INFO-ATARI16 Digest         Mon, 20 Nov 89       Volume 89 : Issue 679
 
Today's Topics:
                     atari ABC  yea or nay  ????
                      BUG in FWRITE (LATTICE C)
                         Downloading, Help Me
          Gadgets by Small - Possible new '030 add-on board!
                       Need help with Gulam/MX2
                              Ram Disks
                          Terminator archive
                            Vapourware!!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 10:38:38 GMT
From:
 uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!uxf.cso.uiuc.edu!rjk
 752@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu
Subject: atari ABC  yea or nay  ????
 
/* Written by suhonen@tukki.jyu.fi in uxf.cso.uiuc.edu:comp.sys.atari.st */
 
Much text deleted intermittently
 
>The MC68000 is FAR from RISC!!!!   It is absolutely a CISC processor!
        Not true.  See below.
 
<       I am a month from graduation as a computer engineer, and....
>if only I where you professor, I'll would kick you out of the University!!
>Almoust draduated computer engineer, and does not know NOTHING about
>processors... Where is the word goning to?????
        Isn't there some sort of error in logic there ?  Because I haven't
programmed the 68000 and one of my statements about it was technically
incorrect, I know NOTHING about processors.  I know quite a bit about
processors (I won't bore everyone by putting it in).  The University of
Illinois is in fact one of the best Colleges in the United states in the
field of Computer Engineering, and I will graduate in December. However,
they tend to concentrate on theory.  I have had little experience with the
hardware currently on the market.
        I don't see any smiles in your text.  If you want to get personal
with colorful insults, then please use mail.  Your message is in very poor
taste.  There is enough bashing going on here, we don't need to start flame
wars as well, do we ?
        I heard about the 68000 architecture from a friend at the University
here (I haven't actually programmed it myself).  Here is what he said:
(Note that I now admit the 68000 is considered CISC)
 
"Actually, the 68000 is considered CISC, because of the fact that YOU, the USER
cannot write programs in its "basic" set.  I am *quite* sure that at the very
*heart* of the 68000 is a RISC ALU which executes a VERY small program (which
is stored in the on-chip memory) which reads the instructions from memory and
decodes them.  So overall, the 68000 is in fact CISC, but it is run by a RISC
heart.
 
And yes, I am quite sure of this.  I got this info from a (very informative)
article on CPU architecture in Byte magazine (a special issue on architecture
sometime in the last 14 months or so) -- they were doing a specific comparison
of the basic operation differences between the 80x86 and the 680x0 families."
 
        Hopefully that will clear up any confusion that you or I created.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 09:19:50 GMT
From: eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!inria!loria!wiener.crin.fr!domen@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
  (Eric Domenjoud)
Subject: BUG in FWRITE (LATTICE C)
 
I'd like to report a bug I found in the function FWRITE of the library
GEMLIB.BIN of LATTICE C. Writing 0xFF to a file causes an error.
I've included the code of this function with some comments so that
everybody can see the bug is.
 
Did somebody already notice it?
Does this bug really exist or only in my version ? (would be very strange)
 
Anyway, be carefull when using this function.
 
        Eric
 
----------------------------------------------
 
FHANDLE = 20    ; file handle
BLKCNT  = 16    ; number of blocks to be written
BLKSIZE = 12    ; block size
BADDR   =  8    ; address of the current byte
 
BLKWR   = -4    ; blocks written
BYTEWR  = -8    ; bytes written
THEBYTE = -12   ; current byte
 
 
FWRITE:
        link    A6,#-12
        clr.l   -4(A6)          ; no block written
 
NEXTBLK:
        move.l  -4(A6),D0
        cmp.l   16(A6),D0
        bge.s   ALLDONE
        clr.l   -8(A6)          ; no byte written
 
NEXTBYTE:
        move.l  -8(A6),D0
        cmp.l   12(A6),D0
        bge.s   BLKDONE
        movea.l 8(A6),A0        ; If the byte to be written is 0xFF
        move.b  (A0),D0         ; D0 = 0xFF
        ext.w   D0              ; D0 = 0xFFFF
        ext.l   D0              ; D0 = 0xFFFFFFFF
        addq.l  #1,8(A6)
        movea.l 20(A6),A0
        move.l  8(A0),D1
        subq.l  #1,D1
        move.l  D1,8(A0)
        move.l  D0,-12(A6)
        tst.l   D1
        bmi.s   BUFFULL         ; branch if the file buffer is full
        movea.l (A0),A1         ; Otherwise ...
        addq.l  #1,(A0)
        move.b  D0,(A1)         ; D0 still contains 0xFFFFFFFF
        ext.w   D0              ;
        ext.l   D0              ;
        bra.s   ONEDONE         ; LOOK ...
                                   |
BUFFULL:                           |
        move.l  20(A6),-(SP)       |
        move.l  -12(A6),-(SP)      |
        jsr     _FLSBF             |
        addq.l  #8,SP              |
                                   |
ONEDONE:                           V
        addq.l  #1,D0           ; D0 now contains 0 !
        bne.s   NOERROR         ; and we have an error !!!!!
        move.l  -4(A6),D0
        unlk    A6
        rts
 
NOERROR:
        addq.l  #1,-8(A6)
        bra.s   NEXTBYTE
 
BLKDONE:
        addq.l  #1,-4(A6)
        bra.s   NEXTBLK
 
ALLDONE:
        move.l  -4(A6),D0
        unlk    A6
        rts
 
----------------------------------------------------------
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 10:38:40 GMT
From:
 gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso
 .uiuc.edu!uicbert.eecs.uic.edu!dillenbu@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Downloading, Help Me
 
Help !   How do I download a file from the Terminator archives to my
ST ?  I tried using binary ftp to d/l a file to my school computer and
then binary kermit from there to my ST but  I keep getting BAD Header
and BAD checksum errors when I try to de-arc the files.
        Thanks,
            John Dillenburg
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 07:03:19 GMT
From:
 gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!uvaarpa!hudson!asts
 un.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu  (Greg Lindahl)
Subject: Gadgets by Small - Possible new '030 add-on board!
 
In article <3795@netmbx.UUCP> hase@netmbx.UUCP (Hartmut Semken) writes:
 
>I exspect the Gadgets board to help a lot with Spectre and do almost
>nothing for TOS.
 
Hm. I thought the FaST Tech board was a 16mhz 68000 with a
write-through 32k cache. So if you do lots of reading in a row, you
get a big win. Now if you essentially mounted a 16mhz 68030 with a 16
bit data path onto the same board, and somehow get around the Fline
problem, then you'd have something that would speed things up more
than the Turbo16. Right? It wouldn't be as good as a 32-bit data path
with no speed decrease on writes, but still better than a 68000 at
16mhz.
 
Of course, I don't know if the '030 can handle different bus widths.
My Moto books aren't that recent.
 
The way that it wins over the PAK68 is that Jim Allen has partially
decoupled the processor speed from the video speed.
 
> The ST is a closed machine; a compatible, faster
>redesign is pretty exspensive.
 
But the TT *is* a compatible redesign with 32-bit everything, right?
It will be interesting to compare the TT to other similar '030 boxes,
when/if it arrives.
 
------
Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                  Astrophysicists for Choice.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 19 Nov 89 15:05:49 GMT
From: agate!saturn!ucscg.UCSC.EDU!dstr012@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (10003012)
Subject: Need help with Gulam/MX2
 
Help!!! I just downloaded the Gulam shell and MX2.  For some reason,
MX2 can't seem to perform background tasks correctly.  Every time I
try to do a background download, it seems to refuse to send checksums
back to the sender and it just eventually quits.  I tried setting the
priority higher but it still did not work.  Has anyone gotten the MX2
kernal to work efficiently?
 
    Roman Baker
    dstr012@UCSCG.UCSC.EDU
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 08:31:24 GMT
From: agate!saturn!ucscg.UCSC.EDU!dstr012@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (10003012)
Subject: Ram Disks
 
Is it possible or is there already out there a RAM disk program that
could increase it's size as more and more files are put into it?
I would really be great because I keep running out of space on deArcs.
 
Roman Baker
 
------------------------------
 
Date: Mon Nov 20 11:35:00 UTC+0100 1989
From: VCD51661%DS0RUS54.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu
Subject: Terminator archive
 
Hi there,
 
last week i tried to access the terminator archive via mail and
via ftp. I used the internet adress atari@terminator.cc.umich.edu
and got the message "unknown host" using ftp. My mails remained
without reply. Does anybody know whether the terminator archive
is still working, or what else could be wrong?
 
Thanx alot.
                        /*
                        **  Benno Salzgeber
                        **  Institute for Computer Applications
                        **  University of Stuttgart
                        **  VCD51661@DS0RUS54.BITNET
                        */
 
-- FOOD FOR THE LITTLE LINEEATER -- FOOD FOR THE LITTLE LINEEATER -- FOOD
-- FOOD FOR THE LITTLE LINEEATER -- FOOD FOR THE LITTLE LINEEATER -- FOOD
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 20 Nov 89 10:37:12 GMT
From: eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!inria!laas!ralph@bloom-beacon.mit.edu  (Ralph P.
 Sobek)
Subject: Vapourware!!!
 
In article <13200@s.ms.uky.edu> phoenix@ms.uky.edu (R'ykandar Korra'ti) writes:
|  In article <480035@hpdml93.HP.COM> rona@hpdml93.HP.COM (Ron Abramson) writes:
|  >I've seen the NEXT machine.  It is very real.
|   I've seen the NeXT machine.  It is very slow.
|       :-)
|       (Display postscript... bleah...)
|                                                      - R'ykandar.
 
Well, all that depends...  I've seen other machines which display
PostScript on the screen, and they were much slower for that than th NeXT!
All this is like comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges.
 
Ralph P. Sobek                    Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own.
ralph@laas.laas.fr                         Addresses are ordered by importance.
ralph@laas.uucp, or ...!uunet!mcvax!laas!ralph          If all else fails, try:
SOBEK@FRMOP11.BITNET                                  sobek@eclair.Berkeley.EDU
===============================================================================
Upon the instruments of death the sunlight brightly gleams.   --   King Crimson
 
------------------------------
 
End of INFO-ATARI16 Digest V89 Issue #679
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