Orig. Atari Dev. Equip. Q.

[+davidcalgary29]

Can anyone advise what equipment Atari initially used to develop software for the 400/800 and, perhaps, the 5200? I recall reading that some 5200 proto software had been found on 8" disk format, and I'm assuming that those drives were not hooked up to an Atari 8-bit computer.

[Tempest]

They used a modified Atari 800. It had a special port that allowed it to be connected to a Cormenco mainframe and it also had two other high speed ports (serial?). I know Curt auctioned one off a year or so ago, but I don't think it met the reserve. Neat to have, but pretty useless these days.

 

Tempest

[deathtrappomegranate]

I don't know, I heard about a Cromemco for sale recently...

[bjk7382]

When I was talking to Howard Scott Warshaw thru PM he told me that when he was making Yars' he backed up what he had in stages, as to see the progress of the game. He had a bunch of backups on 8" floppies. He also said that he has none of that stuff anymore (not any atari stuff), but it sure would be nice to find someday.

[Curt Vendel]

Can anyone advise what equipment Atari initially used to develop software for the 400/800 and, perhaps, the 5200? I recall reading that some 5200 proto software had been found on 8" disk format, and I'm assuming that those drives were not hooked up to an Atari 8-bit computer.

 

Originally most of the development was taking place via assemblers on Vax 11/7xx classic super-mini's, then the HCD (Home Computer Division) brought in several high end Data General MV 8000-9600's and they were performing their compiling on those super-mini's (more commonly known in many circles as mainframes)

 

Atari had then worked on a desktop-side system, they were using Cromemco Z2's for a lot of the Atari 2600 development (while also connecting to DC PDP-11's for compiling and storage and saving the data to RX02 8" floppy disks in RT-11 format) and several boards were developed for the Z2's (which were S-100 bus microcomputers - same type of systems as the original Altair 8800 and the Imsai 8080 from WarGames)

 

A boardset was developed with the 800 chipset on it and a ribbon cable feed to a specially modified Atari 800 called an DS800 (Developers System) which had a different CPU card which feed through the 800 case to a LEFT side interface panel with 2 serial ports, one for a terminal to connect to the DS800 for debugging and a second port to communicate serially with a host device (such as a PDP-11 or a serial port to a Vax or other device) and a ribbon cable connector which took the ribbon cable coming from the S-100 board in the Cromemco Z2 microcomputer.

 

Atari was also working to adapt DEC Professional 350 workstations using a modified version of RSX (a Dec single user OS) and create a new developer station with their own sets of Human interfacing OS, developers tools and so forth... they managed to go a bit with that new OS design, but it never got far outside the group developing it.

 

Then there is SWEAT (SoftWare Editors And Tools) which were Atari 800 based tools for developing animation, sound, backgrounds etc... these were used to develop ET Phone Home for the Atari 800 and the unreleased Superman III for the 800.

 

Then there is GUMP... but thats another system for another time...

 

If you want to see the manual for the DS800 and/or the Sweat Tools I'll post them up onto the Atari Museum archives server this week.

 

 

 

Curt

[Wrathchild]

Where/when did the MadMac cross assembler originate from?

[Curt Vendel]

Where/when did the MadMac cross assembler originate from?

 

That was an assembler off of one of the Vax's as I recall, started out as Camac. Jim Dunion, who was one of THE most amazing coders in the HCD and was part of Corporate Research worked on a great deal of the tools for the division. One of his best works was DDT (Dunions Debugging Tools) which would later be included on the Mac/65 OSS cart.

 

 

 

Curt