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INFO-ATARI16 Digest         Thu, 25 Jan 90       Volume 90 : Issue  101
 
Today's Topics:
                       How to Fix a Dead ST???
                         METAFOUR hard drives
                      Need dumped GNUEmacs 18.55
                    Question on use of Interleaves
                            The real world
               Words of wisdom on MWC behaviour needed
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Date: 25 Jan 90 21:10:09 GMT
From: att!dptg!lzsc!hcj@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (HC Johnson)
Subject: How to Fix a Dead ST???
Message-ID: <1245@lzsc.ATT.COM>
 
In article <370005@col.hp.com>, don@col.hp.com (Don Allison) writes:
> How do you go about maintaining your Atari ST?  I managed to kill mine in the
> process of upgrading the memory (it was flakey anyway, but it is really dead
 
Don't panic:
1. Atari does have its exchange.
 
If the product is out of warranty, you can send it directly to
Atari at this address:
 
                       Atari Corp.
                       390 Caribbean Dr.
                       Sunnyvale, CA 94089
                       ATTN: Door 17
 
It will be repaired or replaced at their discretion.  If the unit
is no longer manufactured or kept in stock by Atari, they will
replace it with an equivalent or enhanced version at their discretion.
 
Repair/Replacement prices for ST equipment are as follows:
 
                       520ST             $95.00
 
2. you may have slightly munged the socked for the mmu.
 
Standard fix:  remove mmu, GENTLY flex the socket pins toward the center to
tighten them, reinsert mmu.  This fixes lots of MMU problems.
 
3. check the power supply:  if +5 +12 are there, there's hope.
 
4. for $100 you can become a developer, and get the schematics.  I've seen
ref. to H. Sams having schematics for a 512.
 
good luck
 
Howard C. Johnson
ATT Bell Labs
=====NEW address====
att!lzsc!hcj
hcj@lzsc.att.com
 
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Date: 25 Jan 90 22:23:31 GMT
From: van-bc!ubc-cs!alberta!aunro!atha!rwa@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Ross Alexander)
Subject: METAFOUR hard drives
Message-ID: <1608@atha.AthabascaU.CA>
 
870086t@aucs.uucp (Shannon Tremblay) writes:
> Has anyone ever heard of or delt with METAFOUR MARKETING out of
>Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  They sell custom harddrives.  I just bought
[a long tale of woe re damaged-in-shipment and slow delivery]
> METAFOUR tells me they have a good track record shipping all over
>the country, but what do you expect.
 
I've got one of these too; Quantum Pro-80 (with the ROM fix), BMS
adaptor, room for another drive, et c. et c.  I don't think that power
supply is 200w :-), maybe 125 or so.  Agreed it's total overkill.  For
the price, given that you can't/don't want to roll your own, they are
fine.
 
I have to admit that Maurice Hilarius (that's his real name, folks)
seems to have a bad time with the shippers.  My disk wandered to
Portsmouth, Oregon before it got the 150 km north from Edmonton to
here.  Sure was a loooong time a'coming.  There was a similar long
wait for an order of printer ribbons.
 
I don't think he's a scam artist, though; just a very small
businessman with thin margins.  It seems to come with the Atari
territory :-(.  I'm still dealing with him in complete confidence.
I've just switched to going down and picking stuff up in person;
that's always worked beautifully.  Obviously your mileage may vary
;-).
--
--
Ross Alexander    (403) 675 6311    rwa@aungbad.AthabascaU.CA    VE6PDQ
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 26 Jan 90 01:31:10 GMT
From: dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!cs121ta1@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Need dumped GNUEmacs 18.55
Message-ID: <16000002@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
 
I want to use GNU Emacs 18.55, but there's just no way that I can manage
the dumping process on my one-drive, 1040ST.  Is there any reason why I
could not use the dumped "xemacs" from somebody else's system?  If so,
could some kind soul make one available via FTP?
==========================
Scott Renner                                    INTERNET: renner@cs.uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign      UUCP: pur-ee!uiucdcs!renner
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 25 Jan 90 21:31:11 GMT
From: att!dptg!lzsc!hcj@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (HC Johnson)
Subject: Question on use of Interleaves
Message-ID: <1246@lzsc.ATT.COM>
 
From: dlm@druwy.ATT.COM (Dan Moore)
in article <1230@lzsc.ATT.COM>, hcj@lzsc.ATT.COM (HC Johnson) says:
> The information with the Adaptec 4000 controller that most MFM systems
> use is to use interleave=1.  There are 17 sectors on each track.  With
 
I will write 16 != 18 100  times.
 
Straight from the book.
 "The ACB-4000 series controllers are capable of reading one track of data
from the disk in one revolution of the disk.  This is called noninterleaved,
or 1-to-1 interleaved operation."
 
"SECTOR SIZE  BYTES/SECTOR INTERLEAVE  SECTORS/TRACK
        512     576             1               17
        512     566             >1              18"
 
So the deal is with Interleave=1, Adaptec will deliver all the sectors on
one turn.  Since TOS usually asks for 2 at a time, this is somewhat efficient.
The key question is how soon TOS will come back with the next request.  I
think not too soon -- this is a ms/dos clone; no read ahead.
The result will probably be close to 2 sectors per turn.
 
Likewise, if Interleave >1, then it will take a little longer to get the 2
sectors for TOS (3 sector times instead of 2 for I=2) but it still is close
to 2 sectors per turn.
 
Since the Adaptec doesn't have to process on the fly, it can pack the sectors
tighter; leaving 18 to the track, which increases capacity.
 
Since I do cartridge tape backup and read a track at a time, it pays me to use
interleave=1.  your mileage may differ.
 
Howard C. Johnson
ATT Bell Labs
=====NEW address====
att!lzsc!hcj
hcj@lzsc.att.com
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 26 Jan 90 01:00:35 GMT
From:
 samsung!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!tiger!sw
 klassen@think.com  (Steven W. Klassen)
Subject: The real world
Message-ID: <20189@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
 
In article <26715@brunix.UUCP> rjd@cs.brown.edu (Rob Demillo) writes:
>
>So, don't laugh too hard...I did, but after getting my Masters, and
>contracting around for about 5 years, and reading the trade journals,
>and talking with other computer professionals....C still has a way
>to go outside the computer science field.
 
Hmmm, so far my work terms have included:
 
Ministry of Transporation - dBase III+, Clipper, Lotus 1-2-3, Pascal on PCs
GE Plastics - Oracle (SQL) on a VAX 8350 (yes that says 8350!)
EDS (part of General Motors) - Fortran on a PDP-11/70 and a 4GL on a HP3000
 
All the jobs (except one) I have applied for this term are programming
in C on a Unix (or Unix-like) environment.
 
I have yet to touch BASIC while programming in the "real" world.  Guess
I'm just lucky!
 
Steven W. Klassen                       +-----------------------------+
Computer Science Major                  | Support the poor...buy fur! |
University of Waterloo                  +-----------------------------+
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 25 Jan 90 19:09:37 GMT
From: van-bc!ubc-cs!alberta!myrias!mj@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Michal Jaegermann)
Subject: Words of wisdom on MWC behaviour needed
Message-ID: <633294579.26980@myrias.com>
 
Does anybody has a sage advice what to do with the following
problem (short of replacing a compiler with something else)?
 
Setting:  Mega ST with TOS 1.4, gulam shell and MWC 3.0.6 compiler.
Any program compiled with supplied MWC libraries which reads stdin.
 
An attempt to redirect on a command line stdin to come from a file
causes an 'exit()' routine to bomb out in the most interesting and
unusual manner. On my screen appears a messege "*** SYSTEM HALTED ***"
in a company of some other nonsense which informs me that the system
memeory is exhausted and advise me to use FOLDRXXX.PRG to avoid that.
Which is obviously bogus.
 
I hoped that maybe an istallation of poolfix3 (yes, version 3) will
improve the situation.  Unfortunately it does not have a slightest
influence - at least on this.
 
All test programs work beautifuly, echoing nicely input, until they
hit exit(). THE CRASH does not happen when there are run under msh, OR
when run under msh or gulam but were compiled with MWC-zed dLibs
libraries.  But I need a floating point, which dLibs does not support.
An attempt to use MWC printf with dLibs was partially successful in
that the the program behaves nicely and exits in a clean manner but it
does not print anything at all (probalby due to incompatible internal
structures).
 
Part of a problem obviously is caused by a fact that MWC thinks that
there is only one shell in a world and is called msh.  Still I am
not very eager to pay good money for sources for their libraries
in order to fix their bugs. I feel that I already paid for a compiler.
BTW - MWC libraries contain, indeed, an undocumented function isatty(),
which, once again, works with msh only.  Fortunately this is easy to
remedy.
 
In hope that somebody may come with a good solution,
        Michal Jaegermann
        Myrias Research Corporation
        Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA
        mj@myrias.COM
        ...?uunet,alberta?!myrias!mj
 
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End of INFO-ATARI16 Digest V90 Issue #101
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