RE: Introduction & Question

> Dave was the freakin' KING of hack projects! His "Magic
> Sack" Mac-on-the-Atari-ST product was one of those things
> most people only dream of doing.

Yeah, that was just plain insane. Props to the Mac team though too-- pretty
cool that they were farsighted enough that the OS pretty much just said "oh,
OK" when presented with a larger screen, faster CPU, and decidedly
"different" Mac-ish characteristics.

I can't remember exactly, but wasn't there a stand-alone Z80 box that
unswizzled the Mac GCR discs *before* Spectre GCR came out? I remember lots
of floppy cables going everywhere whenever you used it. ;-) (...so after 15
minutes of Google searching I just caved and sent Dave a message on Facebook
asking if I'm just making stuff up out of thin air now. I thought it was
called the "translator" or something like that.)

> I mean, what a challenge --
> and he pulled it off! Apple was not amused, though. They
> did everything they could to dry up the supply of Mac ROMs.

About a decade before working together, I met Dan and Dave at the West Coast
Computer Faire (and ended up buying a Magic Sac there). Had to track down
the "guy with the bag" of Mac OS ROMs on the show floor and buy those
separately. ;-) I think Apple finally managed to put him out of business
when it turned out that some were OTP's and not original mask ROMs?
Something like that anyway.

> Nope, never had that! Never even heard about it before
> today, in fact. Oh, the things I could have done with that!

Oh, yeah... Man, I'm going to have to see if I can find some info on it
now. [...several minutes pass...] The internet is amazing. Here I am
remembering that Mark never finished it and none went out, and what do I
find-- Youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4DKJyetvMQ&list=UUmC4Clxn45gkYfatqynq16Q&ind
ex=4&feature=plcp

It was back at MPP (Microbits Peripheral Products-- the 'first try' company
before John and Alan re-formed as Supra Corp.) It was the "Super Charger":

http://www.pitfalljones.com/0800-cartpic-big/superchargercartridge.jpg

Wish I could remember the coprocessor chip... I want to say it was a
National part (even in the Supra/Diamond/SonicBlue days we always had strong
ties with National), but I just can't recall now.

Looking at the video, the 3D seems pretty quick (at least vs. "3D
Supergraphics" or Solid States running in Mode8), but there's a chance it's
using some pre-computation on things. Mark White was my supervisor when I
started at Supra and my Atari enthusiasm probably drove him nuts-- I was
always bugging him for old info and I'm just *positive* that he told me
about something "not quite right" on the math coprocessor cart. Would be
fun to disassemble that and see what it's really up to. ;-)

> I wrote a Battlezone clone for the 400/800 back in 1982 but
> all the transforms were done with a big table. With the 6502
> that was how I did almost anything requiring math -- just so
> much faster.

Did it ever ship?

> In some of the old discussions I found online
> with Jeff Hendrix talking about the Space Wars/Space Duel
> conversion, there was some talk about possibly adding a
> coprocessor so that developers could streamline certain math

Sounds like something I'd advocate. ;-) I've had a long-standing obsession
with making a Vectrex cart with a math coprocessor/helper CPU on it that
would play a nice 3D game and more or less just use the Vectrex CPU for I/O
and display generation. ;-)

> That would be beyond awesome. So do all you guys use the
> same macro assembler? I'd be happy to go with TASMx, given
> the fact that it has been designed with the vector hardware in mind.

I wrote the multigame menu and Vector Breakout with an old DOS assembler
called A65. I think I used it because it used the same hex notation (h'xx)
and memory manipulation stuff as my old 8051 assembler so I was comfortable
with it. (It had no linker or anything, which was fine by me-- DOS was fast
at scrolling one big file of text. ;-)

Most recently I've been using AS65.exe which I believe Neil found...

        AS65 Assembler for R6502 [1.11]. Copyright 1994-96, Frank A.
Vorstenbosch
        Usage: AS65 [-cdghilmnopqstvwxz] file

-Clay

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Received on Mon May 21 14:53:52 2012