Re: Amiga, AtariST, soft repos [was: Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers]
Guys, Thanks for the tips and info. Wrt: - C-Lab Notator - I do not think I will need this, as it seems to be musician's stuff. - Amiga vs Atari quality - I have never had any hands on experience with AtariST, so I will stick to other people's opinions for a while... - TOSEC - I have checked and they are mentioned in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSEC : "The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative founded in February 2000 initially for the renaming and cataloging of software files intended for use in emulators" and their website works - cool. The verdict for me, so far, is that in short term I will stick to trying some AtariST emulator and see how far it takes me. Long term, the chance I go back to Amiga seems a bit higher now. I have no intention to play games (well, maybe some) and want to see how useful such emulators can be for playing with Forth or MK68 assembler. At least such is wishful thinking because I cannot divert too much time yet and besides I remember a post from alt.sysadmin.recovery decades ago where a guy played with virtual machine at work, then came home to play with IIRC mac emulation on windows emulation on something and he sounded a bit insane (kind of "have I woke up from the simulation or I am in upper level simulation" syndrome, only perhaps he thought he was a computer)... So I got to thread gently, I guess? Anyway, this small project is far away & stuck in a fifo right now. I am just collecting threads to connect them later. Thanks for help. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
Re: Amiga, AtariST, soft repos [was: Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers]
> > tl;dr: Is there a software repository for AtariST comparable to Aminet? > > I don't follow it much, so I can't really say for sure what systems or software are in the archive. But there was an effort for collecting "all" games and software for many systems called TOSEC. Unfortunately, it's not an authorized collection so copyright folks may frown on obtaining those files.
Re: Amiga, AtariST, soft repos [was: Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers]
(especially if they started with MS DOS, as I observed). OTOH, in retrospect, I wonder if I would spent the money wiser by choosing AtariST or going straight to 286 (not the same experience, I know, but cheap and easier to sell away). Or, if I wanted it really cheap, C128 I grew up Atari 8bit then MS-DOS but watched Amiga and Atari ST. I now dabble with both machines. To me the Amiga seems better in most ways. The hard drive interfaces were probably just as expensive then. ASCI or whatever their custom SCSI implementation is on the Atari. The colors are better on the Amiga. The sound seems mostly better on the Amiga (skipping the midi factor of the Atari ST since that requires buying expensive synths or tone modules or samplers. No standard here.) The community hacking of the Amiga seems larger, and the accessory market seems way bigger on the Amiga. The Atari high res mono monitor is better than the Amigas headache inducing stuff but you had to forgo color to get that. A friend growing up was an Atari ST guy and I think he fairly recently picked up both a Falcon 030 and an Amiga 1200 and made some sort comment about how the experience made him sad that he realizes the Amiga was pretty much better in every way. If you DO get an Atari ST, I recommend the UltraSatan dual SD card emulator for a hard drive. Still having a bit of a time trying to bulk transfer software games and apps onto the Atari ST. And need a C-Lab Notator Dongle for the Atari ST. YMMV -- : Ethan O'Toole
Amiga, AtariST, soft repos [was: Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers]
On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:06:03AM -0600, John Foust via cctalk wrote: > At 03:13 PM 2/6/2019, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote: > >Lattice was the thing, back when I had Amiga. Too bad I could not > >afford a harddisk :-). > > As I related here back in 2005 and 2007: > > I believe I stuck with Manx Aztec C throughout my entire era of Amiga > development. I liked it because it was more Unix-like. I got to know > one of its developers, Jim Goodnow. > > I was supposed to have an article in one of first issues of Amigaworld, > reviewing the Lattice C compiler. [...] > it was canned and not published. I guess you could have a revenge now and publish it on a web? > Development on a floppy-based Amiga was incredibly painful. tl;dr: Is there a software repository for AtariST comparable to Aminet? Yeah... It was a bit less painful if one had Amiga 2000 or higher (I had 2000c... or b?) since there was a lot of place inside. I had two floppy stations and second half of my ownership was blessed with ram extension (giving me total of 3 megabytes). I used Aztec C (it had proper linker (ln), make for makefiles and ar for *.a archive management, IIRC). Managed to squeeze full dev environment into ramdisk (I remember I had to delete some unused files to make place, and probably used some small AmigaDOS batch file to automate things). And the ramdisk was rebootable, and could be booted from, which was so cool (because Guru Meditation plagued me a bit)! On the other hand, later on I witnessed coming of relatively cheap PC-compatible harddrives for Amiga 500, which were unusable in my case (there were too few Amiga 2/3/4xxx users to care, and I believe around this time the inept C= managers decided to eject everything and /-I guess-/ pay themselves a bonus, so the ice under users' feet was definitely shrinking). I have also learnt to hate MS-made Basic (included on Workbench floppies) while trying to use it. Overally, it was a good experience. It helped me to grasp and appreciate modern aspects of computing, and so I swallowed the Unix bug in a second, while it took fellow students weeks or infinity (especially if they started with MS DOS, as I observed). OTOH, in retrospect, I wonder if I would spent the money wiser by choosing AtariST or going straight to 286 (not the same experience, I know, but cheap and easier to sell away). Or, if I wanted it really cheap, C128 was able to give me 80x24 terminal in one gfx mode, but I could not find any floppy drive for it capable of r/w PC floppies, so that option is probably out. I have a kind of very-very low priority project to investigate AtariST side of things, especially that nowadays I can run a very nice community-written TOS on emulator, but it seems there is no software repository similar to Aminet, am I right? I am interested in utility software, mostly compilers and editors and other such things. Multimedia and games, not so much. Actually, the project is spelled somewhat like "assume that buying Amiga 2000 was bad idea, was there something that could have prepared me for embracing Unix (and later, Linux), while giving me PC compatible floppy, good text terminal (i.e. 80x24) and maybe even hard drive? (gaming not required, as I really had almost no time for this)". So that John Titor could drop me a postcard (also, assume he is subscribed here). So far, one of AtariST or Amiga 500. But I cannot get price listings from old Polish computer press - my own papers lay buried deep below new papers, no access, and I am yet to find proper incantation for goog. So the "project" is on temporary hold. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
