monitors Color 61 64 76 Monochrome 17 20 61 63 Moore Dan 5 12 145 Muller Dean 152 N Networks Bix 2 131 CompuServe 127 128 131 GEnie 2 3 5 22 59 99 115 127 128 131 Null Modem Cable 2 5 59 99 115 39 135 O 128K ROMs 152 3 4 13 17 18 53 144 Where to get them 129 Option Key 55 Orwell s Disk Monitor 55 56 133 P Parallel Port 24 101 102 Partitions 94 96 81 83 Pine Darlah 3 5 Printer Driver 17 21 24 102 105 129 130 Printer Interceptor Printer Menu 77 78 Printing 21 24 101 109 PostScript 23 108 109 Pushing the Envelope 7 9 106 107
19. Atari format whose data happens to look like what you d find ona Mac disk Mac format which is an Apple Macintosh format If you have a Spectre 128 you can only read Spectre format disks you can t read Mac format disks You have to use other means to get 25 a Requirements im stuff off of Mac disks and into your ST If you have a Spectre GCR you can read both Spectre and Mac format disks directly This means if you have a Spectre 128 you cannot start up the Spectre in Mac mode until you get a System Finder disk to Spectre format With the Spectre GCR you can start up directly off a Mac disk as long as it has System Finder on it ST and Macintosh Product Support We re just going to assume you know how to run the Mac the ST and the Mac program you want to run If not check out the various manuals I haven t possibly got room here to cover them except for the Spectre specific stuff Two good books for the Atari are The Atari ST Book by Ralph C Turner and Helpful Hints for the Atari ST or Mega User by Bill Skurski Enterprises The ABACUS books for the ST are OK butaren t that good for a beginner An excellent pair of Mac books are The Apple Macintosh Book by Cary Lu from Microsoft Press which is a fine starter s book and The Macintosh Bible by Dale Coleman and Arthur Naiman which is like every short cut and hint for the Mac ever found rolled into one book Both are incredibly good and highly
20. But that s how you learn If you don t get a reply from cither The Well or the Gadgets machine it s because the reply to you bounced back the mailers aren t very smart to use UNIX technical talk 127 Support 5 If we ve established a Gadgets online area on the system you dial into you probably will be able to find a topic that answers your questions up there and ready to look at from some previous user who asked the same question So take a moment and browse around looking at the questions This takes very little time and doesn t cost you an arm and a leg Generally we try to reply to email within 72 hours and if you post the question online usually some Spectre user will reply within 12 hours Not bad eh gt Fax us at 303 791 0253 We have a handy dandy little device that just loves to spit out paper We find this is the best way for us to support non online users as the questions and problems are written down Generally we just fax back the original with the questions answered so please leave space for writing gt You can call us on the phone This isn t much fun First it s a long distance call for you almost certainly Denver is not an oasis of Spectre users Second we may be in the middle of something in which case we can t come to the phone You have to understand that when we take one tech call we spend X minutes satisfying one person maybe when we put a fix or upgrade into
21. Disks If you don t have Automount selected on the Spectre Menu Page then you will need to manually mount you selected Hard Disks or partitions To do this just press F3 to mount the first one F4 for the second and so on until you ve mounted all the drives Also 53 Mac Mode you don t have to mount any of the drives when you re in Mac mode you can leave all or some unmounted As far as the Spectre is concerned Hard Disk ejects are treated the same as floppies except that you don t get told to remove them with a flashing C or D or whatever after you throw the icon in the trash The Mac doesn t insist on sccing the platter taken out It realizeseven a disk eject slave has limitations Enough about disks already Let s talk about something clse for a change Those Funny Mac Keys Check out a Mac keyboard sometime It s got letters and numbers arranged the usual ways But it has some strange keys too Caps Lock gt Cap sLo ck First the Mac has a CAPS LOCK key The Mac s CAPS LOCK physically locks down the first time you press it the second time you press it it unlocks This is a lot like many typewriter CAPS LOCK keys Of course the ST hasn t got a lock down CAPS LOCK so use it like you would in ST mode press once to CAPS LOCK press again to de CAPS LOCK gt Enter Next the Mac has an ENTER key On the ST you can find this key on the right side of the numeric keypad on the far rig
22. F3 or whatever and see if you don t get a list of files IF you do pick what you can grab it and save it elsewhere Often a hard disk that cannot display its wares to Finder s Desktop can still have them accessed in this way Needless to say this is a desperation move Once you ve gotten the data go reformat the drive using SPECTRE PRG Keep backups of your hard disks The only stable program I m aware of to do this is Meg a Minute Elite which Dan Moore and I wrote for START magazine Fall 1988 This produces an image of any partition that can later be restored Perhaps one of the commercial Macintosh backup programs will start working but they all seem to go straight to the SCSI and IWM disk chips to get maximum speed Don t hold your breath Backup one partition to another partition It takes hardly any time at all with Spectre speeds to move 5 10 megabytes of data if you ve got the space ICD ssuperb excellent FA ST tape backup works very well with the Spectre and whips through 8 megabytes per minute to or from Spectre partitions This is past cool into frigid I strongly recom mend it It is a bit pricey but look I ve checked out the cost of the com ponents inside that tape unit and ICD isn t making very much it s a high quality Teac tape unit If you arein Mac mode and it starts acting bonkers it usually cures itself when you recopy System Finder from a known good disk This usually is re
23. Marconi for inventing the radio was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 so the next time someonc tells you Marconi invented the radio tell em about the Spectre manual EDITOR WHAT Macintosh Filing System Hierarchical Filing System Ha ha I just shocked the editor into using italics MFS and HFS very briefly were two different file storage schemes Apple used famous for causing nightmares when you changed from onc to the other But the bad old days of worrying about them ended with the 128K ROMs you installed into the Spectre On 64K ROMS you had all sorts of headaches and had to know all about MFS and HFS In this manual I don t even nced to mention them because the 128K ROMs take care of all that nonsense by themselves Okay okay if you re into history the 64K ROMS only had MFS built into them this MFS is the low level way a disk is laid out and data stored HFS was Apple s new and much more efficient way of laying disks out which came built in with the 128K ROMs The 64K ROMS could only access HFS disks which to a Mac means any double sided disks through a horrid kludge called Hard Disk 20 which sort of installed HFS capability into a 64K ROM Mac EDITOR Sort of If you re upgrading from Magic Sac please forget everything you had to learn about MFS and HFS delete Hard Disk 20 although it is harmless with 128K ROMS installed and grin from ear to car you can now boot 800K HFS disks directly Hard
24. Now floppies rotate at 300 RPM which means each byte spins by the read write head within 32 millionths of a second of each other Thus each bit takes 4 millionths of a second What s unbelievable is that they re fairly reliable Now take the RPM up to 3600 RPM twelve times faster Instead of rubbing the head on the relatively flexible surface of the floppy disk let s fly the head over a rigid platter still coated with Live Rust though And let s put five million bytes per disk instead of a mere 400 000 forty million magnetic fields That s a hard disk If the head ever touches the disk platter you have what is Known as a head crash The sound of this will curdle your blood it sounds a lot like a cat being drawn and quartered And you can Kiss off the data on that hard disk To crash a hard disk merely lean back in your chair and gently kick the desk that your ST is 91 Interlude Five sitting on It doesn t take much more than a tap If you re lucky you lose merely the section of the disk where the head touched down if you re not you lose big time Possibly it has something to do with me I ve crashed probably ten hard disks in the last two years I ve crashed HP hard disks the most reliable hard disks in the industry I ve crashed Microscience Seagate and Tulin hard disks I m not really sure why In some cases it s been power problems lightning does wondrous things
25. ST only ALTERNATE is by the space bar Some even write nasty letters chiding me for not making the ALTERNATE key into COMMAND Oh well EDITOR You can t please all of the people all of the time There are some keys on the ST keyboards that aren t on the Mac keyboard For instance the ESC key You ll note when you press it nothing happens it s a ghost key the Mac has no use for so the Spectre doesn t pass it along Remember we re kidding the Mac OS into think ing it s running on a real Mac and we don t want to disillusion it disillusionment in a computer means a crash The four arrow keys correspond to the arrow keys on the Mac Plus keyboard Remember when the Mac first came out it had no arrow keys except on an optional numeric keypad The Mac Plus keyboard made them standard I don t think shifted arrow keys work yct I usc shift arrow for vari ous Spectre debug functions Orwell s Disk Monitor and High Speed Mode On Off which I ll go into in a minute The INSERT CLR HOME HELP and UNDO keys do nothing for the Mac The keypad keys pretty much do what you think they should do 55 Mac Mode a 9 makes a 9 for instance However they don t generate an ex tended Mac keypad 0 through 9 they make a regular plain ol 0 through 9 Apparently some Mac software cares so I ll probably up date this soon I recommend going to the Key Caps Desk Accessory and typing a few keys and pressing CONTROL a
26. To print get something ready to print a document drawing or whatever Hence you are in the program that generates whatever you want to print this is important Then select the Chooser or Choose 103 Printers and Spectre Printer Desk Accessory the name will vary depending on your System Finder version number A list of available drivers will appear click on the proper driver For instance to use an MX 80 driver click on MX 80 then Quit The Chooser dialogue will disappear Next you ll need to use Page Setup under the File menu to make sure your program knows the MX 80 s page size if you forget Page Setup you ll get screwy printouts typically too tall or too small Finally choose Print select the options you want and away you go You should know right up front that you ll be experimenting for awhile to find out the differences between the quality of print you can select which really is how many passes the printer makes per line vs specd of printout different printer drivers how tall the printed page is and so forth To get the best results with a printer you need the right size fonts Each kind of printer scems to require different proportioned fonts For example if you have a 9 pin printer Epson MX and your document is in 12 point you will also need 24 point in your System to get the best results If you havc a serial printer you can count on having to sct some switches inside it I ve always had t
27. Various incantations and prayers also didn t help it just plain died As it expires the Spectre gasps out the information that killed it in the form of LOTS of hexadecimal num bers Hexadecimals That s Base 16 counting It s real easy if you have 16 fingers It counts like this 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F then 10 1 12 Interpreting the Crash Page You re naturally a little curious what all these numbers are They re the Crash info given me by the 68000 as it died to let me do a postmortem analysis and find the problem Remember you only get this page if some pretty sophisticated retry code fails to restart the ST invisible to you It does this successfully dozens of times per Mac sessions it works darn well Bus Errors MOST crashes are bus errors This means the ST was told to read or write information somewhere that s a no no on the memory bus hence the name The pertinent information on bus errors is the bus cycle The bus cycle is where the transfer was tried from to and since that ad dress was the no no it thus tells us the problem If problem is Bus Error look at Bus Cycle If 00000000 00000007 it tried to write into location 0 Typical zerostore I couldn t catch it and save it either because it s an instruction that lies to the IR Instruction Register about what it was bit test bit save bit clear or because I haven t figured out someone cou
28. a copy of a file on the same diskette Select the file by clicking once on it then use Duplicate File under the File menu on the Desktop You ll get a new file named Copy Of whatever it was You can then rename it to whatever you want How Click on the name under the icon the name will highlight and the cursor will change to an I Beam Press backspace to delete the old name and typein a new one If all of this sounds like pretty wild territory it s time to get an introductory Mac book like Cary Lu s Macintosh Book and check it out Sometimes the Macintosh will need something off a diskette you ve taken out This happens a LOT on single drive systems where you booted with onc disk then ran a program off another disk It ll display a message asking you to switch disks and will eject the present one you ll sce the blinking A or B You have to take the disk out to satisfy the blinking A or B and press F1 F2 if the ST misses you taking out the disk Then you have to put in the disk the Mac is asking for and again press F1 F2 if the ST misses the disk insert Yes in some ways it s akin to being a slave to the computer Well I m sure that when you were growing up you never thought you d grow up to be a disk change mechanism so let s talk about something else One or Two Drive Floppy Systems If you have a single disk drive system you re quickly going to find out why Mac owners ran not walked to buy second disk drives
29. a new SPECTRE CMF file and copy it into your AUTO folder From here the manual will continue on to tell you things about running in Mac mode Until you re experienced a bit more in Mac operations some of it won t make sense for instance until you know what a Command key is you won t know why we made the ST s Control key be the Command key or what it does Then the manual will talk about the many options available from the Spectre s startup menu and how you can customize it to be the Mac you want the most Thus it s clearly time for an Interlude EDITOR Yeah 42 Interlude Three Jennifer and the Mac Disk gt ack when Jennifer ap lt gt our daughter was four years old she started wanting to do things for herself Everything From washing her own hair to choosing her clothes to whatever she wanted to do it Especially food making Sandy and I had gone to a Mac store to pick up a copy of the new MacWrite MacPaint disk We got it home and left it along with lots of other stuff on the Kitchen counter Jennifer came toddling into the Kitchen and decided to make herself a ham sandwich Out came the bread Out came the mayonnaise But no ham in the refrigerator So she used the disk instead Didn t taste so good so she put it down We discovered this to the tune of wailing and gnashing of teeth on our part several hours later when the hard disk burped and lost th
30. at full speed is like that Seeing HyperCard come up and fly is that feeling If you ve ever heard the sound of a well tuned high compression long overlap cam engine winding up or heard the clipped square wave sound of a guitar pushing an amplifier a little past its limits listen to Foreplay Long Time on Boston s first album then you know the sound that s in my mind every time I go through the enve lope in software That s why I do it It s just another form of art Welcome to my latest little hack It s called the Spectre GCR In a way it s four years of my life and I don t get too many four year timeframes in my whole life It is the best program I have ever written It is the fastest I have ever pushed a piece of computer hardware It is far and away the most compatible Mac emulator in existence in many ways you will notice it is faster than the Mac I very much appreciate you paying your money to sce it and use it that money allows me to feed my family and continue doing something I love to do I ve watched many friends who used to be independents go to work for big computer outfits They get paid a great deal more than I do But they don t seem to push the envelope much anymore they write things like text editing boxes or spelling checkers or whatnot True I could make a great deal more money than I make with Spectre if I was to work for let s say Apple but I ve only got this one shot at living and there
31. changes like due to a cosmic ray the computer Knows it s a lost cause and gives up This is the dreaded Parity Check fault on the IBM PC On the ST though we don t have parity bits and if the computer hits one of the bad data bits there s no way to tell And when your CPU tries to execute that instruction that s the ball game Think of it as Russian Roulette Computing If you live at 70 Denver s altitude as I do you can expect one cosmic ray memory hit per day lower altitudes have somewhat better shielding because of the atmosphere Thus when your computer flakes out loses your work or whatever it might not even be your computer s fault might just be acosmic ray Try to think of that cosmic ray traveling for possibly millions of years and millions of miles all to end up zapping some bits in your computer The philosophical implications are staggering the sort of thing I consider at three in the morning while writing computer manuals Or Just think the next time your system inexplicably crashes that you just might have caught a cosmic ray from Darth Vader s ship m Spectre Menus The Spectre Menus When you first double click on SPECTRE PRG you re taken to the Spectre main menus Through these menus you can do a varicty of things For people upgrading from Magic Sac all the functions that used to be handled by different files are handled within onc file SPEC
32. different types of keyboards for the Mac The first is US the other is International They print various keycaps on top of the keys for the different International keyboards French German UK and so forth 56 D Mac Mode Atari also makes two physically different types of keyboards the US and International typc Again Atari also prints different key caps on top of different keys for the International keyboard What I do in Spectre is determine which Atari machine US UK German etc you have at startup timc Then whenever you press a key I translate that key into what the Mac expects to get from the key board to make that key The idea is that you ll type the key as it appears on the label of the Atari keyboard and that kcy will appcar on the Spectre screen as though a Mac keyboard had pressed it This is hard in some places because for instance on a Mac key board a certain key is accessed by pressing it without the SHIFT key and the ST requires SHIFT down to access that key To handle this I sometimes press or un press the SHIFT key without telling you the uscr in order for the Mac to get the right keycode This press or un press of SHIFT only lasts as long as the key needs it to work right To sce this in action go to the Key Caps Desk Accessory and work your way through the various punctuation kcys You ll sometimes scc the SHIFT key being pressed or un pressed to make the Mac see the proper
33. disk file instead of the LaserWriter if you press Command K Control K in 108 ff Printers and Spectre Mac mode when you choose Print from the File menu Hold down Control K until you see Creating PostScript fileon Disk It won t take very long to save the file to disk The newly created file PostScriptO will usually show up in the same place as application or sometimes in your System Folder If you save several files the name will change each time PostScript1 PostScript2 etc Once you have the PostScript files on disk you need to copy them onto the MFS floppies you formatted earlier or onto your MFS hard disk partition Then eject your Spectre disks and return to Atari mode Either press Shift Help the reset button or flip the power switch Next you need to use Transverter to get the PostScript files from the MFS Spectre disks to ST disks that UltraScript can read Here is a quick overview for more detail see the Transverter chapter Run Transverter and set the from and to drives Since you re Transverting Mac to ST the from drive should be either a Mac floppy or MFS partition and the to drive should be an ST partition or floppy Select Mac gt ST from the File menu and transfer the file as TEXT Don t worry about adding linefeeds since it works either way and adding linefeeds takes longer to transvert When the file is done transverting save it then print it using UltraScri
34. down bug after bug pushing the limits of the system And then came the day when I couldn t find any more ways to crash it So then I put some serious effort in the disk drives I made them as fast as I could make them go I ve been coding disk drive software since 1982 when I did the software for the L E Systems disk drive for the 8 bit Atari 800 that was the fastest disk drive ever done for the 8 bit I went farther than even L E Systems I went to extremes on it I measured where the bottlenecks were Introduction and unrolled them I did completely new algorithms for the floppy disk write code and honestly that drove me up a wall debugging them was very difficult Finally they worked and it was worth it The results were pretty surprising Well letme tell you To copy a 500K file hard disk to hard disk Magic Sac 2 MINUTES Spectre 128 8 SECONDS First time I did that I swear I thought it was a mistake The file must not have copied I said to myself Then I started watching the disk drive lights and checked files and realized I was driving the ST hardware as fast as it could be driven It was no surprise things were so fast For all of its software problems the ST is one darn fast hardware design All it needed was someone to unleash what was already in silicon So passed my summer of 88 In July 1988 my wife Sandy decided to come out of retirement too She d gotten bored with co
35. driver out of the ones he d tested I do get the impression that there are several quality drivers around you just need to pick the one which suits you best Also someone uploaded a give away HP DeskJet driver to the GEnie network Mac area for essentially public use So overall it sounds to me like it s difficult to go wrong with an HP DeskJet and any of several different drivers So if you re looking for extremely high quality printing and don t need it to be superfast e g you make more newsletters than program printouts please check out the HP DeskJet and DeskJet Plus They are impressive printers indeed Atari Laser Printer No I m not kidding The prices on Laser Printers are falling so fast it s incredible you should seriously consider a Laser Printer as your next printer They are fast quict and the output is incredibly high quality The Atari laser unit sure beats the Okidata 84 I have which sounds like a B 52 landing on your head while printing Or a cricket with an amplifier WHEET WHEEET But I digress There s four flavors of Laser Printer to check out Apple s LaserWriter or LaserWriter II NT or NTX Don t even try with the LaserWriter II SC it can t work on the ST as it relies on the Apple implementation of SCSI and other weirdness Generic PostScript Printers basically anything that talks Postscript Atari s Laser Printer SLM804 at the moment Hewlet
36. for hard disks in D d other cases I come in in the morn ing the system won t start up and I get out my Hard Disk Toolkit and start looking Don t take your hard disk for granted The heads fly above the hard disk surface at a distance 1 20th the thickness of a human hair Be prepared at any point to lose those 20 40 60 or whatever megabytes of data Or as a friend has put it Youll find out how good your backups are when your hard disks crash 92 Hard Disks and Spectre Heavy Metal Rock And Roll Hard Disks and Spectre Easily the best peripheral to add to any ST is a hard disk It may not seem like it at first but floppy disks really slow you down while using the ST The ST admittedly drives floppies as quickly as they can be driven but still floppies are just plain slow Floppics cost you a few minutes here a few there and it all adds up to less time to use your ST and more time spent tapping your foot Floppies also cost you At 2 00 each on the average they add up after awhile Ever added up the cost of that shelf full of floppies just in media cost A 20 megabyte drive can be had for under 500 and that s a terrific deal In one step you ll gain great speed storage capability and stop wasting your time on floppies A hard disk will particularly help the Spectre because the Mac operating system hammers on the disk a great deal This is because Mac programs end up being w
37. format disks from the Spectre Menus under Floppy Disk You can choose either GCR or Spectre format You will see This is Not a Mac Disk if you put an ST GEM disk into the ST while in Mac mode Again choose Eject to exit safcly You should never try to read a Spectre format disk from GEM while in regular ST mode To do so will instantly hang the ST system you ll have to RESET to restart the machine GEM does not check that a diskette has even remotely valid data before trying to read things from it and it happens that the things on a Spectre diskette crash GEM The next section discusses the Spectre Menu Page this is the first sct of menus you rcach immediately upon running the SPECTRE PRG program They let you do things like configure what kind of Mac you ll be format disks set up hard disks and morc 67 Mac Mode 68 Dynamic RAM Horror Stories Now to begin with we need to expose The Great Covertlp in the industry ROM Read Only Memory is one form of memory In ROM stuff is burned into a chip and it can t be changed ROMS are used for instance in game cartridges inside your ST and those chips you plugged into the Spectre or GCR are Mac ROM chips q AM stands for get this AR ndom Access Memory The ra tionalization behind this name is that you can access any part of it at any time Well foo You can do that with ROM too The TRUTH of the matt
38. info start 1 size 19941 9970K type Gemdos Partition 1 2 3 4 5 6 Partition 7 Partition Format HFS HFS 10 il 12 Partition Partition Partition Partition Partition a D D D D D n Partition Partition Partition Partition Figure 11 Spectre Menus We do not support Atari s brand new 3 0 super big partition scheme We didn t find out about it until after the software was too far along If you are using HDX 3 0 and have more than 4 partitions do not reformat partition 3 as a Spectre partition You will destroy all the partitions after it You select the SCSI Device and Unit number at screen top by pointing to them clicking and entering a new number For the drive you ve just selected the partitions that exist will be shown in black the nonexistent partitions will be greyed out and unselectable Next select the partition you wish to inspect modify by clicking on the box next to it s number The partition s data will be put on the right half of the box it s starting sector number decimal size in sectors decimal and type GEM Spectre or unknown To get the partition size in K divide the sector size by 2 to get the size in megabytes divide by 2000 For instance 20 000 sectors is 10 megabytes 40 000 sectors is 20 megabytes To formata partition into MFS the Macintosh Filing System the older file system click on the Format MFS button WARNING You are not given
39. into it and let the Mac swap to the Ramdisk to get what it needs that way you won t have to physically change disks If you ve got a RamDisk with System on it the Mac will usually find whatever it needs in there Single Double Sided Disk Drives This is a real casy one If you use single sided drives you get 400K per disk If you use double sided drives you ll get 800K per disk Of course you may not put a double sided disk into a single sided drive and expect results However I did set things up so that if you have a double sided Spectre disk and you put it into a single sided drive you can access the first half of it This is intended just for desperation you know user group demos where someone forgot to bring a double sided drive and if it s to work all your data must be on the first 400K of the disk e g the front side Mac disks are different you can t get away with double sided disks in single sided drives at all 400K Spectre disks are in MFS format 800K Spectre disks are in HFS format This is exactly how the Mac docs things too Yes it s possible to do things other ways but this is a very rarely encountered thing 52 S Dy Mac Mode Now you ask MFS HFS What do they stand for Well I m not going to tell you because this isn t the usual user manual that tells you a lot of useless trivia l m trying to just tell you important stuff that you ll need Nikola Tesla s patent challenge to
40. is 80 fas m Spectre Menus set to and tum it off Atari s model SH204 and possibly SH205 hard disks have a bug in their hardware which can cause problems which you must fix at this menu Briefly even though there s only one disk drive mechanism inside the 204 205 the drives respond as though there s two Thus a ghost of the first drive shows up You ll sce this as a repeat of all the partitions of the first drive To get rid of this ghosting disable the second LUN logical unit number on any Atari drive or use someone else s Supra s ICD s host adaptor which work properly There s even rumored to be an outfit that sells a replacement PAL chip that fixes the bugs in the Atari drive it s called the ADE Chip and is sold by Berkeley Microsystems gt Format This brings up the hard disk formatting menu sce Figure 11 This menu allows you to specify a given hard disk s SCSI and LUN logical unit number and a partition from 1 to 12 using the Supra extended partitions scheme The partition you sclect will be formatted into Spectre format hard disks for use only with the Spectre If you do this the partition will become unavailable to GEM probably for good until a reformat rezero lt is no easy task to get it back to GEM by the way we re workingon a way to do this but it s not complete yet JN File Memory Cache Printer WEWWIELZ Floppy Disk Goodies Format Hard Disk Partition Device 8 Unit 8 Partition
41. ll end up at the Mac Desktop At this point allow me to introduce 8 new buttons F3 F10 at the top of your keyboard Remember how F1 and F2 are used to tell Mac mode that you are inserting cjecting a floppy with drive A or B Well F3 inserts the first Spectre hard disk partition F4 the second and so on up to eight at once That means you could access 256 meg of hard disk 32 meg per part x 8 parts at once on the Spectre I ve only tested to 120 Meg but that looks quite solid So press F3 to mount the first 5 megabyte partition We are not mounting the 10 megabyte GEMDOS partition at all GEM partitions don t enter into the game at all You can t mount them from Mac mode The hard disk lights will come on and in a few seconds you ll have a disk icon for the 5 megabyte drive Open it up and sure enough there will be 5 000K bytes available That s 5 megabytes Okay if you are using a System 4 2 Finder 6 0 or newer version run the Installer program included with the System disks from Apple It will ask where you want your System Folder put what kind of Mac you have and will set it all up for you on your hard drive If you have an earlier System Finder just copy the System Folder at the very least System and Finder from floppy to the hard disk When donce you might copy an application or two onto the hard disk just for fun Okay time to close down Just grab all the disk icons draw a box around them and drag th
42. re going to notice overall speed is down about 30 the mouse seems to move notchily or jerkily and the screens seem to open in sudden movements rather than smooth animation This is because of how I had to do color The Mac only knows about monochrome 1 color and sets up screen memory for monochrome this is completely wrong for the ST hardware in color Thus every 1 30th of a second or so I take a snapshot of the monochrome screen format it for color and write it to a separate color screen Thus you re getting a series of snapshots and hence the strange special effects On the highest memory mode of a 1 meg ST you ll lose some memory going to color mode as I have to reserve 64K for the color buffer actually only 32K but these things work on 64K borders trust me they do Monochrome monitors are under 150 and if you try you can find them for much less Many ST dealers tell me that Mac emulation is 63 Mac Mode D one big reason they re selling so well On the other hand some people tell me they re perfectly happy in color mode Make your own decision on this one I prefer black and white myself The Mac ToolBox One of the basic ideas behind the Mac and the reason we can actually run Mac programs on the ST is that everything done by a Mac program is donc through a Toolbox Call a sort of subroutine call For instance a program might need to write text onscreen it calls the Mac Tool
43. sell you the ROMs or System Finder gt You can use the Spectre Cartridge on your computer and the Spectre Software on your computer and you can even make a back up archival copy of the Spectre Software for your own use but you cannot make copies for your friends or neighbors or dog or any thing anyone else gt You agree not to disassemble modify tweak zap or mangle the Spectre software gt Gadgets by Small Inc is not responsible for anything that may happen to your hard disk or other portions of your equipment if you modify our product see above condition One pirate version regu larly destroys hard disk data because the person that did the work didn t understand my code In other words it s really not a good idea Consider it as friendly advice gt Gadgets by Small Inc is not responsible for how you choose to use this product or for what you do with it Also Gadgets by Small Inc is notliable should any of your equipment or software not provided by us suddenly quit working for any reason 153 E Appendix H License to gt This product is warrentied for 80 000 machine cycles or 90 days whichever is longer Gadgets by Small cannot possibly warranty that it will work with everything you try because we don t know what you ll try we have made a reasonable effort to make it work as best we can gt You agree that by opening and or using the product you will abide by the terms of this agreement
44. test them out Every time the Spectre 128 or Spectre GCR is started up the chips are tested If they re okay the startup continues if not the Spectre dis plays a warning message and stops it tells you in great detail that something is wrong and even gives suggestions about things to fix Okay start with the cartridge unplugged Turn on the ST for a moment and watch the video display mentally note how long it takes from the time you turn the switch on until the video pops on It varies from almost instantly to 2 3 seconds on a 4 megabyte ST It s related to memory size Now make sure your ST is off and plug the cartridge in CHIPS DOWN on Spectre 128 Maybe check one more time the chips are pointing down Please On the GCR the disk plugs will be in the back Now we ll do the smoke test That s really what they call it What we re going to do is apply power to the ST and thus to the cartridge and see if the ST still turns on We ll verify it still turns on by watching the video display if it goes from black to white things are well What you want to do is turn on the ST and see if the video turns on just like it did a minute ago If the screen stays black there s a cartridge problem the board s in upside down a chip is in backwards both chips are in backwards the board s in upside down and the chips are in backwards or whatever So go ahead Turn your computer on If the video comes up you re doing fine
45. the first two sectors These are called the boot blocks With this and the ST gt Mac option you can create a Spectre format startup floppy disk for use with the Spectre 128 You can press w or Alt W to select this option from the keyboard Before selecting this option you need to use Set Drives to set up which drive is the ST and which is the Spectre The ST drive select ed should be where the BOOTBLKS BB file is located usually with the Transverter program and which floppy to use as the Spectre drive A or B After doing that select Write Boot A file selector will show you which boot blocks you can choose currently there is only one set which works with all current System Finder combinations After selecting the boot blocks file Transverter will write them out to the Spectre drive Once you have boot blocks on a disk you can transvert the previ ously downloaded Apple Macintosh System Finder files to the Spectre disk At this point you have a bootable Spectre format disk gt Run Program Another feature offered by Transverter is the ability to run any PRG TOS or TTP program from it p or Alt P from the keyboard When you exit that program you ll be returned to Transverter One use for this is to format new Spectre disks without quitting Transverter To use this feature select Run Program and choose the program you want to run If you chose a TTP program
46. the first time that month It received a lot of publicity and a lot of interest so from February to September 1986 I cleaned it up added all the stuff you need to make a nice hack into a usable program and unleashed it on the unsuspecting public Well it worked but Lots of popular applications crashed Sales were slow when word got around it wasn t perfect I spent September 1986 to May 1987 fixing bugs in Mac programs which were causing the Magic Sac to crash May 1987 saw release 4 32 of the MagicSac which finally started fixing the system crashes on a widespread basis I wrote some code which recovered from bus er rors which the faulty Mac programs were causing The Motorola manual says this is impossible but I d long since quit listening to words like impossible I spent many hours online supporting users answering questions and helping out I set up support arcas on Bix CompuServe GEnie and Usenet I got to know many people and made many friends there They pointed out problems I would put out a new version of the software that sometimes fixed the problems and the cycle would repeat From May 1987 to January 1988 various goodies were added to Magic Sac Version 4 52 brought the hard disk online for the first timc The Magic Sac grew to 23 000 lines of code In 1988 version 5 9 brought HFS and the Translator One online so the ST could read write Mac disks directly The Translator was a long exhaust
47. the software we make a few thousand users happy Where do you think we should draw the line We enjoy talking with people but there s only a certain number of five minute periods each day Third the lines may be busy because we re dealing with someone else This happens There are a lot of someones Also the depressing fact is that a lot of our tech calls are questions that are covered in the manual or are from people who don t have a manual because it s err a copy of the Spectre not an original Also Barb who answers the phone has heard every possible question at least sixteen times Feel free to ask her questions she usual ly knows the answer Honest we don t have any no knowledge phone answerers here 128 Appendix A Sources Appendix A Sources Sources for Mac 128K ROMs Pre Owned Electronics 30 Clematis Avenue Waltham Massachusetts 02154 800 274 5343 617 891 6851 Fax 617 891 3556 Shreve Systems 2421 Malcolm Street Shreveport Louisiana 71108 318 865 6743 Fax 318 865 2006 Source for Mac 64K ROMs Berkeley Microsystems PO Box 20119 Oakland California 94620 415 547 2191 Fax 415 547 0184 Sources for Printer Drivers Epstart MacEnhancer SoftStyle Phoenix Technologies 6600 Kalanianaole Highway Honolulu Hawaii 96825 808 396 6368 800 367 5600 Fax 808 395 8972 Print Link GDT SoftWorks PO Box 1865 Point Roberts Washington 98281 604 291 9121 Fax 604 29
48. then push a second diskette into drive B drive B will light up by itself whirr a moment as the Mac OS examines the disk then put B s icon up on the screen along with the floppy s name Note the difference between the ST and Mac operating systems If you eject drive B using Control E the icon will stay there but it will be dimmed to let you know that diskette isn t in a drive anymore If you eject by dragging the icon to the trash the icon will disappear Now let s say you now insert a third diskette You get a third icon You ll have the startup disk icon the dimmed icon of the disk you ejected and the new one Note each icon has a name that s the name of the diskette Thus icons aren t really related to disk drives as they are on the ST For instance if you take a disk out of drive B the icon will dim if you put that same floppy back into drive A the icon willlight back up I wanted to point this out to you because it s confusing to first timers How would you copy a file between diskettes Just select and drag the file as you would on the ST Note however that just dragging a file within a disk s own window will just reposition the icon on the ST that would cause a file copy to happen On the Mac it just repositions the icon In fact you canarrange your Desktop any way you want You can even drag icons out of the windows and onto the Desktop It s heady stuff 50 5 Mac Mode So how do you make
49. things up Just a word to the wise We have seen a rather odd problem on some boards where when the cartridges were cut from the main PC board there was a very thin strip of gold left across all the gold fingers probably because the gold was mal leable and the blade not ultra sharp It s rather hard to see a magnifying glass helps but electrons will find it Symptoms are a dead short your ST doesn t light up One easy solution is to lightly rub the edge of the cartridge fingers with sandpaper to get rid of the gold remnant that s how we fix most returned dead car tridges here 35 Getting It Going 5 Incredibly Raro Bad board Call us if you think this is it it probably isn t but we ll help you isolate the real problem or replace the board Let s Check It Out Looking good so far Okay the ST will power up like it normally does If you ve got a hard disk and are set up to autostart off of the hard disk that will happen too Should things be screwy at this point say lots of bombs crashes power off and remove the cartridge and try itagain if the problems disappear something s wrong in the car tridge not bad enough to prevent the machine from starting at all but bad enough to screw it up Check for the abovementioned gold finger problem and for chips with a leg up Put in theSpectre Program disk the one we ship with it not a Spectre FORMAT disk which is basically Mac software on an ST fo
50. too Either of these indicates your cartridge is working fine The Mac software in the ROM chips has checked out and is correct and operating just fine You won t get the fade to Mac if they aren t perfect Incidentally I have never scen a cartridge go bad once it has worked once The chips never wear out The cartridge is very high quality and darned expensive to make and will most likely outlast your ST You may want to make provisions for it in your will EDITOR Family Heirlooms Dave Now if you don t get the Mac screen with some sort of icon in the middle of it something is wrong You may get a There is something wrong with your cartridge message in which case something is wrong The ST can t see and use the ROM chips properly in that case Check under Installing the ROM Chips for common problems and see if you can find anything Fix it and try again Congratulations You vc gotten the machine to the point where it thinks it is a Mac and is asking for a startup disk e g a disk with System and Finder on it Things are working fine Now this is as far as you can go unless you have System and Finder If you have the GCR and a System and Finder on either Mac or Spectre format disk you can start up off that disk If you have a Spectre 128 then you can only start up if you have System and Finder on a Spectre format disk 38 ra Getting It Going Getting Mac Disks to Spectre Format The following dis
51. whatever the current directory is where you ran the program from If the disk is write protected of course this will fail The nice thing about saving your configuration is next time you run Spectre it ll come up pre configured the way you want it so you need to only press RETURN to start up If Spectre ever finds that you ve changed memory sizes or hard disks or something since you last wrote the configuration file SPECTRE CNF it ll reset everything and ask you to start over this is to prevent you from accidentally walking into a disaster area after changing hard disks getting a memory upgrade running on a friend s machine or at a user group demonstration etc gt Quit or pressing Control Q just exits you back to GEM if you came into Spectre accidentally or were only here to store your configu ration file format some disks ctc gt Spectre or just pressing RETURN starts up the Spectre into Mac mode in whatever form it s currently configured to be AN WEITEN Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk Floppy Disk Goodies Save settings Figure 5 Hence the first time you run Spectre you ll spend time in the menus configuring it and save the configuration then if you want 73 Spectre Menus press RETURN to go to Mac mode after that you need only run SPECTRE PRG and press RETURN to start up with your customized configuration You can also press ENTER I find that early in the morning it s a lot easier to
52. work and every now and then I run into something SCSI that I just plain can t get working period for no apparent reason no matter what The last one was a Rodime disk drive Folks at ICD and Supra make their living straightening out SCSI Apple SCSI is done ina variety of interesting ways too depending on who you buy the drive from For a fun afternoon read the termination section in an Apple SCSI manual it s reminiscent of a nightmare Thus it is no simple buy a cable and go hookup It depends on your present hard disk setup and what kind of Apple hard disk you want to hook up to Since we don t want people casually trashing expensive hard disks this is not a good place to start learning about digital electronics and soldering However we also do believe in information exchange so we don t want to suppress details on this just to cover ourselves legally Thus we can t be responsible for what you do with this information okay Now with that out of the way here s the details Atari uses ACSI their 19 pin disk cable This is not SCSI it is just a cousin The ACSI cable goes into an Atari disk drive unit and is electrically translated into true SCSI well not multiple machine but close enough a 50 pin ribbon cable You can buy the ACSI SCSI translation unit separately from disk drive makers like ICD and Supra I happen to like ICD s as it lets me daisy chain to the SLM804 laser printer
53. you can use Imagen s UltraScript This involves printing to disk Transverting that disk file to an ST disk and using UltraScript to print it It s not hard I am adding more support for the Atari Laser Printer at this time Well last week actually not right at this minute The at this time phrase is just something writers say to be vague on exactly when they are doing something Anyway right now you can take screen snapshots with the Atari LaserPrinter either at 1 1 resolution or flipped sideways at 72 dpi and they look really great You may also fool the system into thinking your SLM804 is an ImageWriter either at low or high resolu tion 72 or 144 dpi The printer driver ImageWriter used for this is standard on the Mac and comes on those System disks you bought As of this instant you can t do PostScript printing right out of 23 Requirements e Spectre mode e g pull down Print and it starts spitting out paper But we re working on that EDITOR Tisk Tisk Revealing information again Dave One downside to the Atari SLM804 you need to dedicate one megabyte of memory to its usc Atari chose to use ST system memory for the page layout all 954 000 bytes of it rather than putting RAM chips in their printer It makes for a cheaper printer truc but takes away from your actual system size Plugging a Printer In How do you plug the printer into the ST Well the ST has two output ports or places to p
54. you download Mac files to your ST they will bein MacBinary format Files transferred with a Copy II PC Option Board will be in Unary format Any Mac file which is not a MacBinary or Unary file must be transverted as a text file technical explanation the complete file will be put into a Macintosh Data Fork In most cases you will want to use a straight ASCII file one without any special control codes or formatting commands Since the Macintosh uses just a carriage return to signify the end of a line whereas most other computers including the ST use both a carriage return and a linefeed at the end of cach line Transverter gives you the option of removing or adding linefeeds depending upon direction of transfer for text If you have a Mac application program which is not in MacBinary or Unary format you can transvert it as a text file Then while in Mac mode you must use the program BinHex to convert the text file back to a Mac application Warning the transverted application may not work it depends on how it was transferred from the Macintosh originally About Transverter The first entry in the Desk menu is the Copyright Trademark no tice sce Figure 16 After that are all your ST Desk Accessories Please note that Gadgets by Small does not own the copyright to Transverter it belongs to Doug Wheeler one of our beta testers and general fixer up per person He lets us distribute it Doug has helped us a lot here for e
55. you will get a dialogue box where you can type in any parameters needed by the program Transverter will change the current drive and path to that of the program being run This makes sure the program will be able to find it s support files if any Upon exiting Transverter will change the default drive and path back to what it was originally 121 Transverter 5 Keep in mind that while running another program Transverter remains in memory and in some cases may not leave enough free memory for the other program If you run out of memory try removing Desk Accessories and RAMdisks and try again Transverter will make use of all available memory Transverting ST to Spectre Let s assume that you wish to transvert a Macintosh program from an ST disk to a Macintosh disk To do this select ST gt Mac from the File menu you will get a file selector You can select just one file or you can use wildcards such as MAC all the files which match will be transverted If the file is in MacBinary or Unary format Transverter will then read thc file into memory If the file is not in MacBinary or Unary format you will get a dialogue box asking whether you want linefeeds removed stripped gives you a chance to change the Filetype and Creator of the file along with the option to cancel the transfer The Macintosh OS uses the FileType and Creator to determine what kind of file it is and what program created it Usually th
56. 1 9689 Grappler C Orange Micro 1400 Lakeview Avenue Anaheim California 92807 714 779 2772 Fax 714 779 9332 129 Appendix A Sources Source for UltraScript UltraScript Imagen Corporation PO Box 58101 Santa Clara California 95052 800 635 3997 408 986 9400 Sources for HP DeskJet Drivers MacPrint Insight Development Corp 1024 County Club Drive Moraga California 94556 415 376 9500 Fax 415 631 0595 JetLink GDT SoftWorks PO Box 1865 Point Roberts Washington 98281 604 291 9121 Fax 604 291 9689 Printworks SoftStyle Phoenix Technologies 6600 Kalanianaole Highway Honolulu Hawaii 96825 808 396 6368 800 367 5600 Fax 808 395 8972 Grappler C Orange Micro 1400 Lakeview Avenue Anaheim California 92807 714 779 2772 Fax 714 779 9332 Printer Interface III DataPak 14011 Ventura Avenue 507 Sherman Oaks California 91423 800 327 6703 818 905 2201 Mark Booth s pick 130 Appendix A Sources Sources for Mac PD Software Current Notes Magazine 122 N Johnson Road Sterling Virginia 22170 703 450 4761 AccuSoft PO Box 02214 Columbus Ohio 43202 UpTime 221 3rd Street Newport Rhode Island 02840 401 847 2455 Network Customer Service Numbers CompuServe Customer Service 1 800 848 8990 or 614 457 8650 GEnie Client Services 1 800 638 9636 Bix Customer Service 1 800 227 2983 or 603 924 7681 131 Appendix A Sources 132 App
57. 29 Source for Mac 64K ROMS 0000s eee eens 129 Sources for Printer Drivers llle 129 Source for UltraSscHipt 2222222529 tS 130 Sources for HP Desk Jet Drivers 222222222220 130 Sources for Mac PD Software 000 eee 131 Network Customer Service Numbers 131 Appendix B Special Function Keys 133 General Keys 27 35 9949 EODEM GROS See iN N 133 SEMBOL Keys ku uter eee ee CR ee e eS 134 Appendix C Connections leere 135 Atari Serial to ImageWriterl 0 135 Null Modem or ImageWriter I Cable 135 Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks 137 Appendix E Hard Disk Tips 143 Appendix F UltraScript Tips cce 147 Appendix G Crashing ccceceeceeeeees 149 Interpreting the Crash Page oda IRIS 149 Mega 2 Problems e Str em ans re Ue 151 Recovering FromaCrash 2 22 2202 152 Appendix H You Found the License 153 Index u es arena 155 iv Introduction and my wife Sandy and I had a baby a weck later The 128K ROMS All through this time a thought was running through my mind the 128K ROMs See the 64K ROMS were a good first try for Apple but they had bugs So Apple debugged them sped them up considerably did neat things and came out with 128K ROMS twice as big in the new Mac Plus Lots of programs only worked
58. Gotcha 154 AS m Index 144 A R 2 Fax 122 Abort AutoRun FileType 115 117 About Spectre Menu 71 72 Alternate Video 60 61 88 89 Autoboot Restoring 98 AutoRunning Spectre 42 B BinHex 116 Bix 2 131 Brown Willie 95 Booth Mark 6 7 22 130 Boot Blocks 116 C Cache Menu 76 77 CapsLock Key 54 Chooser 103 108 Coffee 1 Color Monitor 61 64 76 Command Key 54 55 Common Problems 35 36 CompuServe 2 5 59 99 115 127 128 131 Crash Page 40 149 151 Crash Recovering From 152 Creator 115 117 D Data Pacific 2 DCFormatter 39 84 108 110 DeMar John 5 Desk Accessories 18 19 40 41 55 58 103 104 108 122 147 Desktop 4 19 40 41 42 46 50 51 63 77 79 95 96 98 119 133 144 145 Detect Disk Insertion 85 87 E 832K Mode 75 76 Ejecting Disks 45 49 Enter Key 54 EPROM 17 18 F F1 F10 47 49 51 53 86 87 97 133 File Menu 72 74 Finder T7 18 19 20 26 37 39 40 46 47 51 52 57 58 77 79 83 96 98 121 133 145 146 152 Finder 5 3 41 Floppy Disk Menu 83 87 Floppy Disks Double Sided 52 53 Duplicating 84 85 Ejecting 45 49 Inserting 49 5 One or Two Drives 51 52 Single Sided 52 53 Fonts 18 22 51 104 147 148 Font DA Juggler Plus 18 40 Foreign Keyboards 56 58 Formatting Floppy Disks 66 67 83 84 Hard Disks 81 82 96 Glendale Show 5 6 Goodies Menu 87 89 Greenblatt Jeff 7 H Hahn Lewin Barb Hard Disk 20 53 Hard Disk Menu 79 83 5 6 111
59. He COR Grades loy Sroowuul fie SPWELErTE E GER The Premier Macintosh Emulator the one that reads Mac Disks by David Small 1989 Gadgets by Small Inc All Rights Reserved Transverter is 1987 1989 by Douglas N Wheeler All Rights Reserved A CAUTION A A HIGH TECHNOLOGY A A FUN TO READ A WARNING This manual is easy to read and actually entertaining This may ruin your enjoy ment of other computer manuals We can accept no responsibility nor liability for clarity of this manual or if you decide that you strongly dislike other manuals after reading this one FURTHERMORE SOME OF THE DIAGRAMS WERE DRAWN BY SOMEONE WITH THE ARTISTIC ABILITY OF GENGHIS KHAN Reading this manual is probably not necessary as the GCR is so straight forward to hook up and use However you should read this manual even if you ve owned a Spectre or Magic Sac before because of all the new things we ve added to the software like version 2 0 and 128K Rom support Besides you ll kick yourself if you break your new GCR because you didn t read the manual first All products marked with and those that we missed are trademarks of their respective companies the names are not intended to be used generically Thank you for reading this notice Oh yeah read the license agree ment in back It s a dirty job but someone has to do it Introduction Introduction There and Back Again THIS IS NOT A
60. IGHT APPLE and are NOT to be illegally copied They come to you either straight from your Apple Dealer with a Macintosh or on many applications disks whose authors have paid for a license from Apple I recommend pur chasing the System and Finder and manuals from a dealer they will tell you a lot about how the Mac and System Finder operate Some Mac programs require a specific System Finder to work For instance at one point the early games from Infocom only worked on Finder 1 1g System 1 1 which is mighty ancient stuff Read your program s documentation to find out if it s touchy in this manner Macintosh software the programs you want to run There are commercial programs that you can purchase from your local Apple Dealer or computer store There are shareware programs where you basically get them for free and if you decide you like them and want to use them you re supposed to send a small fee to the author Finally there are public domain programs that can be given away and used freely Most Mac users have a combination of all three There are some excellent public domain PD programs out there particularly Desk Accessories that are extremely useful Some of the shareware programs such as some versions of Red Ryder a telecomm or modem program are excellent too Commercial programs vary from complete rot to complete excellence Microsoft s Excel for instance 19 Requirements is widely regarded a
61. If it succeeds you never know anything went wrong Of course later your Mac program may crash usually with an ID 2 BOMB message but it would do that on a Mac too If it fails you will get the Crash Page and the Bus Cycle digits will all be 0 s This means the Mac program screwed up If this happens it s usually repeatable so try to avoid doing whatever it was that caused the crash It s not going to get better or vary usually Thus there will always be a few Mac programs that won t work and that s not going to change just avoid them Note that if they re doing this they re headed for a crash on a real Mac anyway Those of you with Mac experience will know the zero store as the dreaded dereferenced Pointer problem an extremely common and tricky problem for Mac programs EDITOR We promise not to name names 65 Mac Mode 5 Naturally the Spectre contains a Zero Store Handler with im proved whitener and bleach for those tough to handle stains Things You Definitely Should Not Ever Do gt You should never take a disk out of the drive without the Mac mode flashing an A or B at you Short of a crash when you ve run out of choices anyway gt You should never shut the system off without legally ejecting the disks unless you crash gt You should never use Shutdown or Restart from the Finder I rcalize they seem to work but our testing has found that they
62. If you hit S then E rcal quickly sometimes the keyboard sends an F1 keypress on to the ST The Mac OS thinks you just put a disk into the A drive and starts dealing with it If the Mac OS thinks you already had a disk in there it gets very confused sometimes it asks you to put the disk back in AGAIN thinking you manually cjected it with a paperclip and proba bly mumbling to itself about its users Usually hitting F1 again cures this problem You ll know this happens if the ST s disk drive suddenly turns on when you haven t put a disk in it and the ST informs you that the non existent diskette in there has a problem It will then ask if you d like to initialize or cject the disk click on Eject press Fl again and you re out of it With Spectre GCR note that the GCR nearly dies trying to read whatever disk is in the drive doing retries of all sorts recalibrating it self chanting prayers to the gods of silicon chips and so on This takes time The GCR doesn t know that there s no disk in that drive it just thinks your disk is in really terrible shapc You re going to appreciate all that hang in there trying when you have a flaky disk so Patience Okay There s nothing to be done about this bug Go casy on S E keys The next problem is some aftermarket drives The ST senses disk changes by watching the write protect switch on the disk drives 70 times per second If it sees the switch change position then it knows a di
63. LS373 s or If you don t feel comfortable soldering you may be able to get your local Atari dealer to do it for you This should solve all those strange problems assuming they were caused by the load put on the Mega 2 by the Spectre in the first place Recovering From a Crash If you crash you have several things you can do to try to recover Press Keypad to try to return to the Finder or Press RETURN to try to restart Mac mode no guaran tees or Give up on trying to recover and RESET the ST The first two options will fail if the system or Spectre was dam aged too badly by the crash however they are worth a try if it gives you a chance to recover your data 152 Pe m Appendix H License You Found the License I always thought it was ridiculous to say DO NOT OPEN THIS PACKAGE UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THIS AGREEMENT when you have obviously already opened the package or you wouldn t be reading this Anyway here goes If you open this package and use our software you agree to the following pretty reasonable conditions gt You realize that this software and such are copyrighted by Gadgets by Small Inc and belongs to us no matter what That s fancy for Copyright 1989 Gadgets by Small Inc All Rights Reserved gt You acknowledge that you have to get your own Apple Macintosh ROMs and also Apple Macintosh software including System Finder which you intend to run on your Atari Computer We do not
64. NINTRODUCTION WHERE THE AUTHOR THANKS HIS MOM AND DAD AND WIFE AND PET GILA MONSTER THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY WORTH READING IN FACT NO ONE IS THANKED HERE WELL ALMOST NO ONE IT WILL HOWEVER GIVE YOU A VALUABLE OVERALL FEEL FOR THE SPECTRE Four years ago I began working on an impossible project bringing up the Mac operating system on the Atari ST I had little idea what I was getting into I knew that the functionality of the Mac was contained in two 64K ROM chips I knew I could physically connect the chips to the ST and I knew a tiny bit about the Mac operating system This was back when the ST didn t have its operating system on chips you had to load it from disk So plugging the Macintosh ROMs in wasn t any big problem you understand As I looked into the challenge I learned that there wasn t any problem I couldn t overcome with a mix of elegance hacking and usually sheer force which translates to lots of late night programming sessions coffee and so on I think I can honestly say I pushed myself to my very limit in making the Mac work on the ST it took lots of hard work real creativity for otherwise unsolvable problems and imagination to figure out why something was failing From November 1985 to February 1986 I wrote around 12 000 lines of code and brought up what was called the Magic Sac It was or I would have gone into the ice cream truck business instead D Introduction m demoed for
65. Oa ehh eee ORTAN eS 72 Memory Menus outs uetus E we UNES DISCE oberen 74 G che Men s 9 766 area a sat Scu E RSS 76 Printer Men oo ee o EH RUN E 77 Hard Disk Menu sg u m X ums eos o ars Tes 79 kloppy DiskMenui 4 x2s 59 99 gw eg be 83 Goodies Men ba 242 28 Ba ame hg Oh aoe ee Rata 87 Table of Contents Ta Interlude Five Les sein Wintel Ea 91 Hard Disks and Spectre e 93 About Hard DISkS oe are ee 94 Setting Up Spectre With a Hard Disk 96 Interlude Six 2 0 05 68 TS TES 4200 20 200 499 Printers and Spectre eee 101 Printers and the Serial Port 00 101 The Software Part of Printing 0 102 Atari s SLM804 Laser Printer 004 105 Interlude Seven ccescscesececcessesesesecs LI Transverter see a Us ote fce Tete lene ane qe Us 115 Limitations eee I EIER Ne EHE 115 About Transverter 23222209 XU alas mann 116 ALE Menus c opto a Bud ee a oe agg A 117 Options Men s os 2 5 De Wee Ras aR gh See sie 118 Transverting ST to Spectre 02 000 122 Transverting Spectre to ST o tana nan a llle ee 123 ELIOLS414X29 ee R ae Bk 123 DisclaimeRkz ccu See ee eh lerne AS 124 Interlude Eight cece ccc ence cence cccveee 125 Where and How to get Support 2 2 127 Appendix A Sources eee eee een 129 Sources for 128K Mac ROMs 2 2222 1
66. R Resources 51 52 93 94 122 Restart 40 66 Retirement 2 3 Rogovin Bruce 3 7 ROMs 128K 3 4 13 17 18 53 144 151 64K ROMs 1 3 18 31 53 Installing 30 31 Rymal Larry 152 S 64K ROMs 1 3 18 31 53 Sad Mac 40 SCSI Devices 80 81 Serial Port 24 101 102 Setting Up Spectre 29 35 96 98 ShutDown 40 66 SLM804 22 24 74 76 78 105 109 134 Sloatman Cathy 41 Sloatman Mark 5 20 Sound 58 61 83 87 89 133 150 Spectre Format 11 17 25 26 32 36 39 66 67 95 97 115 118 121 143 SPECTRE CNF 72 73 74 SPECTRE PRG 33 34 40 67 71 74 96 98 145 STARTUP PS 147 Suitcase II 18 40 System 17 18 19 20 26 37 39 40 51 52 56 58 79 83 96 98 104 121 145 146 System Folder 103 105 106 108 156 Index Tahiti 17 Testing the Cartridge 34 35 36 38 342 0341 17 18 31 342 0342 17 18 31 342 0220 18 31 342 0221 18 31 Transferring Software 39 Translator One 2 6 84 Transverter 115 About Transverter 116 117 File Menu 117 118 Limitations 115 116 Options Menu 118 122 Run Program 121 122 Set Drives 118 119 Set Options 119 121 Write Boot 121 Transverting Spectre to ST 123 ST to Spectre 122 123 Turbo Disk Mode 56 133 U UltraScript 23 108 109 115 UltraScript Tips 147 149 Unary 115 116 120 122 Universal Disk Copier 6 Usenet 121 WwW Walker Norm 7 152 White Mark 95 Wilson Sandy 3 Y Young Neil 4 27 28 91 157 Plug and Play Compatibi
67. SCSI cable comnector Hard Disk Controller Adaptec 4000 ar 4070 Omu 3527 or others Apple SCSI c g 25 pin SCSI Integrated controller and hard disk such as Seagate ST 277N 296N etc TERMINATOR INSTALLED LASTDRIVE Up to 7 SCSI devices can be on the total SCSI chain true SCSI and Apple combined Last Drive on the chainmus have terminator all otherszus nothave it Figure 24 140 fX m Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks wants a terminator on either end of the cable to prevent ringing and other signal troubles You want exactly one on either end of the 50 pin true SCSI two is too many and may actually cause damage by making the chips that drive SCSI work too hard Zero is too few as the signal will be lost in all the ringing and noise What this boils down to is when you daisy chain hard disks to an Apple hard disk you have to determine if the Apple hard disk is terminated and depending on how you ve hooked things up make it so that the last disk drive on the 50 pin true SCSI cable is terminated and no others arc You ll probably have to pull the terminator packs off any present Atari drives But again it depends on your present rig Maybe you ll want the Apple drive in the middle in which case it should not be terminated You ll also have to do some creative cabling to get the 25 wires out of the Atari drive and to the Apple drive connector For portability between the Mac and Atari you might want t
68. TRE PRG such as disk format disk duplicate hard disk format hard disk status etc Going from left to right the first menuentries have to do with the Mac you ll be emulating configured as in computereso if you start up the Spectre what memory size it is what printer it is set up for serial or parallel etc The menu entries towards the right are for things like formatting disks setting up your hard disks goodies and other magic Let s go through the menus one at a time and discuss their functions Actually we can t really discuss their functions because this is a printed manual and I m talking at you and you can t really say anything back except by writing on the page maybe and mailing it to me But it s considered very posh to say discuss instead of talk about So I used discuss About Spectre This shows you the Spectre logo our company name address and phone number and importantly the version number of the Spectre program see Figure 4 page 71 You can bet the Spectre will be periodically improved and revised you need to know what version number you arc We started out at 1 51 The current version of Spectre is 2 0 we ve had 1 51 1 75 1 9F and now arc at 2 0 Registered owners received 1 75 and 1 9F for free Please note this software is copyrighted by Gadgets by Small Inc 71 Spectre Menus While it may only seem like a disk file to you it s the last four years of my life and my hop
69. The night before the show opened I don t think we slept at all we were so worried that no one would care Morning Doors open A roaring mob swept from the doors direct ly to our booth and lined up Mark Booth his wife Cathy and Doug Wheeler were working with us Most of our stock disappeared within 2 hours as our booth was besieged and the rest were gone just a short time later We went home amazed that people would by a computer product in a manila envelope and thankfully paid off the parts people Visa American Express the house payment the car payment phone utilities etc Throughout the winter of 88 we 4 did better Barb helped us ship zil i lions of units Contrary to popular be lief we didn t get rich The Atari mar ket was justa little too depressed for that what with their dealers dying off right and left What we did do was go frombeing unknown to internationally known in about 6 months We also discovered being international means you need a fax machine So we got one During that winter I started on a new hack The Spectre GCR I knew a lot about disks from doing the Universal Disk Copier back in 84 and was sick to death of the ultra slow Translator Now mind you I did the Translator software I m allowed to complain about it The thing was strangled by use of the MIDI ports which allow only a few thousand bytes per second to pass through This is slow for floppies w
70. a 2 meg Atari in order to use UltraScript with the Laser Printer There is also another version for the Epson FX HP DeskJet and other miscella neous printers ask your Atari dealer If you want to print a Mac PostScript file to the Atari Laser Printer you have to um follow a few simple steps It s not just a matter of se lecting Print while in Mac mode First if you don t have an MFS Spectre partition on your hard disk or don t have a hard disk you will need to format some 800K MFS floppies using DCFormatter This is because Transverter only works with MFS you will probably need that much room see the Transverter Chapter for more information Next run the Spectre program Make sure you have the files Laser Prep and Laser Writer in your System Folder They come with the System disks from Apple Also apparently not all Laser Prep versions work with UltraScript we ve been told that version 5 2 defi nitely does not work Laser Prep versions 3 1 5 0 5 1 and 6 0 work fine Next create a PostScript masterpiece in Mac mode using a pro gram like Ready Set Go or MacDraw II Make sure you select LaserWriter from the Chooser Desk Accessory and then do Page Setup under the File menu In order to get your masterpiece from Mac mode to UltraScript you need to Print to a file rather than to the LaserWriter It s a lot easi er to do than you think the Mac s OS will send PostScript to a
71. a chance to undo this once done the format happens immediately To format a partition into HFS the Hierarchical Filing System the newer and current file system click on the Format HFS button WARNING You are not given a chance to undo this once done the format happens immediately All GEM ST DATA IS LOST ON THIS PARTITION just like with any format If you have a very small partition less than 2 meg you may only select MFS partitions above 5 meg may only be HFS These sizes were determined by experiment the Mac doesn t like huge MFS partitions for instance If you have a hopelessly damaged Spectre partition formatting will re zero the partition so you can use it again All data on it is lost so it s kind of a Final Option gt The last section of the Hard Disk menu shows you the names of every Mac hard disk partition found that s available for the Spectre 82 3s Spectre Menus see Figure 9 page 78 This way you can quickly determine what partitions are enabled disabled what drives you have online and if a drive is functioning responding This menu also has check marks by partitions that are switched on You can switch a partition on or off just by clicking on it Only partitions which are Spectre mountable are visible The first activated partition is the one you will boot from so it needs System Finder Instalicd on it using the Apple Installer program Atari drives drives with Atari p
72. a pretty clear picture of half the Mac s screen either the top half or the bottom half 61 Mac Mode m We can sort of scrunch two Mac scan lines into one color line This gives a fuzzy picture of the entire Mac screen text isn t especially readable although you can stand it for awhile Neither one of these is particularly appealing so we at least give you the option of doing either You can change anytime you re in Mac mode with a key press If you re working in a small area of the screen you may want to stay in half screen mode since you can sce what you re doing Perhaps you can size the working window to half screen in that case you re in fine shape To toggle to half screen mode press SHIFT on the numeric keypad to the right of the main keyboard To toggle to scrunch screen mode press SHIFT on the numeric keypad While in half screen mode to see the top half of the screen press SHIFT asterisk on the numeric key pad To see the lower half press SHIFT minus si gn on the numeric keypad The is on top of thus it s a bit intuitive When in scrunch mode your color settings are going to be criti cal to your visibility We used to force them to an optimal setting but persistent complaints resulted in us taking that out now you can now set them however you like in the ST s control panel and we ll use those settings To understand what s going on in sc
73. ac asking you to eject the disk since the ST does not have an automatic eject mechanism Now you ve got the disk ejected okay It s safe to power off Or you can press Shift UNDO to restart into Mac mode or Shift HELP to reboot into ST mode Whatever You must make the Mac ask you to eject the disk before powering off On the Mac the computer controls disk eject On the ST you do On the Mac the computer puts off updating the disk until just before it ejects it because it knows the disk is there until it specifically ejects it right So you must force the Mac to E ject the disk and wait until the Mac writes its stuff to the disk then tells you it s okay for you to physically eject it In other words you need to play disk eject mechanism for the Mac One of Apple s System Finder versions has a bug where it ignores you telling it to Eject the disk This is Finder 5 3 Look on the fibout the Finder selection under Desk Accessories the amp menu to get the version If you have this version you can only eject disks by clicking on the disk icon then dragging it to the trashcan Again don t worry this doesn t throw your data away It just ejects the disk and removes the icon from the desktop Only Finder 5 3 requires this and yes it s annoyed a whole lot of users who are used to doing it differ ently Well there you have it a quick test drive of your cartridge It s working fine You might as well go ahead and b
74. also assume the screen is 64 bytes wide instead of the ST s 80 bytes and will present a messy screen anyway MacPaint 1 3 pulled this trick in FatBits mode and makes a mess MacPaint 1 5 or 2 0 fix this bug I believe a commercial Golf program also makes this mistake and that s all the times I ve seen it in many thousands of applications So anyway leave it in Alternate Video and don t worry about it Color Monitor Support Well look we might as well say one thing right up front Color Monitor support isn t half as good as monochrome if you get a chance go monochrome by all means Also we do not support Mac II software that works in color either The Mac II requires 256K ROMS and a 68020 processor plus a strange vidco sctup NuBus cards and a million other things that aren t in ST s It won t work Here s the problem with color monitors On a monochrome monitor there are 400 individual scan lines or rows of 640 dots This means there are 640 x 400 dots on the screen which means we can paint sharp crisp pictures onscreen The Mac has 512 x 342 so we have 128 more dots horizontally and 58 more vertically That s why you can have a bigger screen on an ST when running Spectre A color monitor only has 200 scan lines or a 640 x 200 display This is 142 less scan lines than the Mac has Hence we have several bad choices We can show you half the Mac screen 200 scan lines out of 342 total This gives
75. anger And I got my usual tan from fluorescent lights Another summer gone Alas we slightly missed our August shipdate and I m determined to put in why a worker in Taiwan installing the plastic mold in the machine was hurt and the mold was damaged in an industrial acci dent He was hospitalized and was fortunate not to lose his hand he s all right but will be off work for two full months It s a reminder that this package you have comes from parts from all over the world and people have done a lot of work to get it to you Sometimes I feel like I ve done the least I only dream the things up Other people make them real The Envelope There s a special feeling I get from doing all this It s pushing the envelope It s lying awake at night and knowing you re doing the impossible that there is no one you can call for help because no one has ever done it before You wonder and wonder if it can be done sometimes it just plain can t You think of new ideas the problem is always on the back of your mind You mumble to yourself a lot and your wife wonders what s running through your mind You walk into doors a lot M Introduction D And sometimes an idea comes to you you code it up and try it and it works And the limits of possible get pushed out a little farther Watching the Spectre 128 plotting Welcome to Macintosh for the first time is that feeling Watching the hard disks unleashed for the first time
76. aper matches the width of the Atari screen much like Atari s screen dump Bit for bit screen dumps are done with Shift Keypad 1 This dumps the current screen memory in the ST to the Laser Printer A normal 640 x 400 screen is only an about 2 x 1 5 inches on the laser output so I suggest using a program such as Stepping Out to expand available screen memory it works then call up Shift Keypad 1 Some experimentation is in order here the program attempts to adjust for different screen sizes but there are limits Still it s very interesting to see a large Stepping Out screen size showing up on the laser I don t expect you to use Shift Keypad 1 a lot but it s useful in certain situations and as you see I try to give you the maximum flexi bility gt QuickDraw Support The Mac uses something called QuickDraw fun name huh to do all its screen draws It can also use it to print things since QuickDraw is really smart Unfortunately a printer driver the software that makes QuickDraw talk to the printer is an extremely obscure and hard to write thing Just to make it more fun the rules of printer drivers keep changing HyperCard for instance does things in a totally new way So I decided to handle printing by emulation I make the SLM804 act like an ImageWriter The printer emulator accepts data as though it were an ImageWriter dot matrix printer and prints it to the SLM804 The only printer driver required is Apple
77. artition tables are marked with the Atari symbol at left whereas real Apple Macintosh drives are not so marked The Spectre will recognize Apple SCSI formatted hard disks and use them correctly An Extremely Cool Trick Sometimes it s a great advantage to be able to use different Systems and Finders For instance Finder 5 3 System 32 uses little memory but doesn t support CDEVs or INITs Finder 6 1 System 6 0 2 uses lots of memory supports CDEVS and INITs but sound won t work on it at the moment And so forth If you feel like it set up your hard disk this way Put two or three 1 2 megabyte partitions at the start of your Spectre partitions Put Finder 5 3 System 3 2 on thc first little partition Finder 6 0 System 4 2 on the second Finder 6 1 System 6 0 2 on the third Then use this menu to enable just one of the three boot partitions you can thus quickly and easily flip back and forth between different System Finders Floppy Disk Menu gt Format Thisallows you to format floppies into Spectre or Macintosh format sce Figure 12 You select the drive to be formatted single or double sided and whether to format into Spectre modified ST format or into Mac GCR format The Mac format is only available if you are using the Spectre GCR The formatting will begin when you click on the format menu if any errors are encountered an crror message will be shown You do 83 Spectre Menus not have the option of creati
78. ata around fast Check out Figure 24 Apple uses their own SCSI It comes out of the Mac on a 25 pin connector a DB 25 that looks identical to the ones on the back of the ST where you hook up a printer and modem It s fairly close to true SCSI except Apple doesn t put any terminators inside the Mac like they should have editorial comment Now you say true SCSI is 50 pins how do they manage with 25 Well the 50 pin standard SCSI has odd pins as ground and some pins that aren t really used so 25 is enough for the essentials NOTE true SCSI pin 25 is NOT ground every other odd numbered pin is What you need to do is connect the Apple 25 pin connector to the 50 pin connector true SCSI ribbon cable inside the Atari drive This is a matter of connecting pin A to pin B for Apple s25 wires and is a nice afternoon project with some Radio Shack style parts I ve included the necessary pin numbers Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks SCSI Specification Apple SIDE 50 pin standard SCSI DB 25 Apple standard Pin Signal Pin 5 GROUND de 2 DB 0 8 4 DB 1 21 6 DB 2 22 8 DB 3 10 10 DB 4 23 12 DB 5 11 14 DB 6 12 16 DB 7 13 18 DB PARITY 20 20 GROUND 14 22 GROUND 16 24 GROUND 18 25 TERMPWR 25 n c 28 GROUND 9 30 GROUND 24 32 ATN 17 34 GROUND 7 36 BSY 6 38 ACK 5 40 RST 4 42 MSG 2 44 SEL 19 46 C D 15 48 REQ 1 50 I O 3 If you ve never done this sort of work forget it
79. atting Spectre partitions from the Spectre menu page you should always reboot Otherwise GEM may try to access data on that partition not realizing the partition has been subverted to Spectre format It could damage the Spectre directory and boot data or whatever Let GEM reboot it ll figure out the partition is off limits to GEM and reshuffle the icons Beware this icon shuffle You ll note how the icons are assigned one at a time starting at C to the next available GEM only partition If you change a GEM partition in the middle of a bunch of GEM partitions all the GEM partitions past it will shift down one letter as of next reboot Istrongly recommend purchasing a copy of ICD sor Supra s Hard Disk Utilities to help keep track of your hard disk and what s going on in general They are extremely valuable and have saved me many times When you format Spectre partitions you ll temporarily lose the autoboot ability of your disk drive to autoboot into ST mode at all No sweat Just re run the Enable Boot program to re enable hard disk autoboot This happens because tweaking the partition table to tell GEM we re taking over a partition upsets a flag that tells GEM that the hard disk is bootable Atari s driver software quits looking for partitions on a drive and assigns drive icon letters to partitions as soon as it finds a non GEM one Thus you end up with GEM partitions you cannot access if you put a Spectre partit
80. ble Finally I began to dream of keyboard codes and CAPS LOCK Keys I d loaded my brain to the brim with all Known information In desperation I reached far back into my bag of programmer s tricks for the old axiom no pain no gain I logically inverted this to If pain gain Well it s logical right So I looked through my record collection for something that would be true pain And I found it Neil Young live in concert Off Key trembly voice songs whose lyrics would depress a hyena I put on the record player on automatic repeat turned it on and set to coding Time seemingly flew by Neil wailed about Sugar Mountain smoking your first cigarette friends coming to him for drugs and then dying the massacre of 27 Interlude Two the Mayans by Cortez Neil whimpered about how it was bet terto burn outthan to fade away and how rust never sleeps Six hours and 1 500 lines of code later I was done I tried assembling it for the first time No errors For those of you who aren t programmers this NEVER hap pens Every program has a few bugs if only because of typos and most have logic flow problems as well If you get a no error it usu ally means that your program has completely been wiped clean and a no program means no errors Well I looked at the disk and golly it seemed to have an as sembled file on it So Iran it The keyboard worked I typed a and the Ma
81. box to do it The Toolbox instead of the program talks to the hardware to get the writing done By altering the parameters of the Toolbox it ll work with the ST This is how Spectre 128 and Spectre GCR work Alas some Mac programs insist on going straight to the Mac hardware either by accident or deliberately When they do they re trying to crash because the Mac and ST hardware setups are only vaguely alike Depending on what exactly the program does it will either continuc malfunction or fail instantly Be aware that programs such as disk copiers LaserWriter spoolers and so forth go directly to the Mac hardware to do their job whereas programs such as spreadsheets word processors and such the vast majority of Mac softwarc have no nced to Thus the programs using Mac hardware are specific to the Mac and cannot run on the Spectre Honestly this isn t a Spectre bug You re going to be surprised how few programs feel any need to go the hardware The Mac Toolbox is extremely rich and varied and covers nearly every need a program can have This is why the Spectre is so compatible The only programs which consistently do not use the Toolbox are games and midi programs Some programs go to the hardware by accident They usc something called a Pointer which is a variable that points to another variable Well through some foulup or other the Pointer gets set to 0 the Mac s way of indicating an error condition exists
82. but there s a lot of quality units around from other companies too I just tend to find one that works and stick to it I ve lost my spirit of adventure when it comes to computer hardware I guess 137 Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks 5 This true 50 pin SCSI is then routed to the disk drive controller The controller is sometimes built into the disk drive sometimes not If you have multiple disk drive controllers the 50 pin cable is routed to each one that means it connects to them one after another You absolutely cannot do things like Y cables or a circular cable Note that the common Adaptec 4000 controller can handle two drives by itself so a two drive system doesn t necessarily imply two controllers Also Atari s MegaFile series of drives has merged together the ACSI SCSI board and the disk controller board and doesn t use the 50 pin true SCSI at all You can t get at true SCSI with that kind of hard disk The older SH204 is fine Thus in my system here just as an example the 19 pin cable comes out of the Atari and goes to an ICD board thence to the SLM804 laser printer The 50 pin cable starts at the ICD board s other end It s routed to an OMTI controller then to an Adaptec controller then finally to a hard disk with built in controller where the terminator is this last hard disk happens to be a Mac formatted drive I can unhook that drive and move it straight to the Mac to move big chunks of d
83. c Knew I d typed a I was really impressed I breathed Thank you Neil Neil replied about The Needle And The Damage Done 28 So I got ready to debug the mouse code which I was really dreading I moved the mouse to make room for a legal pad to take notes on and the mouse pointer onscreen tracked with the mouse as I moved it I played with the mouse in utter amazement for a few minutes It worked This is the first piece of programming I have ever written that worked the first time As any programmer will tell you this doesn t ever happen it did for me just this once To this day I am terrified to touch that code lest I break the spell that s clearly on it I attribute it all to Neil So these days I Keep in reserve a cassette of Live Rust no Kidding that s the name and when the programming gets tough Neil gets going im Getting It Going Getting It Going This is about half as hard as half of you think it is This is all stuff you ll have to do just once This section covers in stalling the ROMS and plugging your cartridge in 128 or GCR Next it walks you through starting up the Spectre off floppy for the first time just to give you a quick lesson on what it s all about While you re wondering what on earth that means take apart the Spectre 128 or Spectre GCR cartridge Just pull it apart Spectre GCR On the GCR pull it apart at the circular openings for the drive
84. c disk that comes with the Spectre package 146 Appendix F UltraScript Tips Appendix F UltraScript Tips Ifyouare getting Out of Memory errors with UltraScript get rid of your Desk Accessories large PostScript files can really chew up space when printing Freehand 2 0 PostScript files sometimes will not print with UltraScript In order to printthese files save them in EPS Encapsulated PostScript format load them into another program like PageMaker and print the PostScript file to disk from PageMaker rath er than directly from Freehand PageMaker has a Print to disk option Just press Option when you select Print from the File menu UltraScript program looks for a file called STARTUP PS during its initialization process and uses it if found We include a STARTUDP PS file on the Spectre disk which allows you to use down loadable Mac fonts such as CassadyWare without having to modify each one and allows a Ready Set Go 4 5 PostScript file with text in it to print properly As a bonus we also include a replacement error han dler The first section of theSTARTUP PS file is a replacement for the error handler which gives you a little more information if you crash while printing It will print what instruction you died at plus what ever would have been printed on that page If you don t want the error handler just delete the whole errordict section The first line of the second section after system
85. ckets gt Spectre 128 The ROM marked 342 0341 whatever goes into the socket FARTHEST AWAY from the gold fingers right next to the L3 little chip on the board Of 342 0341 necu The ROM marked 342 0342 whatever 342 0342 goes into the socket CLOSEST to the gold fingers next to the capacitor that goes across the board Check out Figure 2 to the right How to Insert Chips Figure 2 Not a lot has been said so far about how to insert chips into sockets What you want to do is get all 28 legs in there without bending onc up or having it stick out the side Generally the chips come to you a little splayed out the legs point out too much This can be cured by gently bending them a wee bit against a table or whatever Don t overdo it And if you blow it a pair of needlenose pliers will fix many ills Start one row of 14 pins Then push towards that row gently and get the other row started Then push thechip on in If itreally resists hard you re probably bending a pin ease up and try again Next pick the board up and look between the chip and the socket there s about 1 16th inch of space there to look in You ll be able to see the row of pins Look for one bent up bent in or splayed out Make sure the chip notch is on the capacitor end of the chip we have a 10 bet here at the office that I can t write a manual well enough to prevent someone from blowing up their ROMs so help me out okay Do
86. connectors Note we ship the GCR already apart to help you out gt Spectre 128 On the Spectre 128 only see the three pegs in the plastic cover If you put it back together with those pegs aligned on the top and bottom halves you re going to have a heck of a time getting it apart again I promise you That s why we ship with the top half reversed so you can get the lid off I d recommend real strongly that you leave the lid off or with the pegs reversed until you re sure everything is working It really is hard to get that lid off once those pegs grab ahold of each other Okay inside the plastic we have a circuit board Put it component side up and check it out Note the gold fingers They aren t the usual cartridge connectors because they re so expensive gold is very malleable soft and thus makes a much better connection inside your ST A lot of companies use tin which corrodes and needs periodic cleaning Also note the green stuff on the cartridge this is solder masking which helps prevent hair thin solder shorts on the cartridge which mean big trouble When you make circuit boards all these Whatthe quote means by the way is that too read J R R Tolkien 29 r3 Getting It Going tJ things are optional we went for the highest quality Believe me they charge you but plenty for the gold Now it s time to take some anti static precautions This means take your shoes off and don t do this next pa
87. cussion does not apply to you if you have a Spectre GCR You don t have to move Mac disks to Atari format since your GCR can read those Mac disks directly With Spectre 128 you need to get the Macintosh programs and data you want to use off the Mac format and onto a format the ST can use This is a hassle true It s the main reason why we came out with the Spectre GCR There s several ways to get Mac data to Spectre Format gt You can wire together a Mac and an ST and modem the programs and data across a null modem cable The Mac will read the Mac disks with its disk drive the ST will write the ST disks with its disk drive Any modem program will do the trick Freeterm and Termworks seem to be popular Look on the bright side you ll only have to download it once When starting up run a terminal program on each machine and download System Finder and a Mac terminal program like Termworks from the Mac to the ST Then use DCFormatter included on your Spectre Disk to format an 800K MFS Spectre format disk sometimes it is also called Magic format Use Transverter see the Transverter Appendix to transfer the stuff you downloaded from ST format to Spectre Format Then boot up with the Spectre System Finder disk Then gt You can use software that you ve downloaded with a Mac terminal program while in Spectre Mac mode The ST will go ahead and write the data with its disk drive into Spectre format and have
88. ded with a bad position and that s it for the program One of the address registers will likely match the Bus Cycle that points to the scene of the crime Illegal Instruction Errors These generally mean something on my end data getting executed somehow I use these as breakpoints sometimes to flag impossible conditions that never should happen 150 e Appendix G Crashing Other Registers Here s what the rest of the stuff on the page is The PC is the program counter it s 2 10 bytes past where the fatal error occurred The IR is the Instruction Register generally it matches the opcode that caused the fatality The AT is the Access Type that s not real useful generally it s an encoded form of the IR The SR is the Status Register it should be 21xx to 27xx to ensure supervisor mode and IPL whatever Then the data and address registers D0 D7 and A0 A7 are dumped Usually with a zerostore you see an address register at 0 any other bus errors usually have a bus cycle pointing off to Mars somewhere Usually with an address error a register is pointing to the same place that Bus Cycle reported With a little disassembly at this point you can trace down the offending pointer and possibly fix the program providing you re developing it If you re a user and it s a minor feature that causes the crash fine don t do that anymore if it s a major feature get the manufacturer to fix it or use the competition I am alway
89. dict fixes the problem with fonts like CassadyWare The next two lines fix the prob lem Ready Set Go 45 has when printing text Inorder to get downloadable Mac fonts to work you have two choices You can either use the STARTUP PS file we send on the Spectre disk or you can use a program like FEdit to find this line found near the beginning of the data fork in each font you are print ing cache NL 0 eq setcachedevice 6 pop repeat ifelse 0 0 moveto def 147 Appendix F UltraScript Tips and change it to cache 0 0 moveto NL 0 eq setcachedevice 6 pop repeat itelse def Get the additional 35 fonts available for UltraScript Adobe brand fonts are encrypted and are not compatible with UltraScript and UltraScript fonts aren t compatible with Adobe fonts so don t buy Adobe fonts to use with UltraScript This does not mean that you can t print programs in Mac mode that use Adobe fonts you just need to have the same fonts for UltraScript that you have in the Adobe brand As far as PostScript is concerned Times Roman is Times Roman Thanks to Graeme Bennett for his notes from his expedition into UltraScript and Spectre 148 Appendix G Crashing Appendix G Crashing There you are peaceably minding your own business running some MacProgram when whamt the crash page scrolls up It sadly informs you that the program crashed so badly that the zero store han dler couldn t even restore it to life
90. e FileType should be left as TEXT and the Creator as To put it simply if you don t know what they mean just leave them the way they are After selecting your options and clicking on OK then Transverter will read in the file While the transfer is in progress a status indicator will be visible on the scrcen The status indicator consists of three bars which fill in from left to right indicating the portion of the operation which has been completed For the ST format disk there is only one bar A Mac does things a little differently a Mac file has two parts the Resource Fork and the Data Fork the Resource Fork consists of the program icons menus dialogue boxes etc and the Data Fork consists of other data such as text files Usually an application will be mostly Resource Fork and a text file will be mostly Data Fork see Figure 21 After Transverter has read the file off the ST disk it will check to make sure the disk you are transverting to is an MFS formatted Spectre or Mac disk then it will write the file In the case of MacBinary files Transverter will write the complete filename to the Spectre disk usually 122 e Transverter not the same as the filename on the ST disk Transverting Spectre to ST As you might imagine transverting from Spectre to ST Format is very similar The only real differences are in the file selector the status indicator and lincfeed handling Desk File Options F
91. e as well whatever is in screen memory happens to show up on the screen and whatever is in the sound area gets played on the speaker If the two memory arcas collide then your sound effects show up onscreen as a messy pattern of white black dots and the sound becomes very strange Mac programs that used to force sound on regardless of the volume setting would end up drawing strange shifting boxes about two thirds of the way down the ST s screen that s the sound data being interpreted as a video image The ultimate music video I guess On the Mac video screen memory is 21 888 bytes long On the ST screen memory is 32 000 bytes long If we begin the video memory at where it usually is on the Mac the ST screen memory while running Mac mode runs into the sound memory and into other stuff causing trouble Thus I usually shift screen memory down around 10 000 bytes so it misses sound buffers error memory and other things This is selected by default with the alternate video option on the Spectre front panel This works on almost all Mac programs which rely on soft pointers to tell them where the screen is A very few Mac programs are hard coded to assume the Mac screen starts at where it always 60 D m Mac Mode does on the Mac 7A700 if you run into one of those programs select normal video instead of alternate vidco on the Spectre startup page Probably though the program will
92. e probably best played with sound cut completely off There is a very popular program called SoundMaster which lets you attach digitized sounds to certain mouse functions For instance the Beep on the system I m typing this on now sounds like a sonar pin n ng g g You ll want to get SoundMaster you can download it from most any BBS Compuserve or GEnie along with some digitized sounds for it they re a lot of fun One thing though disk access and SoundMaster don t mix even on a rcal Mac So don t attach a sound to Disk Eject or Disk Insert okay Version 1 9F used to slow the system unnccessarily and force the 59 Mac Mode o user to toggle off sound manually by pressing ESC this bug has been fixed in 2 0 In general it s best to leave Sound 11 selected as the de fault If for some strange and arcane reason Sound doesn t turn itself off after playing you can force it off by pressing ESC Alternate Video Since this is related to sound I ll put it here Briefly in the memory of the machine you must set aside room for the video screen memory this is memory that is displayed up on the monitor this happens 70 times per second You must also set aside room for the sound image memory this is sound that is output 370 times per refresh which happens 70 times per second or 25 900 times per second Now this memory is the same as any ol computer memory It just happens to do something els
93. e writing program the fa data files were there but no program I needed the original pro gram disk It took a while to find Said I to my wife Hey no problem These 3 1 2 disks have a little shutter door the gunk won t be inside I cleaned the mayonnaise off the outside opened the door to show Sandy and found that Jennifer was one clever little girl indeed She d gotten the mayonnaise inside too Could we get back to the store Nope no time So out came the isopropyl alcohol We cleaned the disk surface as best we could with about a thousand Q tips plugged it into the Mac drive which sounded most odd indeed probably it was well lubricated and miracle of miracles copied the programs off the mayonnaise disk and made a backup That drive by the way has been a little weird since Moral of the story I realize you re perfect and don t make mistakes I m not even suggesting that you need to backup for that reason But there are many little Jennifers out there in many shapes and form just waiting to destroy your data 43 Interlude Three 44 D uy Mac Mode Stuff You Need to Know While in Mac Mode This section of the manual deals with using the Spectre 128 GCR in Mac mode and on how the ST in Mac mode is different from a Mac Ejecting Floppy Disks You MUST NOT eject the floppy disks unless specifically asked to To treat the Spectre like you treat the ST changing disk
94. ed conversions or Add Strip which will cause linefeed conversions to occur Adding or stripping linefeeds will increase the transfer time of a file by 2 3 times This usually isn t a problem with short files lt 50K but can really take some time with longer files Desk File KTTITTE SELECT DEFRULT OPTIONS Header MacBi nary Linefeeds ILA Leave Type Creator TEXT 2777 Figure 20 If you are transverting ST to Spectre or Mac Add Strip will cause linefeeds to be stripped Linefeeds will be added if you are trans verting from Spectre to ST The third parameter is the FileType and Creator to use when transverting text ASCIT file to a Macintosh disk You can change these if you wish but unless you know what you re doing you will get some very strange results when in Mac mode The linefeed and FileType Creator options can also be changed from other menus such as ST Mac This dialogue box just brings 120 D uy Transverter all the settings together in one place and allows you to change the de fault settings After selecting your options you can sclect OK Cancel or Save just like with the Set Drives option Again the ST file TRNSV4 INF contains these settings along with the drives chosen in Set Drives gt Write Boot In order for the Spectre to be able to boot from a disk even if it has System Finder on it there must be special data on
95. elephone will always talk to the Atari s serial port period Thus things like modem programs which use the Mac modem port in software will end up talking to C The Mac modem scrial port the one on the Mac 101 Printers and Spectre Ta the serial RS 232 port on the ST as they should E Now you have a choice as to whether or not the Mac printer port the one on the Mac marked with the little printer talks to the Atari s serial or parallel port usually it s parallel but you can force it to serial if you need to for a serial printer like the ImageWriter Of course then you ve got a problem Anytime the Mac talks to the Mac modem port it will output to the ST s serial port and anytime the Mac talks to the Mac printer port it will also output to the ST s serial port If you don t have the proper device connected at the proper time you re going to have trouble Or garbage Or something You cannot get away with having both a modem and the printer hooked up to the serial port at the same time even with a three way cable The modem and printer will fight one another for control and whocver loses sometimes loses with a blown driver chip Please don t try It s also not good for cables and tempers to swap back and forth all the timc If you have to use a serial printer and serial modem please get an A B switch box and manually switch between devices when you need to CompuAdd sells those boxe
96. em to the trash Don t worry we re not throwing away their data We re just throwing away their icon which forces an eject This is the best way to eject any kind of disk Sometimes if you do Control A Control E to eject the hard disks you ll be asked to re insert one or more hard disk partitions While a 97 a Hard Disks and Spectre i function key would reinsert the partition just ignore the request and shut off your computer Which ever way you choose to do the hard disk eject is irrelevant what matters is the directory update that happens right before the eject Shut the ST off At this point you will not be able to autoboot the ST because you have changed the partition types so you need to reenable it Boot the ST with the Utility disk that came with your Hard Drive and run the autoboot maker It is called HDUTIL if you used ICD s software and SUPUTIL if you used Supra s Then restart your ST to make sure the autoboot is working This time re run SPECTRE PRG Now we ve got a hard disk partition out there with System and Finder on it thus it is bootable Select Boot from HD under the Hard Disk options Of course you should see your hard disks names there Feel free to rename them when in the Mac mode at the Desktop Press RETURN and you ll boot from the hard disk provided all is well and darn fast too It takes maybe a fourth of the time of the floppy boot Try runni
97. emory instead of from disk at much much higher speed see Figure 7 As a demonstration turn the cache on and run MacPaint from floppy It ll take 17 seconds to load that s normal floppy load time All those sectors you just read were stored in the Cache Now quit from MacPaint and rerun it this time it will load in 3 seconds straight out 76 re m Spectre Menus of cache memory probably without even switching the disk on Note also that the time it takes to return to the Desktop is very fast with the Cache on that s because the Finder gets put into the Cache It s liking having a flexible RAMDISK Now you should turn the cache off if You re running in 832K mode This is automatic there s not enough room for 320K of cache You badly need the Mac main memory like with HyperCard on a 1040 ST You don t care much about floppy speed like if you re running off a hard disk and rarely touch floppies Then the 320K is more valuable being given to the Mac OS than to floppies che Printer Hard Disk Floppy Disk Goodies AN File Memory OF Figure 7 Printer Menu As mentioned previously the Mac has two serial ports One is assigned to modem functions the other assigned to printer functions With this menu you select where printer output goes your E Spectre Menus LJ ST s serial or parallel port Usually it s parallel see Figure 8 You may also select the SLM804 Laser Printer a
98. endix B Special Function Keys Appendix B Special Function Keys General Keys Disk Drives Function 1 Mount floppy drive A Function 2 Mount floppy drive B Function 3 Mount first Spectre HD partition Function 10 Mount eighth Spectre HD partition Shift 1 Orwell s Disk Monitor ON Shift J Orwell s Disk Monitor OFF default OFF Shift Turbo Disk Mode ON default ON Shift 2 Turbo Disk Mode OFF gt Color Shift Keypad Show top of scrolled screen Shift Keypad Show bottom of scrolled screen Shift Keypad Switch to scrunched mode Shift Keypad Switch to scrolled mode Sound ESC Sound off gt Miscellaneous Alt Insert Patch SCC and VIA addresses default ON Alt Delete Restore SCC and VIA addresses Alt Keypad Emulate a Mac Plus Alt Keypad Emulate a Mac 512KE default ON Shift Help Reboot from Mac mode to ST Desktop Shift Undo Reboot Mac mode gt After Crashing Return Reboots Mac mode same as Shift Undo Keypad Return to Finder in Mac mode if possible 133 Appendix B Special Function Keys T SLM804 Keys gt Screen Snapshots Shift Keypad 0 72 dpi rotated screen snapshot Shift Keypad 1 300 dpi straight screen snapshot Printer Interceptor Shift Keypad 2 Enable printer interceptor default ON Shift Keypad 3 Disable printer interceptor gt Debugger Only Shift Keypad 4 debugger option dumps bytes in hex Don t use Shift K
99. er is far different Obviously if we have ROM for Read Only Memory we need RWM for Read Write Memory Interlude Four which is what RAM really is But unfortunately it is im possible to pronounce RWM Riwm Rum Rowm Runn So that s why they call it RAM On with the story The original RAM was called Static RAM If you wrote something into a static RAM it stayed there for good as long as you gave it power Alas it was hard to pack much static RAM into a chip The most I ve seen is 32K per chip So the engineers came up with a horror story called Dynamic RAM which we re stuck with today Your ST has between 512 000 and 4 000 000 bytes of this stuff When you write to a dynamic RAM what you wrote immediately begins leaking away I AM NOT KIDDING The CPU must refresh the data to fill the cup up again before the data all leaks away at the rate of thousands of times per second Thus every micro you see on the market is actively struggling 69 Interlude Four just to Keep its marbles Now add the influence of cosmic rays to all this No I m not into UFO s or Shirley Maclaine it s for real When a cosmic ray which you and I and both of our computers are constantly being bombarded with hits a dynamic RAM bit the bit goes twang and sometimes flips Some computer designers put in parity bits to detect this if a memory bit magically
100. es for continuing with this project If you copy it and give it away or especially if you upload it to a BBS you ll help to prevent the Spectre from surviving long and from being improved We are not making much profit off this product and the ST market is relatively small compared to the Mac or IBM market it only takes a little piracy to destroy an ST product What profit we make gives us time to improve the Spectre so it s plowed right back in you see it as an improved product down the road Wc have proven we do improve and upgrade the product you ve made our new product Spectre GCR possible Thank you for your support Please help keep upgrades pos sible by not giving the software away to anyone File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk Floppy Disk Goodies Version 2 0 ckac Ya Ey Buell has j 903 791 6098 AM W Littleton Bled 210 211 Fax 303 791 0253 Littleton Colorado 80120 1988 1989 Gadgets by Small Inc Figure 4 It only takes a few people to upload to BBS s and destroy a product as has been proven time and time again the average lifespan of an ST program is often measured in wecks duc to pirates Please don t be one of the people to hurt the Spectre File Menu There s three options here see Figure 5 page 73 gt Save Settings takes the way the Spectre is currently configured 72 EN D Spectre Menus memory size printer selection etc and saves it to a file named SPECTRE CNF on
101. eypad 5 disables hex dump Don t usc Instant Page Dump Shift Keypad 6 Dump whatever is in the laser buffer to the Laser gt Page Eject Shift Keypad 9 Send a form fecd to the printer page eject Shift Keypad 7 and Shift Keypad 8 are disconnected and are no longer in service 134 Appendix C Connections Appendix C Connections Atari Serial to ImageWriter I Atari DB 25 Female ImageWriter I DB 25 Male CTS 5 DTR 20 TxD 2 RxD 3 RxD 3 TxD 2 GND 7 GND 7 Null Modem or ImageWriter II Cable A null modem cable is used to connect a Mac Plus SE or II to the Atari in order to download Mac software when using the Spectre 128 The same cable is also used to connect an Atari to a Mac Imagewriter II see Figure 23 Atari DB 25 Female ImageWriter II or Mac 8pin din DTR 20 CTS 2 HKSi CTS 5 DTR 1 HKSo TDx 2 RxD 5 RxD 3 TxD 3 GND 714 GND 4 8 6 Figure 23 135 Appendix C Connections Appendix D i i ppendix D SCSI Hard Disks Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks Well here s certainly a topic not for the faint hearted As we mentioned before you can indeed hook up an Apple SCSI hard disk to the Atari and the Spectre will recognize and use it LOTS of people have asked us how to do this Now for the ifs ands or buts SCSI is an extremely complex thing and not at all industry standard Apple doesn t use standard SCSI neither does Atari Hence it can take some doing to make SCSI
102. first is no sound at all This also disables Sound at the Macintosh Device Manager level literally when programs try to do sound the Mac will reply Huh Sound Whazzat to them Sclecting this option crashes a few programs such as the World Builder Adventure Construction Sct The second is Sound 11 or sound at 11 khz This is probably the option you want to use 87 Spectre Menus The third is Sound 22 or sound at 22 khz This isn t such a good option at the moment it slows the system beyond belief Try it and you ll see what I mean Telling you how Mac sound works is a bit beyond the scope of this manual Unless you re familiar with digitized sound interrupts and so forth it s going to look pretty techno gecky Essentially the Mac gets sound for free from its disk hardware the ST has to work hard to produce sound the Mac way Doing it com pletely the same way as the Mac takes up to 75 of the total processor and just beats the poor 68000 to death you ll sec this as drastically slowed speed This is 22 khz mode I put in a compromise option 11 khz which works half as hard and only loses a small portion of the sound to be output the really high frequency stuff Because I ve been to a Van Halen concert I can t hear sounds that high frequency anymore to begin with so it doesn t matter to mc Because it s only making the ST work half as hard you lose about 40 of the processor No
103. from HD v Rutomount HD a Slow SCSI Devices Figure 9 You re going to have to read the hard disk section of the manual Heavy Metal Rock And Roll Hard Disks to gain full understanding of these options See Figure 9 for the menu choices gt Boot from HD selects whether or not the system attempts to boot into Mac mode off the hard disk This assumes you have a good System Finder and Desktop on the hard disk s first Spectre partition and have installed them properly using the Installer program which is included on the Systems disks from Apple If the boot fails and you ve got System Finder out there assume the hard disk is damaged boot from floppy and manually add the hard disk drives by pressing the Function Keys gt Automount HD This option automatically mounts all available Spectre hard disk partitions upon bootup Slow SCSI allows the Seagate 277N and 296N hard drives to work properly Strictly speaking this option does not mean your hard drive is going to slow down to a snail s pace it just slows hard drive accesses to a speed they can handle If you are getting File xxxx was skipped could not be copied messages or crashes while booting into Mac mode this option should 79 Spectre Menus eliminate the problem gt Devices The Devices menu brings up a submenu sce Figure 10
104. hange signal for two things Detecting that you ve inserted a disk If you have the Mac OS will go read it find out if it s a valid Mac disk and mount it plot its icon if you re at the Finder or make it available to you on the Select File menus Detecting that you ve removed a disk after the Mac requests a disk cject the blinking A or B The F1 F2 keys simulate this disk change signal to allow things to work with write protected disks or drives that just plain don t work right This particular menu option lets you turn off sensing completely This is for drives that return many write protect line glitches some mechanisms do this when no disk is inserted making the Mac OS see nearly continual disk inserts Without the ability to ignore those disk 86 D Spectre Menus inserts the Spectre would be unusable on those machines the continu al glitches lock up the Mac operating system making it think its op erator has gone berserk inserting and ejecting disks EDITOR A drive functioning over and above the call of duty If you de select this option you re responsible for pressing F1 F2 to notify the Mac OS of inserts ejects Otherwise Mac mode will just sit there with a flashing A or B on the screen Goodies Menu A File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk Floppy Disk KTTTITI Work id r Ku ES EEE Sound 11 Sound 22 v Alt video Figure 15 gt Sound There are three options with sound The
105. he see next menu item than to run in the highest memory mode except if you absolutely must have that memory such as for HyperCard If you don t care about floppy speed e g you re running a hard disk then feel free to turn the cache off and get another 320K of available memory You can t use 832K with a color monitor so you ll be set to 512K automatically Laser Printer If you select the Atari SLM804 Laser Printer on you will lose 1 meg of memory to the Laser Printer buffer the Laser by its design requires 954 000 bytes of system memory to be reserved to build up a memory image of what the page will look like the memory image is then dumped into the Laser Printer at very high speed If you re on a 2 meg machine and tum the Laser Printer on you ll be left at 408K memory for Mac mode if you leave the cache on That s very shaky for many Mac programs It might be best to disable the cache and recover the 320K of memory it takes up A 2 5 meg machine will be okay as will a 4 meg machine Because different people use the Mac for different things we ve left all these options configurable For instance if the Mac tells you it needs more memory tum off the cache on the Spectre menu page and try again Cache Menu The Cache is a dedicated RAMDISK It works like this Whenever you read or write a disk sector it is remembered in memory in the Cache The next time you need that disk sector it s read from m
106. hich run at well the moral equivalent of 100 000 baud Still I shouldn t be hard on the Translator it was the first time anyone had read and written Mac disks in Atari drives and no one pushes the envelope perfectly the first timc I knew that I could never look at the Translator code again with out having a claustrophobia attack so I resolved to do it right a car Even people in Iraq want more information about the Spectre 6 D gt fa Introduction tridge based Mac disk reader writer The cartridge port can move a million bytes a second if you try So we got the first prototype boards in January 1989 and EDITOR Yawn Cut to the chase Dave We showed the preliminary GCR for the first time in April a bet ter pass in June and the final here s what you get unit in August During this time the Beta testers helped me debug the GCR suggested features for it and found strange quirks which otherwise would have been inflicted on you Bless you Beta Testers Mark Booth Jeff Greenblatt Bruce Rogovin Norman Walker Doug Wheeler I can safe ly say each one of them saved you at least one bug I don t know how many characters of code I ve written to support the GCR I ve purposely not counted because I blew away Spring and Summer 1989 getting final kinks out of it I do know that I knew all my compact disk albums so well and was so sick of them that Sandy took pity on me and got me a random disker ch
107. hift Keypad 9 to do a Form Feed You can do this anytime Eventually we plan on changing to other keys but for now the Keypad was most convenient to use Because by now we ve mentioned lots of keys here s a handy table Snapshots Shift Keypad 0 72 dpi rotated screen snapshot Shift Keypad 1 300 dpi straight screen snapshot Printer Interceptor Shift Keypad 2 Enable printer interceptor for SLM804 printing Shift Keypad 3 Disable printer interceptor Debugger Only Shift Keypad 4 debugger option dumps bytes in hex Don t use Shift Keypad 5 disables hex dump Don t use Instant Page Dump Shift Keypad 6 Dump whatever is in the laser buffer to the Laser Page Eject Shift Keypad 9 Send a form feed to the printer page eject 107 i Re Printers and Spectre D gt PostScript Printing As I mentioned before PostScript is the laser printer standard language it describes what a printed page looks like The Apple LaserWriter is a PostScript printer when you select Print from a Mac you are actually sending a PostScript file to the LaserWriter which has to interpret it in order to print That s why it takes so long to print sometimes the LaserWriter has to figure out what the pages sent to it look like before it can print them The Atari Laser Printer can t print PostScript files by itself it re quires an interpreter called UltraScript by Imagen You must have
108. hing that is read from or written to the hard disk is done in 512 byte chunks the operating system worries about making those 512 byte chunks into odd byte sized files for you and I A 20 megabyte hard disk thus has 40 000 512 byte sectors on it multiply it out 20 million bytes Unless you have HDX 3 0 Atari s new hard disk driver or ICD s Version 4 0 you re stuck with Atari s Disk Operating System for GEM GEMDOS which falls on its face when confronted with hard disks bigger than 16 megabytes The limit ought to be 32 megabytes but there was a 2 character typo in the GEMDOS source code that wasn t caught in time so now we re stuck with 16 So how to usce all of a 20 meg drive Well we split it up into pieces called partitions Atari allows you to split a hard disk up into 4 partitions So for instance if we take a 20 megabyte drive and slice it into four 5 megabyte partitions it looks like this Sectors 1 10 001 first partition Sectors 10 002 20 002 second partition Sectors 20 003 30 003 third partition Sectors 30 004 40 004 fourth partition HMQ 94 gt i L Hard Disks and Spectre Note that it isn t exactly even for instance you start at 30 004 not 30 000 To the operating system these are all completely different drives say C D E and F Only at the lowest level do the drives come together on the mechanism The hard disk handler does this When we ask for sector 1 of drive C we get phys
109. hit ENTER than RETURN Memory Menu This menu basically tells the Spectre how much of the ST s memory to allocate to the function of being Mac Main Memory e g memory the Mac operating system will know about and use see Figure 6 This is the amount of memory that shows up on the About Finder page while you are in Mac mode Thereare four places memory is devoted to or is affected by Mac Main memory what we re selecting now your choice Floppy Cache a 320K floppy accelerator that you may turn on off SLM804 Laser memory 1 megabyte only needed if you have an Atari Laser Printer Memory that the Spectre must use for runtime code always needed and you can t change it This all adds up to whatever amount of RAM you have in your computer Generally it is best to use the maximum memory possiblc This is the default by the way This way your programs and data on the Mac will have the largest possible working space The Mac has the ability to get by with less memory by constantly going to disk if you do this you ll find spiderwebs on you by the time you re finished floppies are far slower than memory If you don t have enough memory for a given size it will be greyed out and thus unavailable You can t allocate memory you don t have So overall just leave it at the default and forget about it There are exceptions I ll tell you about in a moment particularly if you re running on a 1 meg ST
110. ht of the keyboard Contrary to popular belief this is NOT the same as the RETURN key particularly to Macintosh applications Next we get the two most confusing keys Command On the Mac there s a key called Command It s the one with a cloverleaf symbol on top of it it doesn t say Command You use the Command key a lot for shortcuts on the Mac for instance Command E pressing E while holding down COMMAND cjects a disk Command X is always Cut to Clipboard Command V is always Paste from Clipboard There s many more keyboard shortcuts check your program manual for morc details Mac Mode On the ST the Command key is the Control key I did it that way so the first two letters Co mmand Co ntrol were the same so it would be easy to remember gt Option Next the Mac has an OPTION key This key is usually uscd to let you get to guess optional stuff For instance go into the Key Caps Desk Accessory hold down OPTION and you ll see a bunch of different optional characters you can display stuff like a or symbol On the ST the OPTION key becomes the ALTERNATE key Thus if your Mac software wants you to press OPTION just hold down ALTERNATE and press 6 If your Mac software wantsa COMMAND G just hold down CONTROL and press G Okay Some people get confused by this because on the Mac keyboard OPTION and COMMAND are both down on the bottom row by the space bar and on the
111. ical sector 1 of the drive And when we ask for sector 1 of drive D we get the first physical sector of the D partition 10 002 off the drive Similarly asking for the first sector of the F partition gives us sector 30 004 See how they re all put on one drive together There s a place where the offsets for each partition are kept that s the first sector of the hard disk It s also called the partition table and boot sector The data for the Hard Disk menu starting sector and size and type comes from here Okay shortly after Atari did this Supra and other people came out with huge hard disks compared to Atari s 20 megabyte unit Given that we were stuck with 16 megabyte partitions because of the GEMDOS typo the most that a hard drive could hold was four 16 megabyte partitions 64 megabytes total Supra and ICD were already selling 130 megabyte units So Willie Brown and Mark White up at Supra came up witha new partitioning scheme Yup I m just name dropping You could have up to 12 partitions per drive And eventually they let you put up to 32 megabytes per partition with the stipulation that you only go bigger than 16 megabytes if the use for it wasn t GEMDOS e g wasn t anything in ST native mode The Spectre is a perfect example So what we do to make the Spectre hard disk compatible is take one or more of the hard disk s partitions and first mark it soGEM never look
112. ich you ll run into some time or other They all mean the same thing bad disk It all boils down to the same thing though make sure you have a good System Finder disk You can t get anywhere until you do When you re at the Desktop look around a little bit You ll notice that you must pull down the menus by clicking on the menu entry as opposed to the ST method of having them fall down on you sometimes by accident Try the Desk Accessoriesies the ST is limited to 6 but the Mac can have up to 15 or more using programs like Suitcase or Font DA Juggler You can open and close the disk icon much like the ST and you can move individual files within the disk around by dragging them very much unlike the ST where doing that would result in a file copy Okay time to shut down There will be a long dull explanation of this shortly but the summary is this DONOT use the ShutDown or Restart Menu op tions under Special Eject all disks shown on the Desktop including Hard Disks There are two ways to eject disks click on the disk icon to highlight it then pull down the File menu and select Eject Alternately just press Ctrl E or se 40 D m Getting It Going lect all the disk icons and drag them to the Trash This does not throw away the data on the disks The disk will likely whirr a bit this is the final update being done Then a blinking A or B will appear at the top of the screen This is the M
113. ick on Duplicate the copying will begin A File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk Nil i Goodies Duplicate floppy disk Drive A Drive B Spectre Mac m Single sided O Double sided Figure 13 You can monitor progress of the copying by watching the twin boxes at the bottom of the screen they are updated every 5 tracks dur ing the copy process There are 80 tracks total per side of a disk thus 160 on a double sided disk Also the copy process is smart with regards to the ST s memory if enough memory is available to hold the disk image no disk swapping is necessary Detect Disk Insertion This option tells the Spectre whether or not to use the write protect line to the floppy drives to detect a disk being inserted into a drive or a disk being removed from a drive sce Figure 14 This has already been mentioned but EDITOR The manual is getting longer Dave The ST hardware uses the disk s write protect line to detect disk 85 Fan Spectre Menus changes During a disk insert or removal there is a brief glitch on the write protect line the ST senses for this glitch 70 times per second Unlike other 3 1 2 disk systems the ST does not specifically use a line to monitor disk change Unfortunately this sensing doesn t work on write protected disks due to drive sensor design JN File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk WFTTTTWIEZ Goodies Format Figure 14 TheMacOS depends on this disk c
114. igure 21 First you need to select Mac gt ST from the File menu then you sclect the file to be transverted When transverting to an ST disk Transverter will automatically add a MacBinary or Unary header unless the file has a Data Fork in which case Transverter will ask if you wish to transfer the file as Mac or Text ASCII see Figure 22 If you select text just the Data Fork of the Macintosh file will be transverted if you select linefeed conversion linefeeds will be added instead of removed Errors In most cases disk errors will not cause any permanent damage but there may be a few exceptions If Transverter reports an error 123 FR Transverter ID Desk File Options Convert g BROOKE as a Macintosh file or a text file Figure 22 when writing to a Spectre disk stop everything and try the disk with your ST in Mac mode If the disk works copy all the files to a new disk and reformat the one that gave the error If Mac mode can t read the disk don t panic even though it can t Transverter may be able to Use Transverter to transfer all the files to an ST disk and then transfer them back to a newly formatted Spectre disk If you get any other errors please report them to me along with what you were doing at the time of the error Earlier versions of Transverter had problems with large files Transverter 3 xx and above has a new memory management system which allows for much larger files
115. ild eyed and twitches when we run the ol Canon One time the kids decided it might be fun to watch PyeWackette being chased by Fang our dog The natural place to put them in together was our office Pye defied laws of gravity getting away from the dog going straight up walls shelves equip ment racks and so on An inferno of destruction followed in Pye s wake tools carefully sorted floppy disks manuscript pages and so on wafted to the floor in Pye s wake I have yet to find the new TurboST disk that Wayne sent me and the Mega 4 didn t appreciate the cat hair in the Keyboard either Pye sleeps on the monitor now nice and warm Or the Miraculous Walking Disks where certain popular disks 112 walk upstairs completely by themselves and hide under the Kid s beds How did HyperCard get up here We don t knoww ww They like HyperCard be cause of Manhole and Inigo s adventures you see If you have Kids you owe it to yourself to check_out these games which run under HyperCard they are en trancing I did not think it was funny to find a tube of expensive PAL chips in Eric s room their little legs bent around to help form some creature built partly of Legos partly of GCR s And my alligator clips are too often used as The Jaws Of Death The most terrifying to me is Jamey 18 months old Why Jamey is at that stage where he can walk get into trouble scream louder than an
116. ing project and wiped out Summer 1987 an 11 000 line Z 80 assembler program to control it tricky hardware to read write the weird Mac disk format and keeping an external device in sync with the Atari over a variety of adverse conditions is not a trivial project When released the Translator One was like a slow motion disaster the boards didn t work right for a variety of reasons Many were the days I left the office at 3 AM Thus went winter 1987 1988 In about March 1988 I left the company Data Pacific l d helped build The circumstances are much too painful to recount in what is otherwise going to be an upbeat manual Suffice it to say I wasn t happy with the direction the company was going From March 1988 to June 1988 I more or less retired taking it easy having a long long needed vacation I turned 30 in April 1988 2 e Table of Contents Introduction scce ose sis wie 9e ec So ee ers es eps 1 The I28IC ROMS is 2 2 MH readers ehrt 3 The Envelope 3 4 20 20er WW spe I 7 GOHCIUSIOII S te a edens tox estt e t ERR IN e re EY NR 9 A Preview of Coming Attractions eee 11 Interl de One 5 5 99 ofa pelts chere de sorore ein Sole 15 Requirements and Other Things 17 WOU Need xao toc hear ate pes E I AT Nat EYE TL ide 18 You Probably Wais rrari 9 o RR IR TEES 20 Plugging a Printer Ins ce ee bie ry rS hw e 24 Spectre and Mac Disk Formats LL 25 ST and Macintosh P
117. ion in the middle of a group of GEM partitions and use Atari s hard disk boot software ICD s and Supra s software is smarter than that If you have more than one hard disk alright they are mounted in ascending SCSI and LUN order 0 0 0 1 1 0 etc Then they are displayed in the Hard Disk menu so you can check there Note that deselecting a drive in the Devices menu changes this order That order determines what Function key hooks to what parti tion so keep a eye on it 143 Appendix E Hard Disk Tips You will find it difficult to return a Spectre partition to GEMDOS use It depends on your utility software If you can change the drive ID from ACK Spectre to GEM that may help you at least get it zeroed Careful on this don t zero the wrong partition F3 F10 work anytime provided there is a hard disk hooked to them otherwise they are ignored Such places as Finder File Selector Dialogues and so on work fine just like you inserted a big fast floppy disk It s treated the same way incidentally Ido not as yet understand why the hard disk sometimes refuses to fully eject maybe there s a flag somewhere not cleared I know the Please Insert Disk xxxx dialog can be forced off by Command Period Control but this could be dangerous If you are shutting down just ignore this message and turn the computer off It is extremely valuable that we can eject hard disks and
118. itching the machine off may damage your Spectre format disks BETTER READ THE MANUAL FIRST 11 Preview im The Spectre Menus A Survival Guide The next section explains all about the new Spectre menu page that Dan wrote It tells how to use the many many utilities we built into the Spectre 128 s pull down menus Things like formatting a disk copying it selecting memory size and so forth are covered here Heavy Metal Rock And Roll Hard Disks Then we settle down for some major fun We talk about running with a hard disk Believe me you haven t seen anything yet until you ve seen the Spectre running off a hard disk It screams If you can possibly afford a hard disk get one It s worth it Printers and Spectre Here s where we talk about printers and printer drivers and what to do with them It s also where we talk about our biggest area Under Construction teaching the otherwise mild mannered Atari Laser Printer to talk to the Spectre It s not as casy as it looks Where to Get Support As you ll see the Spectre users have formed a tight community to exchange information and help each other out they re good people I ll tell you how to get in touch with them We re at the dawn of the information age with people on line with computers if you want to sce state of the art support for users with the absolute latest news revisions hints bug reports and whatnot you want to join this community Believe me There s n
119. just a cable sticking out the back then plug that cable into either of the sockets on the GCR then plug the floppy cable from the GCR to the ST Generally it s best to put the GCR on the end of the chain for signal reflection reasons but if you can t you can t The floppy disk cable gets the GCR data from the disk drives which it shoots into the ST through the cartridge port and sends data coming from the cartridge port out to the disk drives Thus until the floppy cables are hooked up the GCR can t talk to disks The GCR will beable to get to putina Mac disk and if you put in a Spectre Format disk it works the GCR just won t be able to deal with Mac disks gt Spectre 128 Now here s the key thing to remember THE CHIPS GO FACE DOWN This is real important because if you put it into the ST and power on the ST with the chips up you ll fry the ROM chips And they re expensive little critters 32 Getting It Going Remember THE CHIPS GO DOWN Inevitably someone plugs the cartridge in the wrong way because they didn t read the manual And inevitably they kill the ROMs that way So go ahead and check to make sure the top of the chips are pointing down then put the PC board back into the case Go ahead and wait to put the lid back on until we re sure things are working okay Remember if you line up the three pegs it s going to be very hard to get the case apart Spectre 128 and Spectre GCR Now nex
120. k of it as a problem As I write this a cricket in the next room has been frantically chirping for about three hours and driving me slowly crazy Our weird cat PyeWackette is not in a hunting mood never is when it would do any good Sandy has just appeared with a can of RAID AR Blessed silence Back to the manual 125 Interlude Eight 126 Eo DJ Support Where and How to get Support We try to support our users to the best of our ability but in order to do so we need your help The best way is to send us your Registration Card so you can get the latest news and updates When it comes time to get questions answered report a bug or whatever you ve got several choices gt Drop usa letter Thistakesa while to turn around but is mighty inexpensive It also allows you to enclose a disk showing us the problem generally some MacProgram that MacCrashes so we can scc it and fix it gt Contact us online on BIX CompuServe GEnie or Usenet My signons there are BIX dsmall CompuServe 76004 2136 or type go atariven to go to the Atari ST Vendor conference areas GEnic Type gadgets at any prompt to go to the Gadgets Roundtable Usenet hplabs well dsmall The Well or perhaps if the phase of the moon is right you ll get through on hplabs boulder tcr gadgets dsmall The last one s our in house UNIX machine which takes delight in losing mail and unlinking itself from Usenet
121. key There is often one key on forcign keyboards that doesn t exist on the Atari keyboards on the International Mac keyboards it s to the left of the RETURN key There is just one key less on that row of keys on the ST than on the Mac To gencrate this key press the DELETE key on the ST keyboard to the right of the RETURN key Again I refer you to the Key Caps Desk Accessory it will make this all quite clear Go into Key Caps press the DELETE and Shift DELETE and sce what shows up Not only do you have an International keyboard to worry about you mustalso be awarc of which Macintosh System software you are working with The Macintosh has a different keyboard map for each different country If you use Ict s say a UK Atari ST witha USA System Finder you will run into keyboard problems for instance the Pound currency symbol will not work because that s not accessed the same on US Mac keyboards and the US System knows it 57 Mac Mode To solve this you must use the Apple Localizer utility this utility localizes your System to the proper country and gives you the correct key map Sce your local Apple dealer for the Localizer it s not included with System Finder at least not here in the US The Spectre has been tested for cach and every key on US UK French and German keyboards as far as we know it handles them all including the pre and post accent symbols If you can t find a key
122. ks it should write that directory out you ve already removed the disk Result the directory isn t updated and your work is lost Bad news Thus you must ALWAYS WAIT for the Mac to ask you to eject the disk in other words you get to play disk eject mechanism for the Mac Operating System Thus you ask the Mac to eject the disk It goes and updates the disk preparing it to be ejected waves byebye and sends a signal to physically eject The Atari drives ignore this since they haven t got an eject motor But my software starts blinking an A or B to tell you to eject the disk and the software waits until you do it before con tinuing There s lots of ways to politely ask the Mac to let you do a disk eject Under Finder the Desktop you can Click on a disk icon to select it and pull down Eject from the File menu Clickon a disk icon and press Control E which is Eject Press Control A to select all disk icons then press Control E this will eject all disks A helpful trick to remember Control A is Select All Control E is Eject whatever is selected You can select Eject at File Selector dialogs c g when you are telling a program where a file is going to be loaded from or saved to If you click on it you ll ask the Mac to cject that disk When running ona system with just floppies the Mac often decides on it s own that it wants to eject one disk and asks you to insert a different one
123. l be com fortable with it I ve seen other corporations get downright snob Interlude Seven bish about us having kids around the workplace you see the Kids are relatively quiet until I get on the phone at which point it sud denly becomes DreadFully Urgent for them to ask me questions or to provoke The Siren into another earth shattering roar At that point the person on the end of the phone realizes that Kids Are Around Funny thing though The cold snobbishness usually disap pears about one millisecond after we offer to pay cash up front for parts Security Now given all these happen ings we took SPECI AL precau tions with this manual Eric and Jenny have this thing about doo dling on the stuff Mommy and Daddy doodle on you Know Rolodexs notes printouts HyperCard stacks and so forth and are fully hacker qualified to run computer machinery as Eric proved to Barb Eric has shown me things about MacPaint and NEOchrome that no one else seems to Know Hence this manuscript has been carefully protected from them so that we can project our profes sional image to you Every night 113 Interlude Seven it s locked into a vault which is by our vicious guard dog from our ch are backed i drive which can written The manuseript was guarded day and night and kept in a secure child proof safe when not being edited I quas rushed to the printers in afockad sealed tamper pr
124. lated in some way to a crash and is a Mac peculiar ity Such crashes have a way of damaging System Finder without you realizing it until later Strong recommendation Keep a known good System Finder on a write protected floppy to boot from and restore your hard disk from especially if you are running new and unknown software Put your applications in the root or non folder directory that way HFS can find them quickly and easily when you try to launch a document directly 145 Appendix E Hard Disk Tips Apple disks bigger than 32 megabytes could possibly have a problem depending on how they were formatted and what Atari OS Software you are using Finder 5 3 System 32 or above is required to run HFS Don t try hard disks with Finder 4 1 System 2 0 Finder 5 3 System 3 2 has known bugs which include not being able to eject with Control A Control E and not plotting the Spectre disk icons We recommend Finder 6 0 System 42 but you can use whichever you prefer as all System Finder combinations work Idon teven want to talk about Mac viruses They ll work on the Spectre too Look out I do know that one anti virus program zaps out the Spectre s hard disk partition for good Absolutely use the VACCINE INIT Inits are like AUTO folder programs they are run automatically at system startup Absolutely use Disinfectant from time to time to check your system for infection and clear it up These programs are on the Ma
125. ld do things this way yet I thought I d seen em all But some Mac Programmer just 149 Appendix G Crashing came up with a new creative way to crash 0040xxxx 0041xxxx Someone tried to directly access the Mac ROMS at the address they would be on the Mac Ooops Perhaps a hardcoded jump in someone s program or a goofup on my part 0040008 or 0040009 used to be hit all the time this was the test if you were a Lisa or a Mac but with the declining popularity of the Lisa few people bother any more 0050xxxxx Someone tried to access the SCSI port directly Rare 0009BFFFF Someone tried to write to the serial modem chips directly without going through the toolbox OOOB9FFFF Someone tried to write to the serial modem chips directly without going through the toolbox 00C8xxxx Apparently an in house debugger at Microsoft or perhaps a direct test for the Radius Full Page display card I usually catch this Report this if you see it okay 000DExxxx Someone tried to read write directly to the disk chip Tisk tisk 000EFxxxx Someone wrote to the VIA chip which has many different functions The most common of these is turning the sound on directly with bit 7 of EFE1FE Address Errors This means an address register was pointing to an odd numbered address when a word or long move was tried Generally this is the fallout from the previously mentioned zerostore problem the pointer has gone whacko is loa
126. le appreciate not being insulted eg Hahahaha I ve got you now you ve got to read this turkey so we Te going to make it as bad as we can We don t care we don t have to Computer manuals today are absolutely horrific Oh they usually tell you EVERYTHING and that s the problem They re lousy at telling you what s important and what s trivia bowl only material It s up to you to decide It s something like reading a fiction book where pages and pages are devoted to describing the scenery with the plot sometimes Interlude One thrown in here and there An editor would tell the author of such a book to Keep it moving The other analogy that comes to mind is a dictionary with the words in random order EDITOR Keep it moving Dave Thus I try hard to tell you what s important in this manual what s merely interesting and what s frankly Kinda boring Because of this Spectre users are the best informed users I Rave ever seen and many are the people that Know more about using the Spectre than I do The legal stuff is well you can guess It s on the last page if that gives you any idea only because our lawyer locked us in his office until we put it in SOMEWHERE Welcome to the last four years of my life all those hours spent in front of aCRT coaxing a stubborn CPU into running an operating system never intended for it Welcome to some extremely dynamite applications software huge public d
127. lity The Spectre GCR not only allows you to run Macintosh software on your Atari computer it allows you to purchase Macintosh software and use it right out of the box COMPATIBILITY Macintosh Disk Compatible Read and write Mac disks with your Atari disk drives faster than the Mac can 128K ROM Compatible Runs new software which requires 128K ROMS such as HyperCard Adobe Illustrator PageMaker etc Compatible with Atari s new laptop computer Stacy Now you can have a portable Mac at an affordable price Compatibile with future Mac software Directly compatible with Mac s HFS file system and disk format SPEED Screen 30 larger and overall speed is 20 faster than Mac Plus Spectre GCR allows you to transfer data from Mac to Atari disks and back quickly and easily Screen redraw speed is 400 faster with 128K ROMs Optimization of hard disk Copying a 500K file on a hard disk used to take 2 min 26 sec it s now 8 seconds flat Optimization of floppy disk Floppy write speed is up to 8 times faster Gadgets by Small Une 40 W Littleton Blvd 210 211 Littleton Colorado 80120 Phone 303 791 6098 Fax 1 303 791 0253 Spectre GCR Requires 8 Atari Computer 1040 ST Mega 2 Mega 4 or Stacy Macintosh 128K or 64K ROMs e Macintosh System software amp Macintosh Application software Copyright 1989 Gadgets by Small Inc All Rights Reserved
128. lug things One is parallel one is scrial Use whichever one your printer takes CAUTION It used to be that parallel printers pretty much always used a 36 pin big plug and serial printers used a small 25 pin plug You couldn t plug one into the other because the plug wouldn t fit Nowadays you find lots of parallel printers on 25 pin plugs including the ST s Now PLUGGING A SERIAL PRINTER INTO YOUR PARALLEL PORT CAN BLOW UP YOUR ATARTS PRINTER CHIP INTO SMALL FRAGMENTS If you get a new printer either know what you re doing or check with someone who knows what they re doing don t just plug it in because the cable fits This is an excellent question for your local Atari dealer they do this stuff every day NEVER NEVER NEVER unplug your printer while your ST is turned on unless you enjoy big repair bills That s a quick and easy way to blow your printer chip This applies not only to Spectre mode but any old ST mode Don t ask me how I know this Quiet editor EDITOR ZZZZzzzzzz Huh Then you need to tell the Spectre which port you ve got the printer hooked up to Sorry the Spectre can t figure that one out for itself You do that on the Printer pull down menu when you start up It s really easy We default to parallel because most people use parallel for their printer leaving the serial port open for a modem to call online services BBS s etc 24 Requirements Spectre and Mac Disk Formats Okay now to disc
129. mputers in about 1983 and decided children were much more interesting She has a computer science de gree as well we met in the CS program at Colorado State She s the one responsible for getting this work to you for taking care of the thousand and one thankless little jobs that have to be done to get a product out the door That s why she s the president of our company In August we hocked ourselves to the gills and sweated Barb came to work with us answering the phone sending out literature and assembling Spectre 128 s Dan wrote a launcher that knocked my socks off and insisted I include it Darlah Pine of GEnie generously opencd an area for people to leave their names and addresses for infor mation Ron Luks of Compuserve did the same thing John DeMar and Mark Sloatman bent over backwards to get us plastic cases the Jeffco Community Association who employs handicapped personnel did the circuit assembly work in record time and has had our business ever since We like to take our retirement in pieces when we can afford it like Travis McGee of John D MacDonald fame Thank you Sandy Introduction m By September 1988 we had circuit boards plastic cases software and manuals so we went to the Glendale Show in California and put the Spectre 128 up for sale Our packaging people couldn t get the on the shelf packaging to us in time so we put the Spectres in colored manila envelopes
130. nd ALTERNATE until you re comfortable with how the keyboard is laid out there s a visual display of what Mac key the Mac thinks you re pressing there You can turn on Orwell s Disk Monitor by pressing SHIFT T this will tell you what track and sector number is being read from the disk It s kind of interesting to see those numbers flying by To turn it off press SHIFT J Turbo disk mode defaults to ON when you run the Spectre pro gram This means your drives are running at maximum speed If you have a certain type of hard disk Spectre may be running too fast for the drive You can test this by pressing SHIFT to turn Turbo disk mode OFF To turn Turbo mode ON again press SHIFT If your hard disk performance improves with Turbo OFF you should select the Slow SCSI option under Hard Disk on the Spectre menu page This changes the default Turbo setting from ON to OFF The Slow SCSI option actually just slows the hard disk down to a normal access rate it s not really slow Foreign Keyboards This section tells you how non USA keyboards work If you re using a USA keyboard feel free to skip over this to the Mouse Button section If you re using a non USA keyboard you must have the correctly Localized System to work correctly As a user of a foreign ST you must be aware of how this all works to avoid problems I know it appears complex it IS complex I had to write it Apple makes two physically
131. ng a double sided MFS or single sided HFS floppy neither of these is necessary with the 128K ROMS DCFormatter included on the Spectre disk has an option to for mat an 800K MFS floppy if you need it Incidentally because memory was so tight in 832K mode after adding support for the GCR we were forced to remove support for the Translator One to make room We didn t know this was going to be JN File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk ijl JEJ Goodies Format floppy disk Drive f Drive B Single sided Double sided Spectre Mac Figure 12 necessary until right before the GCR was to be released We started getting the ol out of memory errors It s impossible to use the GCR and Translator One at the same time anyway since they d fight over the disk drives If you badly need to use the Translator just drop back to an earlier version of the Spectre like 1 9F to do your translating gt Duplicate This submenu gives you a convenient way to clone a Spectre modified ST or Mac GCR disk see Figure 13 You select the from drive the source diskette and the to drive the destination diskette If these are the same you ll be prompted to switch diskettes as necessary You also select the disk type you are copying either Spectre ST or Mac GCR The Mac mode is only available if you are using the 84 t5 Spectre Menus GCR Finally you select single or double sided duplication When you cl
132. ng a few applications you ll notice how very fast they load and exiting back to Finder is fast too That s what it s all about When you want to access your second Spectre partition press F4 If you had a third you could press F5 but since you don t in this ex ample the system will ignore F5 Try copying the System and Finder from one 5 meg partition to the other Zip Zipzip It s done Amazing isn t it Again to close down eject the hard disks Use the safe eject all power off Well there s a quick run through of setting up Spectre partitions on a hard disk Again you will have to customize it your needs and I guarantce you ll end up playing with it a few times before you re happy with it no one ever has enough hard disk storage when they need it Well that covers hard disks Get in there and experiment until you find the combination of partitions GEM and Spectre that suits you best 98 The Online Revolution here s a society right now that exists entirely via com puter The members gather on networks Bix CompuServe Genie Usenet some of which span around the world They send electronic mail or e mail to each other they take part in dialogs giving hints reporting bugs and helping out people thousands of miles away that they ve never met and they have online conferences about a particu lar subject where they gather at the same time and coffee Klatch Em We
133. no problems Of course this assumes you ve gotten the terminal program and the System Finder to start up with over to Spectre format already some thing of a chicken and egg problem See above for a solution gt Your local Atari dealer or a friend may have a Spectre GCR or a Mac and be able to convert the software to Spectre format for you gt There are various public domain libraries available in Spectre for mat also called Magic format since it started out as disks for Magic Sac The best far and away is Current Notes library 39 Getting It Going fa After It Starts Up Mac Mode There will be a short pause as the disk is read Then the ST will most likely display Welcome to Macintosh Some games and such don t bother with this Then there will be a pause and you ll get to the Macintosh Desktop This looks incredibly like the Atari ST Desktop and works much like it If this doesn t happen you have a bad System Finder disk Replace it and try again If you get a little floppy icon with a or an X in the middle of the screen your disk isn t recognized as a boot disk There s many variations on this theme You can get a Sad Mac no kidding it s a little pouting Mac with numbers under it indicating the disk is bad You can get a freeze or hang where the machine just sits there after plotting the smiling Mac or after the Welcome to Mac or at the Desktop Or you can get the crash page wh
134. not under ST mode They can t be used in ST mode either to for instance print ST Degas or Neochrome pictures There s several sources for this software The most well known seems to be Epstart fromSoftstyle out in Hawaii Epstart and the later PrintWorks supports the Epson series of printers including the popular MX which is what the missile was named for Yep you re still awake Anywho what you do is put the the Epstart driver file in your System Folder Choose it with a Mac Chooser Desk Accessory then you can print away just as though your Epson was an ImageWriter Since nearly every sane printer manufacturer offers Epson compatibility as it is FAR and away the standard this will get you rolling a great portion of the time Other excellent printer drivers are available from GDT Softworks and Orange Micro And then there are Epson s own Mac drivers contact Epson America about that The Epson brand is fairly new The others have been around for awhile and seem to work pretty well Names and addresses arc listed in the Sources Appendix in the back of the manual Using a printer driver is very easy For example the Epstart printer driver consists of a number of different files Epson MX RX FX etc for the different Epson drivers You copy whichever printer driver you need or the whole lot into your System Folder on your startup disk The printer drivers must be in theSystem Folder other wise it won t work
135. nt replies to your questions access to good software and to chat with other people interested in the Spectre go 99 Interlude Six 100 E m Printers and Spectre Printers and Spectre Printers and the Serial Port To print you have to get the data to the printer You ll need to tell the Spectre whether or not your printer is hooked up to the Atari s se rial or parallel port If you don t know which port to plug your printer into find out generally printers are parallel these days as it is much faster than serial but it s best to find out before you plug it in Then se lect either parallel or serial on the Spectre menu page and the Spectre will know where to output printing to either parallel or serial parallel is default Things get a little tricky here The ST has one serial port and one parallel port Usually the ST s serial port is devoted to a modem and the parallel port is devoted to the printer Again there s only one serial port on the ST The Mac is different it has two serial ports and no parallel port The Mac uses one serial port as the Mac modem serial device and the other as the Mac printer serial port but they re both serial ports I thus had an interesting design decision to make In the interest of passing the buek maximum user flexibility l let you decide how to re solve it EDITOR Don t you just love fancy word processors marked with the little t
136. o This isn t much fun get out your serial printer s manual and start experimenting You re going to want 8 data bits no parity 1 stop bit therestis up to you Several hints are in order to save you time and trouble Epstart is unable to print a catalog listing a listing of the files on the disk more than one page long Two pages or more equals a crash Epstart doesn t seem to work with HyperCard We re talking with Softstyle about this obviously an update is necded We ve been told that PrintWorks will do the job but we haven t tested it ourselves Epstart has some other known kinks it s best to be in touch with our online support group on this as someone else is sure to run into the same problem you re having and can tell you about it 104 i m Printers and Spectre Certain programs such as Microsoft Word totally ignore the Chooser and use whatever file is called ImageWriter as the printer driver Thus it s a darned good idea to copy whatever printer driver you re going to use to the System Folder and name it ImageWriter note the capital W to avoid problems like this Of course the original ImageWriter file will have to go i e change it s name to something else like OldImage or something Atari s SLM804 Laser Printer Atari makes a pretty neat Laser Printer called the SLM804 It fea tures a very classy printer engine which makes very good dots and very little on board brains a
137. o use an unterminated Apple drive and terminate with other drives on your Mac and Atari Or for a single drive terminate it You re beginning to see why we were hesitant to tell people all this right To transfer between a Mac and the Atari you must format the hard disk on the Mac You re going to find that each and every Mac hard disk manufacturer makes their own formatter and they re all a little different unlike the Atari where everyone s formatter pretty much works with everyone else s hardware I use Supra s Mac SCSI formatter for the Mac brand of hard disks I have had zero luck with other ones Finally you have to set the SCSI ID number on the Apple unit to something that doesn t conflict with the Atari devices Atari s SLM804 Laser P rinter uses 7 and has just been changed to use 5 because Ken Badertscher s birthday was on the fifth Your present hard disk is probably 0 but check After all this fun you can check for a valid connection several ways First when you press RESET or poweron the Atari will zip through all connected and working SCSI devices 0 7 and briefly light them up It s looking for partition sectors on all connected disk drives You should sce all the lights flash on your connected units if none flash you ve locked up the SCSI bus usually termination troubles or two same numbered SCSI devices If one doesn t flash 141 Appendix D SCSI Hard Disks that particular unit is miswired or bad
138. of Mac video memory More than a few Mac programs hardcode the start of Mac sound memory so we moved the video memory pointers instead It works far better since QuickDraw handles video and is entirely pointer based and almost no one bypasses QuickDraw for screen updates the shifting downwards appears to be glitch free Me I d leave this option alone at it s default position On Future goodies will be added to this menu and to others so please check out the README file on the Spectre disk for the most up to date information 89 Spectre Menus 90 Hard Disk Horror Stories exx Ty to imagine your 39 floppy disks as they Dees really are That little 3 1 2 piece of plastic has some goo on its sur face which can be magnetized Technical writers call it iron oxide or ferris oxide if they re really showing off Common people call it rust That s right that s why the disks are that color Hey perhaps that s why Neil Young works the album name is Live Rust Anyway there are 400 000 characters crammed in per side of that disk Try to think_of each character as 8 separate magnetic field transitions 8 bits on that disk Thus we re talking 2 400 000 little magnetic fields on a double sided floppy Sort of horrifying to consider how tiny they must be right Now imagine how much Interlude Five mayonnaise being smeared on them does for them
139. often don t update a disk s directory thus ncatly losing all the work you ve done that session To shut down the Spectre first eject all disks a quick way to do this from Finder is press CTRL A CTRL E to Select RII disks then E ject them all then when done removing disks power off the machine Some day we may catch and repair Shutdown and Restart It is very hard because at present they execute a 68000 RESET instruction which thoroughly clobbers the ST I haven t even been able to get the video to come back on without big black bars running through it vertically after this RESET so don t hold your breath Yes the RESET is why the screen goes black when you sclect this button it s also why the ST never wakes up again until you power off power on The 68000 RESET instruction sends a RESET to all the chips in the ST except for the 68000 which pretty well plays bombs away to the ST gt When you put a disk into the Spectre Mac or Spectre format that the Spectre can t make sense of it puts up a dialog asking if you d like to initialize format the disk or just eject it This is how people usually format disks for the Mac As of the writing of this manual we re not certain yet whether or not we ve gotten all the bugs out of our Disk Initialize routine Please see the README file on the Spectre release disk for the most up to date information We re certainly trying 66 m Mac Mode We do allow you to
140. omain libraries and in all truth an occasional crash on something new Welcome to being able to write a note straight to the author online and give hima piece of your mind and get an answer Welcome to my wife and I putting 15 Interlude One out a product and staking our future on it Welcome to the hardest I ve ever worked on something Welcome to the Spectre And now the manual 16 m m Requirements Requirements and Other Things This the stuff you ll need to run the Spectre that we don t include in the package for one reason or another You definitely need One set of 128K Mac Plus Apple Macintosh ROMs part numbers 342 0341 and 342 0342 Apple Macintosh Operating System software System and Finder Mac software the programs you want to run It doesn t matter if these are on the original Mac disks or on Spectre format disks pre transferred The whole idea of the GCR is that you can use Mac disks without having to worry about it You probably want An Atari Computer ST Mega or Stacy at this point Monochrome Monitor Hard Disk Compatible Printer Driver and or An Atari Laser Printer An all expenses paid trip to Tahiti Me too 95994 Yep not all parts are included with the Spectre We would but we don t for varied and obvious reasons Needless to say we won t have any part of copying the ROMs either to EPROM or to disk and strongly recommend that you don t
141. on disks a lot far more than the ST and hard disks are many times faster than floppies It s your time Nowadays you can get hard disks from lots of places Atari makes a good one ICD does too Supra Berkeley Microsystems etc it s really hard to go wrong 20 Requirements Compatible Printer Driver Okay here it becomes a little tricky You will not be able to print with the Spectre until you get a printer driver that works with your printer Unlike every other computer Apple didn t make the Mac use standard printers This means you can t plug in just any old printer and have it work In particular the Mac is meant to drive an ImageWriter an Apple product and outputs graphics to the ImageWriter in the form of individual dots Most printers are built to accept standard characters not individual dots Typically one character is made up out of a 9 x 8 grid of dots for 72 dots total When other printers get the Mac printer codes they go nuts My Okidata 84 for instance starts beeping and ejecting pages of paper Only a lobotomy can save it at that point Now unless you happen to have an ImageWriter lying around in which case you can plug it right into the Spectre you ve got a problem What you need is a printer driver which is Mac software that translates Mac dots into the dots your printer can usc and ships them to your printer If I ve confused you hopelessly think of Degas
142. oof bag are proud pf the n S For ONCE we got somethin the did without the Kids doi g I something to it We d like to give credit where credit is due since it results in a clean professional looking manual for you something like say AT amp T would put out for UNIX System V programmers The Spectre GCR Manual s bturity Team Manual Security Chief Sandy Assistaht Se y prj Dave Small Backup Security During Phone Calls Doug Wheeler Convinced Not To Have Kids Barb Hahn Lewin Tried To Help With Lyn GF Bahr fail MaiNfactz s d e v ueg Sif we nica a a Hi Moris bi fr Gadgets S esting Eric Jenypfer Jamey Slobbeping Special Effects Fang sing Clawing and Glaring pecial Effects PyeWa dkette a Essentigl Babysitting by Christie Movies for the next ten years Panasonic VCR division and MovieTime movid rentals Drop proof pho AN Pac Tel Tough mouse cords Apple Inc Slo ber proof keyboards Akar Corp Door locks VaultL ock Safe Fort Knox Safes gt WORM drive Panasonic Software COREL 114 i B ng f D E f i i K 1 v Re m Transverter Transverter Transverter is an ST utility designed to allow you to transfer con vert hence the namo files between ST format and Spectre format disks The files can be either standard text ASCII or Macintosh files This allows you to download Macintosh software then move the files
143. or When you bring up the Spectre s first menu it should also poll every hard disk looking for Spectre partitions and if it s been formatted on a Mac the drive will show up on the Spectre hard disk pull down menu Note that you can select and deselect SCSI ID s within that menu Is this fun really When I had to do this I made a 25 to 50 pin cable the usual way ribbon cable and brute force It would work fine with one controller but not with two I then called Supra got one of their Mac disk cables which is a 25 to 50 pin cable with the essential termination power supply that you hook onto the 5 supply and their unit worked fine with multiple drives I m still not entirely sure why theirs worked and mine failed with two drives when you enter SCSI you re entering the land of Voodoo Supra drives now feature a 25 pin daisy chain connector for SCSI that is Apple SCSI Hence you ve got a fighting chance to plug in an Apple drive to that and work provided you get the termination right Anyway if you re confident with SCSI and this is all old hat go ahead if not For those of you trying to make up your minds I just got done failing to hook up an Adaptec 4000 controller to a Mac I still don t know why it doesn t work Its brother Adaptec 4000 works just fine on the Mac Bad cable Bad connector Bad karma I don t know 142 Appendix E Hard Disk Tips Appendix E Hard Disk Tips After form
144. or are getting strange results remember to check if your System has been localized and to check Key Caps to see what keys are currently known by the system Beware of the tricky two Systems bug where you get two Systems on two different disks in the system at once and where one of the System files is not localized to your country So if you are having keyboard problems use the Key Caps Desk Accessory to find out which key is what on the Mac Atari keyboard Then use Localizer if necessary to setup for a foreign language keyboard Mouse Button This is probably going to be the shortest section in the manual The left hand mouse button corresponds to the Mac s mouse button use it just as you mostly use it when running ST software There I ll bet that was too casy to be truc right Versions of Spectre before 2 0 did not use the right hand button at all At a user s suggestion the right hand button was made into a Shift key press it to Shift down releasc it to Shift up Why would you want this Well in Mac mode often you have to pick a number of items out of list and the most common way of doing it is to press Shift and while holding it down click on cach item With the new implementa tion of the right mouse button you can do this without touching the keyboard Sound The original Spectre software versions 1 51 1 75 could not cope 58 5 Mac Mode with sound Even the Sound Manager the part of the Mac s operat
145. othing quite like asking a question and having someone a few thousand miles away answer it within the hour it happens all the time today right now At first you just take advantage of it then someone asks a ques tion you know the answer to and suddenly you re part of it It s neat I know I ma little wordy but heck I m used to being paid by the 12 a Preview word Magazines pay per written page honest I know Sandy s going to be a little peeved at what it costs to get this manual duplicated but what the heck EDITOR Ha ha Funny funny am to laugh Sleep on the couch Dave Appendices There are several different appendices included in the back of the manual The information in them includes sources for 128K Mac Roms and printer drivers special function keys cable pin outs for connecting Macs to Ataris and Ataris to ImageWriters how to hook up a SCSI hard drive tips for using a Hard Disk UltraScript tips how to inter pret the dreaded crash page and the ever present license agreement Oh yes by the way 13 Preview 14 Computer Manuals Are Dull that most computer manuals are deadly dull to read Thus they don t get read people haven t got time to be bored So I try really hard not to write a boring manual And it works when people have some fun reading a manual they take the time to READ it and they understand the product better as a result I think peop
146. ou can usc it all with Spectre Conclusion Let me leave you with a thought The Spectre s new It opens up many many Mac programs that never could run before on the ST If you run a new program on the Spectre that may be the first time that program has ever run on an Atari anywhere ever It happens all the time Welcome to the edge of the envelope Welcome to the Spectre GCR EDITOR Psst Dave this next picture S what you meant by pushing the en velope right r3 1 a Preview A Preview Of Coming Attractions What s in the Manual Things You ll Need and Want This section explains the things you ll need to run Spectre 128 and Spectre GCR It also gives you suggestions on what you may want in the future to round out your system so you get optimum use of your Spectre How to Bring Up a Spectre After the Introduction and Preview the next thing you ll find in your manual is how to bring up the Spectre the one time things you need to do like plugging in the 128K ROMs Then we ll have a quick run through just so you can get a little perspective on how things fit together We ll also check out the GCR and make sure that all is well Stuff You Need To Know In Mac Mode Thenext big section is the stuff you ll need to know while you re running in Mac mode What key do you push to emulate the OPTION key for instance And what s the proper way to turn the machine off I ll warn you right now just sw
147. over to a Spectre Format disk You can download files to your ST from a Macintosh or commercial services such as GEnie or CompuServe or local Bulletin Boards using an ST terminal modem program like Flash ST Talk Professional etc You can save a PostScript file basically a text file in Mac mode with a Mac program and then move the file with Transverter to an ST format disk for printing with UltraScript Limitations First and foremost Transverter will not work if you try to trans fer to from HFS disks This mcans that if you arc transverting floppies your Spectre or Mac format disk must be formatted as an MFS disk ei ther 400K or 800K Usc DCFormatter to make 800K MFS Spectre disks If you are transverting with your hard drive it must have an MFS partition To transvert Mac format you must have a GCR and Trnasverter must be in the same place as SPECTRE PRG In either case just copy the files between the HFS and MFS disks while in Mac mode and then transvert using the MFS one This is important to remember Transverter can transfer either Macintosh applications or text files There are a few restrictions on the format of these files Macintosh ap plications must be in MacBinary or Unary format to be transverted properly Most Macintosh terminal programs automatically create 115 AD Transverter MacBinary files when sending files to a non Macintosh computer so you won t have to worry about it In general if
148. pt To print your Mac PostScript file just add the file to the UltraScript list and choose Print There are a few things you need to be aware of though PostScript files can take a long long LONG LONG time to print EDITOR Kind of like the manual right Dave Long This isn t really UltraScript s fault It just takes a long time to pro cess all the information in a PostScript file Be prepared for waits of up to 15 minutes for really complex documents like greyscale pictures to print Actually average print times are pretty good a full page of text usually starts printing in about a minute 109 Life In The Kid Lane t was a bit late in the Ae evening when some WM one phoned Gadgets A strange high pitched voice answered Hello it said It was not the voice of our phone answerer Barb It was not the voice of Sandy It was not even my voice It was a six year old s voice The caller wanted information on the Spectre 128 The answerer wanted information on Tyrannosaurus Rex The caller wanted to Know if it was avail able The answerer said that T Rex stood for terrible lizard The caller was stumped for a mo ment The caller wanted to know if Mom or Dad was available No silly I m talking to you the an swerer replied and hung up The caller called back the next day To our surprise he was a very good sport about the whole thing turns out he was an elementary
149. recommended you ll normally find them both in regular bookstores As far as instruction for running a specific Mac program I ll refer you to that program s manual shrug and warn you it s likely to be awful Mac manuals are usually as bad as Industry Standard manuals It s a cross we all have to bear READER Oh no here he goes again another lecture on the state of the industry s manuals Gah Okay okay Enough preaching 26 The Neil Young Fable NV hile writing the ENN original M agic Zo A Sac the time came E CY for me to code the Keyboard amp mouse driver This was really hard and I struggled over the design for a long time Problem was on the Mac the mouse was run directly by the 68000 via interrupts coming through the SCC chip On the ST the mouse is run by the keyboard microprocessor which periodically interrupts the 68000 to tell it where the mouse moved to Very different Also on both units the Keyboard was run by a standalone microprocessor and the codes returned were totally different I dreaded doing this I saw problems on top of the problems Interrupt conflicts mouse resolution Keyboard mapping I did many loads of dishes cleaned up the office several times went for walks and still couldn t figure my way through the problem Interlude Two It s a hard feeling Knowing that you re past the edge of the en velope and what you want to do may not even be possi
150. ritten in small chunks called resources which are called into memory only when needed as op posed to the ST approach where everything is called in at the beginning Both approaches have their advantages the Mac s is more memory efficient as it doesn t keep stuff around it doesn t need anymore the ST s is nice because it doesn t do much disk reading once it s started If you ever get into a situation where the Mac necds resources that aren ton thecurrent drive you ll get to start swapping disks Doing 93 Hard Disks and Spectre m this a few times will rapidly encourage you to get a hard disk Anything you can do to speed up disk input or output I O helps the Mac really get moving If you ever use the Spectre with a hard disk you ll find it very hard to go back to floppies The Atari ST has amazing hard disk capability if you set things up properly and stay out of the way while it s happening The ST has never been a speed slouch in terms of pure hardware a lot of the speed gets wasted by inefficient operating systems and programs But when you team a good OS with fast disk handlers you can really get a feel for what the ST is capable of that s what you see in Spectre Let s have a look at hard disks About Hard Disks Hard disks are just like floppy disks in many ways They are composed of a number of circular tracks each pie sliced into 17 or 26 sometimes with RLL 512 byte Sectors Everyt
151. rmat Open the icon it s on A or B and double click on SPECTRE PRG You are now at the Spectre Menu Page sce Figure 3 page 36 You aren t in Mac Mode yet but you ve taken the first step Now you re saying to yourself why didn t he tell me to make a backup of the Spectre Program disk Every other manual tells you to do that right here EDITOR Make a backup Make a BACKUP It s because I know it s a waste of time to ask you to at this point the suspense on whether or not the cartridge is working is going to be eating at you and you won t stop to make a backup even if I beg you to To be honest with you I m really bad at making backups too The reason I m rewriting this particular piece of the manual is I lost it to a disk crash for instance because I didn t back it up right Put another way them that tells you to back it up are the oncs that do it the least So like I said double click SPECTRE PRG In a moment you ll get to the normal Spectre Menu page Figure 3 Now we setup Spectre to default to what you re generally going to want This manual will cover the many Spectre options in a while but for now you re all set okay No problem We just want to get into 36 D N Getting It Going Mac mode to see if the cartridge is working fine If you press RETURN the Spectre will start up what we call Mac Mode You can also start Mac mode with a pull down menu see the File Menu if you want to do
152. roduct Support 26 Interlude Two 1 cc ccc ccc cree cece cer t nn 27 Getting It Going wwe wee cere errr nn 29 Installing the ROM Chips 2 22 2200 euere 30 Plugging the Cartridge In 2222 22 32 Do You Need to Remove the Cartridge 33 ZHime for a Test Driver yos esca en eo Sees A 34 Common Problems sn n uer Remate et 35 Bets Check M OUN 2 2 RE EN re en 36 Getting Mac Disks to Spectre Format 60 39 After It Starts Up Mac Mode 2 08 40 Auto Rumning Spectre 2n eher ha waren 42 Interlude Three 6 606003 e eo i TCT CERES 43 Stuff You Need to Know elles 45 Ejecting Floppy DISKS seror au Soe oe wine Hear 45 Inserting a Disk 2 2 espe R2 ne PET 50 One or Two Drive Floppy Systems 51 Single Double Sided Disk Drives 52 Hard Disks otov epe dou anie UNT nr 53 Those Funny Mac Keys 2 2 una ann an Bea 54 Eoreign Keyboards ois kae Hera egre tse 56 Mouse Buttons orree ene x Rer m3 een Hea ee owe os 58 SOUNG Sn chy ee ohare ee ee Gente tans 58 Altermate Videosu eve tU ERETA Se ei 60 Color Monitor Support pum een 61 The Mac ToolBox wb bee e ee NI 64 Things You Definitely Should Not EverDo 66 Interlude Four 22 sr 8a warnen 69 The Spectre Menus eee eee nnn 71 About Spectres 23 3 ena oes el eres ND AREE 71 kile Menu 4 Si ga ns ce nee
153. rs do not correspond the ST drive letters because the ST skips over the Macintosh partitions Use the same partition number you used when you Formatted MFS on the Spectre menu page After setting everything you may accept the changes by selecting OK cancel the changes by selecting Cancel or save the changes by selecting Save Save will cause the drive selections to be stored in TRNSV4 INF along with the options set in Set Options Onc little quirk the ST hasis that if it tries to read a Spectre disk when it thinks it is an ST disk it may lock up the computer no error or dialogue just lock up It is up to you to make sure there is not a Spectre disk in a drive which the ST thinks is supposed to contain an ST disk This is especially important when returning to theST Desktop where you may have a window open for one of the floppies Set Options You can press o or Alt O from the keyboard to access this then you have 3 options you can set sce Figure 20 119 re Transverter m The first is whether you want Transverter to write MacBinary headers or Unary headers on files transverted to an ST disk MacBinary is the format used by most Macintosh terminal programs and is considered the standard Unary is a variation of MacBinary which is used by the Copy II PC Option Board The second parameter is forlinefeed conversions You can either select Leave in which case there will be no linefe
154. rt while on a carpet No kidding shoes and carpets have zapped more computers than anything else I can think of It doesn t take much static charge to cause trouble Ground yourself before continuing another fairly good thing to do is to do this part on a tile floor See the two 28 pin sockets Two rows of 14 pins each That s where your ROM chips are going to go Installing the ROM Chips gt Spectre GCR The ROM marked 342 0341 whatev er goes into the socket CLOSEST to the two floppy disk drive connectors The ROM marked 342 0342 what ever goes into the socket FARTHEST from the two floppy disk drive connec tors Check out Figure 1 to the left Figure 1 The NOTCH on the end of the chips it s only on one end you can t possibly miss it goes on the socket end next to the capacitor The capacitor is the little thing with two legs sticking up from the board next to each socket s end Check out the appropriate diagram That square solder pad is pin 1 by the way The notch on the chips should line up with the notch on the sockets but every now and then a socket can go in backwards You MUST put the chip in with the notch towards the capacitor on the end of the socket If you don t you will fry the chip when you turn on the Atari This is a mighty embarrassing way to blow 150 worth of chips Double triple check it the chip notch is next to the 30 Getting It Going capacitor end of the so
155. runch mode look at the ST s hardware manual sometime Each color dot onscreen is derived from two memory bits which can be one of four combinations That forms a number 1 4 that number is used to determine which color register to output from The screen is scrunched by taking one Mac dot putting it into one ST screen bit taking the Mac dot underneath it and putting that in the other screen bit 62 FA Mac Mode Hence if both Macdots are white you want a white Atari dot to result if one or the other MacDots is white but not both you want a grey Atari dot to result if both MacDots are black you want a black Atari dot to result Using the Atari Control Panel set the first four colors to black grey grey and white and you should be in good shape With the default red green blue colors you ll get a weird Mac Desktop in color effect with colors changing depending on where you arc in the screen It s worth a look try especially the fill patterns in MacPaint The colors resulting are of course accidental but it is fun to see then go back to black grey grey white okay EDITOR After all you bought it so you could use it right I would also suggest using two slightly different greys to help enhance visibility We ve found that the following settings work the best Palette Hex Decimal Greyness Default 0 OFFF 4095 7 OTTI 1 0ccc 3276 4 0000 2 03533 879 3 0700 3 0000 0 0 0600 In color mode you
156. s anxious to see programs that crash to see if I can improve my error handler Feel free to send disks to the Gadgets Address It s even so you don t get an address error EDITOR Moan Okay okay it wasn t that good Also remember that online there are numerous reports of what programs and what programs fizzle and why as well as potential fixes Mega 2 Problems A few Mega 2s have a problem driving the Mac 128K Roms because of insufficient muscle power those Mega 2 s have too much capacitance for some of the chips on the motherboard The symptoms include random crashes even while in ST mode funny disk problems and other weird happenings like those previously mentioned Note that these symptoms occur even when the Spectre program is not run ning 151 Appendix G Crashing D Taking your Mega 2 to a dealer will only result in him telling you it works just fine it does except when a Spectre is plugged in The fix courtesy of Norm Walker Dean Muller and Larry Rymal is fairly sim ple if you are handy with a soldering iron Between the Roms and Ram on your Mega 2 board are 4 chips two 74LS373 s and two 74LS24 s The 74LS373 s are the ones with not enough muscle and this only applies to the ones with SGS on them You have two choices if you have the problem both of which involve soldering Remove clip out and desolder the SGS 74LS373 chips and replace them with EITHER 74AS373 s or another brand of 74
157. s anytime will likely kill your disks EDITOR Not to mention the frustration involved If you ve ever seen a Mac you know the disk drives control their own eject In other words the CPU sends a signal to the disk drive and the drive spits out the floppy disk you do not have an eject button ona Mac as you do on the Atari Believe it or not if the system crashes and you have to get a disk out you have to stick a straightened paperclip into a small hole on the front of the drive to force the disk out And believe it or not even more this is an improvement from Apple s first design on the Lisa if the system crashed you had to remove the front cover to get a diskette out There s advantages to the Mac operating system knowing the disk is locked in there The Mac doesn t have to leave the disk in a clean state every time it s written to as the ST does because you can eject an ST disk at least any time the light isn t on So the Mac operating system doesn t bother updating the directory on the disk it just keeps the directory in memory until right before eject Then it writes the directory to disk On the ST you have the eject button which is pretty dangerous 45 Mac Mode while you are running in Mac mode Let s say you eject right out of the blue The Mac doesn t know The Mac puts off updating the disk directory until right before the Mac thinks it should Eject and by the time it thin
158. s at it again For GEM to look at it would crash GEM just as reading Spectre format floppies crashes GEM Next we stamp Macintosh formatting information on it boot sectors blank directory and so forth Then we re all set the partition is ready As for you next time you reboot your ST that partition will have disappeared from your Desktop in ST mode depending on certain things If there was a disk icon hooked to that former GEM partition you ll find it cither doesn t work anymore drive doesn t exist or it now hooks to the next available GEM partition if there is one e g if 95 Hard Disks and Spectre the Spectre partition isn t the last one on the drive Setting Up Spectre With a Hard Disk You ll need to experiment to find out what combination of GEM and Spectre partitions is right for you Only you know how much space you need for Mac programs vs space for ST programs You ll have to juggle until you come up with what you re comfortable with In my lab I need lots of Mac space to test Mac stuff and lots of ST space to develop the Spectre program on EDITOR You only use that as an excuse to get more Hard Disks Dave Let s assume you have a 20 megabyte drive the most common with 3 partitions one 10 meg two 5 meg You want the 10 meg for GEM the two 5 megs for Spectre 128 Fine Let s go do it First off get anything off the 5 meg partitions you wanted to keep as GEM is shortly going to lo
159. s for about 14 It s much more convenient than swapping cables around For instance you set the switch to the modem when you re in a telecommunications program then switch to the printer when you need to print That way only one device is hooked up to the ST at any onc time I use one of these on my ST and it works quite well This is all further complicated if you decide to use an Atari Laser Printer but l 1l leave that for later The Software Part of Printing A whole manual could be devoted to the art of getting the Mac to print something especially and particularly if you re not using an Apple manufactured printer As I mentioned earlier the Mac is very dot oriented to print something it outputs a string of dots specially coded to the ImageWriter The ImageWriter then puts the dots on the page and if everything works right the dots form letters if you re printing 102 up Printers and Spectre characters or drawings if you re drawing graphics Since nearly no other printers talk ImageWriter ese we have to translate for the printer you DO have Fortunately many Mac owners have non ImageWriter printers and various software people have come up with printer drivers to translate the ImageWriter codes into something those printers can use generally they re for Epson or Epson compatible codes These printer drivers are Macintosh programs they are accessed and installed totally in Mac mode
160. s own ImageWriter which is included with the System disks and goes in the System Folder You use Chooser to select the driver and then select Print from the File menu Easy huh To use this option once again you must enable SLM804 fromthe Spectre Menu page When you select SLM804 Spectre also automati cally enables the ImageWriter printer interceptor The printer interceptor grabs printer stuff instead of sending it out the printer port and redirects it to the SLM804 While the intercep tor is active you can t print out the normal Atari printer hookup 106 i m Printers and Spectre ports Shift Keypad 3 disables the printer interceptor You can then use Chooser select another printer driver and print to a normal dot ma trix printer Press Shift Keypad 2 to reenable the printer interceptor In this mode only ImageWriter formatted output is supported Standard mode gives you 72 dpi output High Quality output gives you 144 dpi This is pretty good remember the laser goes 300 dpi maximum You cannot use other printers in this mode since to get speed I made lots of ImageWriter Only assumptions Real ImageWriters don t page eject the last page when they re done printing Hence we give you EDITOR Oh no not another key another key to do this page eject to finish printing your docu ment This is exactly like the Atari Diablo Emulator s Page Eject fea ture When you re done printing press S
161. s the best spreadsheet you can use on any machine Naturally it works on the Spectre You Probably Want An Atari Computer ST Mega STE or even Stacy I m just checking to see if you re still awake A Monochrome Monitor Is nice but not absolutely essential Basically a monochrome monitor gives you an excellent sharp crisp clean 400 line display A color monitor gives you a fuzzy sometimes unreadable 200 line display Monochrome monitors cost between 90 and 150 at periodic sales and check mail order and Mark Sloatman at Practical Solutions can get you a neat little switch Monitor Master for going between color and monochrome without swapping cables I did the best I could in color there s just 200 lines missing from the display and there s not much to be done about it If you re running color and you see Spectre in monochrome you ll understand why I say this Monochrome is far and away the best We highly recommend it if you are going to do any kind of serious work with the Spectre The Spectre DOES NOT RUN COLOR MAC SOFTWARE IN COLOR IT DOES NOT RUN COLOR MAC SOFTWARE AT ALL That s the realm of the Mac II which is a different CPU 68020 different architecture NuBus slots and a whole different ballgame Hard Disk This will radically improve the performance of the Spectre just as it radically improves a Macintosh You ll have to see it to believe how much faster it is than floppies The Mac hammers
162. s this envelope waiting for me I wrote this introduction because I want you to understand that by running the Spectre you re pushing the envelope too There may be times you crash and burn We re doing something herc you and I that is supposed to be impossible running Mac software on an Atari and it actually works better than a Mac in many ways Your Atari CPU moves things around 20 faster If you ve used a i a Introduction Mac you will notice the supercharging right away Your screen is 30 bigger and nearly all programs let you use that extra space Try doing a drawing or a newsletter and you ll be hooked on the ST The hard disk is tremendously quick subjectively it is much faster than Apple units Watching a megabyte get pulled through the ST in 7 seconds is awesome Try this on for size common Atari hard disks outrun the Mac II standard hard disk in speed on the Spectre And as you will see the GCR moves data off the disk even faster than the no slouch ST Spectre format floppy disks The few times it fails are where we push too hard and go past the envelope That s okay to me nothing is completely perfect What we can do inside the envelope extends the usefulness of your ST many many times The best spreadsheets in the world exist within the enve lope The best integration of software anywhere exists here The best page layout programs the best desktop publishing the best human interface software Y
163. se them Run SPECTRE PRG Select the Hard Disk menu pull down to Format You may have to select the drive LUN it s probably 0 0 the default unless you ve been customizing your hard disks Note that you get only 3 partition choices to click on the program knows you ve only got three partitions to choose from Click on the first partition This is your 10 megabyte 20 000 sectors partition for GEM We want to to leave it alone Click on the second partition button This says 10 000 sectors that s 5 megabytes Click on HFS Format in a few seconds it will be done Click on the third partition it also says 10 000 sectors 5 meg Click on HFS format once again All done Click on Quit The Hard Disk menu should now show you two Spectre parti tions the ones you just made Make sure they re selected a checkmark next to each of them Now let s boot up off of floppy we can t boot off hard disk yet to Mac mode there s no System Finder installed on the hard disk yet So make sure that the Boot from HD selection is turned OFF on the 96 pe m Hard Disks and Spectre hard disk options we don t want to try to boot off the hard disk Press RETURN to start When prompted to put a floppy with Finder 5 3 System 3 2 or later in the floppy drive A and press RETURN If you are using a GCR this disk can be a Mac disk with a Spectre 128 the disk must be in Spectre format You ll start up Mac mode and you
164. sk has been inserted or removed Again if a disk is write protected 48 Aa uy Mac Mode the change happens so swiftly that the ST misses it On some aftermarket drives if you have no diskette in the drive the write protect switch wildly flops up and down floats electrical ly This convinces the ST that you re inserting and removing disks all the time and drives the Mac OS nuts The solution to this is to Disable Disk Insert Detect at the Spectre startup menu at that point the only thing the ST will listen to is the F1 F2 keys By the way this feature was added at the request of many users with aftermarket drives and isn t the default state This is just one of many improvements made to Spectre as the result of user suggestions So in summary NEVER cject a Spectre disk unless the Mac OS is specifically telling you to by presenting you with a flashing A or B If you need to eject a disk ask the Mac OS politely by doing an Eject selection of some sort wait for the flashing A or B then do it Ge 9 lifa f You ve just found out why Mac owners regard system crashes with such dread horror On the ST your disk is usually left in a cleaned up state after any write to it since the ST s operating system doesn t know when you re going to switch disks and must live in terror of you pressing the ol EJECT button On the Mac it s usually leftin a messed up state until Eject If you crash before Eject
165. t make sure your ST is shut off Never ever plug in or takeout the cartridge with the ST running to do so is to likely doom yourST your Cartridge and EDITOR the World in general etc etc Do You Need To Remove The Cartridge Ever Let me try to be rcal clear on this point The Spectre 128 or the Spectre GCR is completely idle unless it is specifically asked for It does not interfere with anything ST not memory not hard disks not anything Unless you double click on the SPECTRE PRG program to start the cartridge up it has no effect on your Atari system Thus there really is little reason to remove the cartridge Plug it in and leave it in I mention all this because a lot of people are under the impression you should remove the Spectre while operating the ST in normal ST mode or in IBM or 8 bit emulation mode There s just no need okay The cartridge is completely idle doing nothing unless you specifically call for it Also you don t need to worry about your ST connectors if you are swapping cartridges back and forth all the time Speaking from per sonal experience my computer has had more Spectres swapped in and out of it than I can count right now and it hasn t affected the connector at all So don t worry about cartridge swapping 33 Getting It Going Time For A Test Drive Now I m sure you re wondering if you got the chips in right and if the ROM chips are okay after all this handling Okay we ll
166. t Packard LaserJet Printer See above for Deskjet be Requirements You should not consider any other Laser Printer at this time there s little chance they ll work with the Spectre If you re wondering PostScript is the laser equivalent of the Epson printer standard it s a language that describes in exacting detail a printed page from characters to drawings A PostScript file is generally movable from printer to printer and generally will produce the same printed page drawings and all on different brand printers Apple adopted PostScript for their LaserWriter and everyone else except HP went to PostScript as the only standard out there With Apple s laser printing software it is possible to use the LaserWriter on the Spectre It s a two step process involving printing to a file using Command k then using a terminal program to move the file data into the LaserWriter It s not as convenient as the one step Apple process where it puts the file directly to the LaserWriter but it does work Another option using the GCR is to save what you want to print on a Mac format disk and then using a Mac to print it with the LaserWriter With a generic PostScript printer the Spectre works pretty much the same as Apple s LaserWriter except you can t take the disk and print using a Mac To print to a file press Command k then output the file to the printer With either the Apple LaserWriter or any generic PostScript print er
167. t a very low cost Many Laser Printers have their own processor and memory For instance an Apple LaserWriter II NTX has a 68020 a more powerful processor than the Mac Plus Problem is the only time this memory and processor get used is during printing Atari went for a more sensible approach They use the Atari s 68000 and memory to support the Laser and they re used when laser printing otherwise they re available to the user We currently offer three levels of Atari SLM804 Laser Printer support In order of complexity they are Screen dump support QuickDraw printing support PostScript printing support gt Screen Dumps Screen dumps are two step procedures First you must enable the SLM804 option at the Spectre Menu page the option requires at least 2 megabytes of memory to even be available This will remove 1 megabyte of free space and assign it to the Atari Laser Printer Next anytime after starting up Spectre it is best to wait until disk drives are off press Shift Keypad 0 The screen will turn inverted as the screen data is processed and the image is built up for the printer Next the screen will be inverted back to normal and the image will be dumped to the Laser Printer It takes just a few seconds 105 Printers and Spectre t5 This is a 72 dpi image each Atari Mac screen dot becomes 16 laser dots 4 x 4 grid It s rotated 90 degrees on the page and is cen tered so that the wide part of the p
168. t this menu it works independently of the serial parallel selection If you select the SLM804 you may do screen dumps and print to the SLM804 in Mac mode However you ll lose the 1 megabyte of memory needed for the Laser Printer s memory buffer you ll see this loss reflected in the main memory menu If you re running on a 2 megabyte ST and need the Laser l d recommend turning off the cache as memory will be tight JN File Memory Cache KISUN E Hard Disk Floppy Disk Goodies i v Parallel RE Serial XO UR SLM8804 SCSI 5 SLM804 SCSI 7 SR Figure 8 There s two SLM804 selections The SLM804 5 uses a SLM804 connected as SCSI device 5 which is for all new Laser Printers as of let s say about January 1989 SLM804 7 uses SCSI device 7 and is for older Laser Printers like mine If you don t know which Laser Printer you have try 5 first go into Mac mode and do a screen dump press shift keypad 0 If nothing happens then try 7 We added this option at the request of users who were tired of flipping switches trying to get their laser to be SCSI 7 As of the writing of this manual we re tracking down a problem in writing to SLM804 s built for the European market Apparently the differing paper sizes are giving the software a problem Please see the README file on disk for updates about this 78 re uy Spectre Menus Hard Disk Menu A File Memory Cache Printer WEIWIEN Floppy Disk Goodies V Boot
169. the Atari hardware works All that pressing F1 or F2 does is tell the ST to take notice of a disk change either an eject or a disk insert If there s no disk in the drive it tells the Mac OS that you just put a disk in there and the Mac OS begins checking it out eventually plotting its icon on the screen or whatever if there was a disk in there and the Mac OS was trying to eject it the Function key tells the Mac OS that the eject has been performed and to move on Now just to complicate things a little let s add some Atari hard ware peculiarities 47 Mac Mode I just mentioned the ST will usually miss a disk insert or disk eject if the disk is write protected Why Well it has to do with how the ST sees those events Every 1 70th of a second the ST checks out each disk drive to see if the write protect switch is closed that s the little tab you set on the disk to write protect it During disk insert or disk eject there is a glitch where the write protect signal shifts because of how a disk goes into the drive When the ST sces this glitch bing it knows you re doing something to the disk Unfortunately this clever idea doesn t work on write protected disks Whups You ve seen this before in ST mode where you have to press ESC to get the ST to notice that you ve changed disks Sometimes the ST s keyboard microprocessor which is a full comput er itself gets confused if you type too fast
170. this but let s do it the easy way and press RETURN okay JM File Memory Cache Printer Hard Disk Floppy Disk Goodies Figure 3 There will be a pause and if you re starting up off floppy a few things will get read off disk Then Spectre will ask you to Please in sert System Finder Disk What it s asking for now is the Macintosh System Finder soft ware If you have a Spectre 128 System Finder needs to be in ST for mat on the Spectre format disk If you are using the GCR any Mac disk with System Finder will do It is not asking for the Spectre Program disk Now if you don t have a disk with System Finder on it yet don t worry We can test the cartridge without that disk If you ve got a System Finder startup disk put it in and press RETURN If not put any old disk in there even the Spectre Program disk will do and press RETURN EDITOR Please back up your Spectre disk first Please PLEASE 37 Getting It Going Ta There will be another pause It s just long enough for you to think nothing is happening If you ll look at the File menu entry see Figure 3 page 37 though you ll see that it s highlighted Hang on Next the screen will dissolve into the Mac startup screen This is a grey screen with a small Happy Mac in the middle smiling at you But only if you ve put in a disk with System Finder on it Otherwise it ll have a floppy disk with a question mark on it that s normal
171. this for both chips Now that wasn t so bad was it Be sure to press both chips down firmly If they re only in part way they won t work If you re plugging in 64K ROM chips the 341 0220 chip replaces the 342 0341 chip and the 341 0221 chip replaces the 342 0342 chip Once again the notch goes towards the capacitors 31 Getting It Going Plugging the Cartridge In gt Spectre GCR The chips are face up there s really only one way to get the board into the plastic and that s with the chips up Unlike the 128 you can t get it in upside down Go ahead and snap the case to gether On Mega ST machines if you ve stacked the Mega on top of some thing say a MegaFile hard disk you ll find that the cartridge will dangle in midair This doesn t hurt anything but possibly could make it more sensitive to vibration You might want to thinkabout putting the Mega on the bottom and thus supporting the GCR cartridge At this point run the disk cable from either of the GCR s drive ports to an open ST drive port but don t plug the cartridge in This means Ifyou only have an internal floppy plug the floppy cable from either of the sockets on the GCR to the External Floppy port on the ST If you have external floppies plug the floppy cable from either of the sockets on the GCR into the end of the chain in other words the last floppy drive s spare port If you have an external drive with only one port or
172. thus force their directories to be updated For instance if you ve just saved The Great American Novel to the hard disk and want to make abso lutely sure it s there go eject the hard disk icon The Mac will think it s a big fast floppy update its directory and in general neaten things up Now if you crash the hard disk directory is there On the Mac I ve had the charming experience of saving T G A N to the hard disk and crashing a little while later and coming back to find the Mac didn t know anything about the file Plausible deniability or something So I made sure you could make it work on the Spectre The 128K ROMs are sensitive to crashes A crash can leave the Desktop file a mess which will result in a crash on autobooting The cure is to boot off floppy then mount the hard disk with F3 or whichever Function key it is If you re going to mess with known crashable software leave the hard disk out of it just never mount it Ifit still crashes try mounting the hard disk while holding down CONTROL and ALTERNATE this forces a rebuild of the Desktop file and fixes it Regrettably it loses all Get Info comments but it s worth it to get the hard disk partition back 144 Appendix E Hard Disk Tips Ifthe CTRL ALT mount doesn t work there s one more thing to try Go into a program say MacWrite if there s MacWrite files you need Get to a Open dialog mount the dead partition with
173. uss one of the points of the Spectre that s difficult to get across to new users The normal Atari without a GCR cannot read Macintosh diskettes If you hook in our Spectre GCR then yes your Atari disk drive can read Macintosh diskettes That s the major point of the GCR Unlike everyone else in the industry the Mac records 3 1 2 diskettes in a weird format called GCR They double the weirdness by varying the speed of the disk drive while recording the disk Everyone else uses a recording technique called MFM and a constant speed Now I don t want to seem down on Apple using GCR lets you get a reliable inexpensive disk drive controller GCR probably made the Apple II into a success MFM and GCR stand for I can t remember And I detest computer manuals that tell you what terms mean just to show off how much the technical writer knows EDITOR Dave hate to tell you this but a few pages ago you told them PI equals 3 1415926535897932384643383 Anyway it s irrelevant as long as you realize they are totally different Thus even though the disks are the same size a Mac disk just will not read into an ST without the Spectre GCR It s like trying to play a CD ona record player It s the same shape but the data is recorded in a different way It s like feeding a cat dog food It s like using a poor analogy in place of a good one So we have two disk formats Spectre format which is an
174. utton up the case On the Spectre 128 it s up to you if you leave the lid on in the easy to remove way or align the pegs up in which case it ll takea lot to open it up again The GCR has a special unique custom designed by Cathy Sloatman at Practical Solutions snap apart case so no worries 41 Getting It Going 5 Auto Running Spectre You can set up the SPECTRE PRG program to run automatically without stopping at the ST desktop To auto run Spectre Copy the contents of the Spectre Program disk to where you want them on your hard disk or if you want to autorun from floppy onto a floppy disk RuntheSPECTRE PRG and use the Spectre Menu page to select the configuration you want and use Save Settings to save the configuration This will create a file called SPECTRE CNF or replace any exist ing SPECTRE CNF file in that directory Copy the LAUNCH PRG and new SPECTRE CNF file into your AUTO folder If you don t have a folder named AUTO just make one Now you will launch automatically into the Spectre program when you boot your ST To start into Mac mode just press RETURN You can press RETURN before you get to the Spectre menu page the ST should remember the keypress If you wantto run as an ST just press either SHIFT key while you are booting This will abortthe autorun and take you to the ST desktop instead If you ever change the location of your SPECTRE PRG program you will need to make
175. w the slowdown only occurs while sound is actually playing For things like Beeps and Boinks and digital sounds believe me you want to download SoundMaster and some sounds and check them out they re hilarious this is just fine For sound during say an arcade game this may not be so good in which casc just shut it off from the front menu Version 1 9F of Spectre had thc original let s try it release of sound It worked okay but had a nasty habit of not shutting off when it wasn t needed and thus slowed the system down a lot of the timc This has been fixed gt Alt Video This option forces the Mac to shift video downwards from its normal location scc Figure 15 page 87 The sound buffer immediately follows the video buffer in the Mac memory map because the ST s screen takes up 32 000 bytes as opposed to the Mac s 22 000 bytes the ST screen collides with the Mac sound buffer This causes sounds to plot onscreen By shifting vidco downwards about 10 000 bytes in memory this collision is avoided With this the error handler and sound handler do not plot onscreen It will be necessary to run in Alternate Video mode when you are using sound 88 f m Spectre Menus So far it seems to present no problems to Mac software under test Just in case there is a compatibility problem though we leave you the option of toggling it off There could be a few probably public domain programs out there that hard wire the beginning
176. which allows you to pick exactly which SCSI devices and logical unit numbers are polled by Spectre for Spectre partitions This allows you great flexibility in your hard disk setup Also it allows you to disable SCSI device 6 used by the ICD clock and 7 used by the older Atari Laser Printers as well as 5 new Laser Printer address to avoid possible conflicts with those devices during polling For SCSI devices 1 7 with two drives per SCSI device this menu controls if a given drive is polled or looked at for Spectre partitions This allows you to easily enable or disable an entire drive s Spectre partitions this is extremely helpful for selecting customized Systems and configurations for instance AMA File Memory Cache Printer WEI Disk Floppy Disk Goodies SCSI Device and Unit control Choose device to format 0 unit SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device SCSI device yaona CA P I CD poaaogaoogooN Figure 10 If the block in a given entry is filled in the drive is selected If it s empty it is not selected Click on it to change The ICD s clock uses SCSI ID 6 and could conceivably be changed by the Spectre if enabled note that the Atari Laser Printer either uses SCSI ID 7 or 5 and again could conceivably be upset over the Spectre s polling process That s why we leave 6 and 7 off by default If you have a Laser Printer you will need to find out what SCSI ID it
177. with these 128K ROMS Important stuff like all Systems past 3 2 HyperCard Adobe Illustrator Aldus Freehand MacWrite 5 MacWrite II MacPaint II FileMaker Quark X Press Ready Set Go and you get the idea None of these programs worked on Magic Sac and at that time there wasn t any way to make them work that anyone knew of Anyway after patching the fixes to the bugs for awhile Apple com pletely dropped support for the 64K ROMs I remembered how hard it was to bring up the 64K ROMs which was a lot like three months of wisdom tceth extraction The 128K ROMs were well twice the code and twice as much to do Besides I wasn t sure anyone really cared about the 128K ROMs Bruce Rogovin a good man that had helped Beta Test new versions of Magic Sac kept calling me People are interested Dave They d buy it if you would do it Darlah Pine and Sandy Wilson on the GEnie network kept after me they arranged an electronic conference on the 128K ROMs asking Is anyone really interested Forty people showed up to emphatically say YES A hundred fifty people left positive responses to a GEnie note I left asking if they d be interested in the 128K ROMS I began to wonder if my opinion was wrong I said to myself Self is my opinion wrong I read the astrology column in the paper Aries said DO THE 128K ROMS I NEED MACWRITE 5 I did OUIJA board tests other worldly spirits chanted 128
178. xample he is the one who fig ured out why Ready Set Go 4 5 wouldn t print with UltraScript and came up with a fix for it It s been very helpful having him work with us And not only is he sharp he s a nice guy too Anyway back to copyrights please don t make copies of Transverter for your friends or upload Transverter to any Bulletin He is also 22 and single Girls send inquiries to Doug Wheeler Gadgets by Small marked personal 116 Transverter MAS File Options Transverter Version 4 50 ST gt Mac Transfer Utility by Douglas N Wheeler Copyright 1987 1989 TRADEMARKS i S MACINTOSH LICENSED TO APPLE COMPUTER MAC APPLE COMPUTER SPECTRE 128 GCR GADGETS BY SMALL INC ST amp FUJI LOGO ATARI CORPORATION COMPILEO HITH HISOFT BASIC PROFESSIONAL Figure 16 Boards or other online service Thank you File Menu This menu has several options which are for the most part self Desk EGET Options ST gt Mac Mac gt ST Figure 17 117 qu Transverter ifm explanatory sce Figure 17 For example you can select ST gt Mac or Mac ST depending on whether you want to convert files from ST format disks to Spectre or Mac format disks or vice versa You can also use a keypress to select the menu options instead of sclecting them Press s or Alt S to transvert ST format to Spectre format To transvert Spectre format to ST format press
179. y smoke detector youve ever seen but can t talk to tell you where it hurts OSHA re cently certified our office as a noise hazard because of him I hope to remedy this situation soon with specially designed ear protec tors originally designed for howit zer firing Jamey will magically get into the storage room and reappear holding say a soldering iron 34 pin cable DB 25 cable or a LittleF oot Dinosaur his favorite he sleeps with it Tt is extremely depressing to find your last test probe clip which you MUST use at the bottom of the toilet Jamey will often toddle up to any Keyboard that s available and bash it a few times You see he wants to do JUST what Mom and Dad do he s very observant Soon he will learn to moan Illegal Instruction Trap You stupid ma chine The Mac II next to me actually cringes when he walks into the room Needless to say it is some what distracting while trying to trace a tricky 68000 interrupt prob lem to have someone toddle up to you scream DEEEE and bash the Keyboard Jamey has also learned that The Primal Scream is remarkably effective at getting him out of the Baby Jail e g play pen back to where the action is He is training his parents you see Now I realize I ve shot our image as a Big Corporation but fook we are a family owned out fit and you re going to be seeing more and more of that in the fu ture so you might as wel

Spectre GCR Manual - Atari Documentation Archive

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