Diamond Operating System

[Gunstar]

It is a lot better with A.P.E Warp+ at in ultraspeed mode, but even then it's just a bit slow. It really is mad for an HD setup, which is why I was hoping to get it working with MyIDE, but the MyIDE OS has to be the internal version, not on flashcart. that's why I WAS thinking of BOSS for the MyIDE on my XE, and ATOS with ultraspeed A.P.E. But since it's been said that BOSS is also incompatible with Mydos, I don't know what to do now. I can do it through my XL becuase I have the 32-in-1 OS internal, but I really wanted the HD for the XE, with ATOS. It's a shame that MyIDE wasn't designed around SpartaDOS which is much more compatible with different setups and GUI's, becuase it has so many versions for different needs and is much more accessible for customization to make things work. I'm hoping for better luck with the new MyIDE 4.2, but I don't think there is a flash version yet, just versions for burning to eproms. I think I would have just installed the internal MyIDE version if I had known about the added incompatabilities of the external MyIDE+flash version.

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I'm a bit confused here.

 

The 1 mb flash MyIde will not work with ATOS? Why is that?

 

And the internal version does work?

 

I believe I have heard of adjustments that have been made to let SpartaDos work with MyIde. Haven't tinkered much with SpartaDos since I just entered the XL world fairly recently and only SpartaDos 1.1 worked on the normal beige 800.

 

Anywho, currently 1 mb flash MyIde will not work with SpartaDos/ATOS, but internal version will?

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My understanding is that OS in the flashcart is accessed differently than an internal OS and that is why, and you can read about the discussions here: http://www.atarimax.com/flashcart/forum/

I was told to re-flash my MyIDE+flash without an OS on it, then use one of the MyIDE OS verions on my 32-in-1 OS in my 1200XL, along with SpartaDOS 3.3a and I could get ATOS to work to some degree that way. But my XE only has the standard XE OS, so the MyIDE OS can only be used from the MyIDE+flash.

[areeve]

I can't really accuse Mr. Merrill playing both sides of the fence. He released his Electronic Cookbook (Did David Sullivan write that? I don't recall. If I recall it was written in Action!).

 

I recall that he called me out of the blue indicated that David wasn't producing like he wanted and I had a working product at the time so he wanted to market mine. I remember he had me thinking I'd be doing a cameo appearance on David Letterman, the product would be in Sears, and it would be bundled with Atari's computer because of all of his connections. And then I got the call from David Sullivan offering to team up as well. Did I ever grow a big head out of that :-) Suddenly, everyone wanted to be my buddy.

 

Well, Mr. Merrill succeeded in getting it in some of the stores that I sure couldn't and that was quite impressive to me. We had it down to where people were ordering directly from him. I would buy the cartridges. Burn them. Send them to him. He'd print the manuals. He'd ship the orders. And he'd collect the cash. What's wrong with that picture? But he gave me some story about advertising costs... etc which may have had some truth to it, but it wasn't agreed upon at the time. My mistake.

 

Then I started getting some calls from retailers / customers telling me that he was a sleaze... quite literally. And then after many months of not getting any money, yet paying money for the cartridges I pulled the plug shortly before the World of Atari show in early '89 (I think). At the time the plan was for him to go, but a last minute change put me and my Mom there.

 

It was interesting seeing some retailers at the show with Diamond GOS boxes that has no cover (just a plain white box) because he shipped an unfinished product to them to make a quick buck. I felt bad for said retailers and it probably hurt the whole effort to promote Diamond GOS.

 

Then about a year afterwards when Diamond Write had been released he sent me a box of printed manuals, cartridge labels, ...etc (i.e. parts) with a sob letter saying that in all fairness I should give him the software so that he can fulfill his orders. Needless to say I have to assume that there were many people that lost their money on that deal, but I can't be sure. Maybe he did the right thing and gave them their money back. I also remember reading in some Atari user groups newsletter about my lack of scruples when I had never dealt with said person which coincided with the Shelly Merrill fun.

 

As for the product line, I was probably way over my head with respect to knowledge to write all of these products. Diamond Paint was fairly easy (and I don't recall all of these bugs I'm reading about with the exception of an issue with earlier Diamond GOS ROMs where it would crash because of Vertical Blank vs the back switching on the cartridge problem), but Diamond Write was quite complicated (and admittedly buggy) because it's quite time consuming rasterizing non 8x8 fonts on a bit mapped screen. Lots of ROLs and RORs (assembly code). I also hadn't written a word processor before and the concept of having a block of editable linear memory in which characters could be deleted and added... etc was challenging at the time. And then there was the memory constraint. At the time I was a second year Comp Sci student at Northern Illinois Universty and didn't have nearly the knowledge that I do now. As for the other products... in retrospect I don't know how I would have done that flying solo.

 

- Alan

 

P.S. I have purchased both Atari Flashback units. Nice job and keep 'em coming. I'm a big fan of retrocomputing and have several hundred Atari 2600 games including some pretty rare ones like Out of Control from Avalon Hill. I got that when I first moved to the Atlanta, GA area and saw an ad in the local classifieds for $2 Atari games. I went to check it out and it was an all black area and I couldn't find the apartment so I asked some guys that were playing basketball and they directed me to the apt and as I walked off they shouted racial obcenities at me. I was pretty scared wondering if all of my car's tires would still have air in them when I got back, but I had more important things on my mind. Anyhow, the lady pulled out this box of games and I purchased 9 and gave her a $20 and said keep the rest. She INSISTED that I take ten. Very nice lady. And then 3 years later was where I learned that this bunch of games are among the rarest in my collection. I only wish they were in a bit better condition.

 

 

 

 

Oh man...

 

Shelly Merrill... what a debacle with those guys. Electronic Cookbook was a neat project, but Shelly was playing both sides of the fence with Alan's Diamond GOS and Steve's TCS (Total Control Systems) desktop, Steve promised quite a bit in his OS, but other then the ASCII Gr.0 version, his never materialized in physical form.

 

I remember calling Alan the day of or after his meeting with the Tramiels, and as he said above, they just weren't interested in continuing the 8bit line, or more importantly giving the 8bit line an OS which essentially looked exactly like the color lo-res version of the ST computers TOS.

 

I gave Ken Van Mersbergen my set of GOS disks to make ATR's out of, I need to have him send them back, I have all of the rev's of Diamond Write, Diamond Paint and also Diamond Develop too. Alan sent me pretty much every version he had so I could beat test and give him feedback. I have the last version of Diamond OS rom, I think it was 2.1

 

 

Curt

[+MrFish]

I always admired the work you did on GOS Alan. Definitely some good ideas in your implementation. It's even more of an accomplishment considering your age (I never knew you were that young).

 

I owned a copy back in the day. I found the paint app quite useful for some of my development needs.

 

Definitely needed to have a few more good apps available, and the possibility of desk accessories was a nice tease. Were any other apps created for the environment outside of Reeve Software?

 

I've always been tempted to write something just to use the interface goodies, but it limits your audience.

 

Was your mom the support staff by any chance? I actually called with questions a couple of times. I remember talking to a very understanding lady.

[areeve]

I believe a handful of very simple desk accessories were written for it. I recall Matthew Ratcliff writing some rudimentary color changer among others. That one just sticks out because I believe he did the ANALOG review. No doubt about the fact that it would have been nice to have more for it. Obviously my resources were limited. I recall one of the best purchases made for the development environment was a 1 megabyte MIO that Tom @ ICD gave me a good price on so that he didn't have to carry it back from a tradeshow. That really accelerated things.

 

And yes, if you spoke to a woman re: Diamond GOS support that would have been Mom.

 

There were two really good ideas that were in Diamond GOS... the first was the memory driver concept that would allow a standardized function call to copy data to and from bankswitched memory regardless of the brand of the extra memory. Most of the memory upgrades were pretty useless as most apps didn't take advantage of them. The other was device indepence of the memory driver and I think I started trying to do that in Diamond Write with printers.

 

I appreciate the compliments, but there was plenty that was done wrong too. I know there were plenty of promises made that didn't get executed as I wasn't much of a businessperson in my teen years. I was also quite upset when I had the plug pulled on the cartridge format I was using by ICD after putting all of my eggs in their basket. They had, in my opinion, a much nicer bank switching mechanism than did Atari simply because Atari's blocked out 8k of memory. I also remember being criticized by David Sullivan because I didn't use all 64k of the bank switched cartridge and the media buying that as some issue. Like I'm going to code until it's full.. and then announce that there's no more space to improve the product.

 

They were good times through and certainly a very good experience. It's been fun reminiscing as I'm a pretty nostalgic person in general.

 

- Alan

 

I always admired the work you did on GOS Alan. Definitely some good ideas in your implementation. It's even more of an accomplishment considering your age (I never knew you were that young).

 

I owned a copy back in the day. I found the paint app quite useful for some of my development needs.

 

Definitely needed to have a few more good apps available, and the possibility of desk accessories was a nice tease. Were any other apps created for the environment outside of Reeve Software?

 

I've always been tempted to write something just to use the interface goodies, but it limits your audience.

 

Was your mom the support staff by any chance? I actually called with questions a couple of times. I remember talking to a very understanding lady.

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[+MrFish]

It all makes a lot more sense, now that I've heard what was going on. Too bad things didn't work out differently. I guess timing had a lot to do with it. Kind of indicative of the demise of the Atari 8-bit line.

 

I feel that many people are still interested in a good GUI for the A8's. I know there is a group currently working on a TRS type GUI, and there are others out there. I guess I would like to see something come to the forefront also.

 

By the way, if you're nostalgic you've come to right place.

[Shawn Jefferson]

I think the BOSS desktop uses some of the memory locations that MyIDE needs - therefore it wont work with it.  I think I tried many moons ago when using the external cart version.

 

Some folks got ATOS working but had corruption issues with the 3.x MyIDE OS.  MyIDE 4.2 is available now and it should work better - One of these days I will try

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I have tried it but haven't been able to get it to work as of yet. I had a ATOS setup with MyIDE 3.1 OS working, but the partition corruption bug did it in and I haven't ran the 3.1 OS since the newer ones came out.

 

Also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, if Tom Hunt will release the source code (is he still around the 8-bit scene?) for the windowing library and 80-column driver for ATOS, I'll rewrite some of the currently gr.0 ATOS utilities for the GUI environment, and maybe a few other things, time and interested providing.

Edited March 3, 2006 by Shawn Jefferson

[doctorclu]

I have tried it but haven't been able to get it to work as of yet.  I had a ATOS setup with MyIDE 3.1 OS working, but the partition corruption bug did it in and I haven't ran the 3.1 OS since the newer ones came out.

 

Also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, if Tom Hunt will release the source code (is he still around the 8-bit scene?) for the windowing library and 80-column driver for ATOS, I'll rewrite some of the currently gr.0 ATOS utilities for the GUI environment, and maybe a few other things, time and interested providing.

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Well good to know that ATOS can work with MyIde to a limited degree at least. I look forward to trying.

 

As ATOS, is it possible to load regular programs with ATOS (Games, exit to basic, things like that)?

[Shawn Jefferson]

Well good to know that ATOS can work with MyIde to a limited degree at least.  I look forward to trying.

 

I had it working with MyIDE OS 3.1 in ROM and SpartaDOS v3.3a. I haven't had any luck with 4.2 in ROM as of yet. If anyone gets it going, let me know how you did it!

 

As ATOS, is it possible to load regular programs with ATOS (Games, exit to basic, things like that)?

 

Yes, it will swap out the desktop and just leave a small "core" that will usually reload on RESET or exit from the program.

 

I had it running from my hard drive with a RAM drive setup to hold the desktop swap file. It was very fast (in 1Mhz CPU terms) going in and out of programs that needed to swap out the desktop GUI.

[walter_J64bit]

WOW, I don't know about the other TOS like OS's.

Edited March 5, 2006 by walter_J64bit