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"Commodore, Atari, and me
Did you know Commodore was thinking about releasing an Atari ST Emulator?
Gather around the camp fire folks and I’ll tell you a few stories:
Settings: I was about 17, had an Amiga 500, and spent many an hour on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” which was really located in Jasper, AL. If you don’t understand that statement its alright but some of you will and that’s important to this story.
I and my co-horts were working on a program to boot Kickstart 1.4 into $200000. This was before there was a plethora of Kickstart relocator programs and info about Kickstart was pretty hard to come by. Anyway I bumped into a Euro Amiga Team that was working on an Atari ST emulator for the Amiga and we swapped stories and questions. They were having problems getting TOS to work on NTSC Amiga’s and tracking down a bug that would cause the ST not to run on some Amiga’s. They asked if I would take a look.
I was thrilled to see an ST emulator for the Amiga so that I could bring it into my local Amiga dealership –which also carried ST’s- and strut around the place running Amiga and Atari software.
I got the emulator and tried to run it but it would hang on my 500. I then tried it on a friend’s Amiga and it ran but was ‘jittery’ and in German. I asked the Euro Team about this and they had the same problems when they had other NTSC user’s try their program.
I dove into the world of Atari and borrowed “Compute’s First Book of Atari ST” when I flipped to the back of the book and to my surprise was a complete ROM disassembly with informative notations. I was shocked at this to be honest but it was Atari, how smart could they be with their OS?
Anyway, I discovered 3 things that lowered my opinion of Atari’s OS:
1. In Atari’s rush to market they had problems with their port of GEM so they used illegal calls in the 68000 chip to get GEM up and running. However, by doing this they broke compatibility with every CPU above the 68000. Motorola was very specific about legal instructions and experimental instructions and Atari shot themselves in the foot by not listening to Motorola.
2. TOS is hard coded for NTSC and PAL. The book gave the exact address and hex code.
3. TOS jumps between User and Supervisor State in the 68000 which is a really bad thing to do according to Motorola. Apple’s Mac just switched the chip in to Supervisor Mode (Super State) when the OS loaded and ran the show from there. Motorola said that you hurt the performance of the chip by doing this and that a multitasking OS would be difficult if not impossible to do with the chip in this state. I don’t remember the whole deal but it caused Motorola to shake its finger at Atari and Apple.
Well, this explained a lot since I had a super fast 010 in my Amiga 500 and once replaced with the 68000 the Atari Emulator worked. I also hex edited the ROM from PAL to NTSC and it was not ‘jittery’ anymore.
I asked the Euro Team about trying an English ROM but try as we might the emulator was like hard coded for this German ROM (The ROM was not a separate file it was one large exe). Anyway, since I had the Atari Book I hand edited all the German to English over the course of 5 or 6 hours and that solved the last problem.
Enter Commodore
So the emulator ran just awesome on any Amiga with a plain jane 68000 and I decided to take it to either AmiExpo or World of Amiga (I can’t remember which) in Chicago. This Commodore guy was doing some Amiga demos for the crowd and I asked him if he wanted to see an Atari Emulator for the Amiga. He said sure and brought us up on stage.
I thought how cool this was but then the Commodore guy was kind of making fun of us like we were stupid kids or something. He asked us if this was a real Atari emulator with this condescending lilt in his voice and a wink to the audience. I told him it was a real emulator and he should boot the disk. As we waited for the disk to load he asked if this was for a school project and kind of laughed to the audience.
I was pretty insulted and told him no, it was a real emulator that ran real Atari Software like Sim City. The emulator came up to the TOS desktop and he looked at the audience and said something to the effect of these fellas at least know how to use a paint program; and maybe AmigaBasic.
I’m like what the hell are you talking about? So I tell him you can do ‘about TOS’ switch resolutions, etc…it’s a REAL emulator. So he smugly looks out at the audience and says well if this is a REAL Atari Emulator it should be able to read a REAL MSDOS disk, huh?
I smiled at him as he pulls a disk out of his suit jacket and puts it into the drive, double clicks on the icon and it pulls up just fine. Now we’re looking pretty smug and he just about drops his pants. He ushers us off stage and has us wait with some other Commodore people while he talks to them. They then take us up to a Commodore Suite and ask us about a million questions.
I told them that they could have the emulator and give it away with Amiga’s if they wanted to. We just loved the Amiga and thought it was an awesome insult to Atari that you could run Amiga and Atari ST software on the Amiga. We didn’t know how you would get around the copyright of the ROM but here you go anyway.
They asked for our names, phone numbers, and a copy of the disk which we all gave but I never heard back from Commodore after that (neither did anyone else). I really didn’t care as the emulator was a pretty bad burn for the Atari folks at our local dealership and life went on. Hey, I was 17, what do you expect?
That’s my Atari story…
BONUS STORY!
When the first Amiga 500’s (with a CBM key and an Amiga key, not two Amiga keys) were being demo’d (not released) to dealers I asked the Commodore Rept how to load a other Kickstarts into the machine to maybe play a game that needs Kickstart 1.1 or something. He said that was a good question and looked through his documentation. He then called a few folks and ended up calling somebody at EA about this question.
EA put him on hold and then came back and said you needed to turn the machine off, then on, while holding down both mouse buttons or hold down control, cbm key, and amiga key which should prompt you for a Kickstart disk. Of course neither worked.
Not deterred I logged into Jay’s BBS and asked if he knew which he didn’t but said I should call Rob Peck. Since his phone number was listed in the phone book Jay gave the number to me and I called Rob. Rob said he didn’t know, didn’t think either suggestion would work, and said he would call me back after he asked around.
True to his word he called me back (long distance even!) and said you can’t. However, there are new beta Kickstart being compiled for $200000 but those are not for public release. That’s all we needed and we were off! Long to short, we wrote our own but did need Bryce Nesbitt’s help on resetting some kicktag pointers but it was a cool project."
as seen on: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1945&forum=3
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Amiga <-> Atari.. the old days new
