Conference 7.286::atarist

    Is this available to "developers" only or can I upgrade my TOS too?
    
    
    						Carl.
    

    Supposedly, to registered developers only. But I don't know if they
    would refuse you if you weren't a developer. Interesting point.
    You might try making a phone call to Atari to find out.
    

    
         This is for developers only, it is currently in beta test now,
    so atari feels that it is not ready for general consumption.  There
    has been good heated debate going on in the atari usenet postings
    between atari, and a gentleman from at&t.  The guy from at&t has
    an illegal copy and he has done some atari bashing openly on usenet
    for bugs which are in the new version.  atari feels this was not
    a nice thing to do given that it is only a beta test, and he should
    have sent them directly to atari, or kept his mouth shut.  Roy Good
    of atari threatened legal recourse, though he claims that it wasn't
    a lot of people interpretted it as such.
    
    Bill Powers
     
   

Yesterday my TOS 1.4 developer kit update came in the mail. That was exactly
one week after I sent in my request for it - now that's what I call good
service!

Of all the kit items that arrived, the TOS 1.4 update was what I was really
interested in. So I took that boot disk, inserted it into my drive, and tried
to boot with it. After about 20 seconds of disk access the red disk access
LED went off. But the disk motor stayed on. The screen was still blank. I
waited about a minute, but nothing happened. Same thing when I tried again.
My normal boot disk worked fine. Was I doing something really dumb, I
wondered. The AUTO folder had some hard disk boot stuff in it, so I used
Procopy to copy the boot disk, and deleted the AUTO folder from the copy.
A boot from this copy resulted in exactly the same thing. Hmmm.

About a half-hour ago I called Cindy Clavern, the person responsible for
sending out the Developer's update. Had to try a few times since her phone
seems to be very busy. After I explained my problem, she said a few
developers had the same problem, and she suspects a bad batch of disks.
She took my name and address and promised to send a replacement today.
I complimented her on the speed of receiving the update. She replied that
she sends the updates out the same day she gets the request for them.

Among the documents in the package was one called "TOS 1.4 Release Notes",
dated August 17, 1988. It is 23 pages long, looks like it was done on a
laser printer, and is printed on heavy stock. Its quality is a big cut
above that of the original Developer's Kit which I received several years
ago. It begins by describing 34 changes made to the desktop, and about
8 changes made to the file selector. Detailed descriptions of about 7
AES calls are then given. This is followed by a description of 33 changes
made to GEMDOS[BDOS/BIOS/XBIOS], a discussion of new system variables,
a discussion of how to add buffers to GEMDOS, a discussion of OS pool, a
discussion of file attribute bits, a discussion of Pexec(), and the
assembly code used regarding forcing a medio change.

Surprisingly, there was no warning included that we developers should not
discuss the results of our testing. I sort of expected that after all the
flaming on USENET recently. That seems to mean we can freely discuss this
new TOS here in the notes file. But I also understand that this is not
the TOS to be released, and that some problems are likely to occur.

All in all, except for the corrupted boot disk, I'm happy with the way
Atari is handling the release of this new TOS.

    
    RE: .5

> Surprisingly, there was no warning included that we developers should not
> discuss the results of our testing. I sort of expected that after all the
> flaming on USENET recently. That seems to mean we can freely discuss this
> new TOS here in the notes file. But I also understand that this is not
> the TOS to be released, and that some problems are likely to occur.

     I think the reason that you did not have to sign a non disclosure
  agreement about the new tos, is that: Atari hand picked who would be the
  beta testers.  At this time, the update was unavailable to even developers
  They had hoped that they would be able to keep it from leeking out that
  way, you have seen the result on usenet.  When they made it available to
  developers, they figured that there was no way that it would stay only
  in the developers hands. :^)

     Could you post a short description of what they have changed in terms
  of the desktop, GEMDOG,bios,xbios, new system variables,etc.

  thanks

  Bill Powers

    You had to have a non-disclosure on file to become a registered
    developer, so you don't need to sign yet again.
    
    My version worked straight from the copy (I didn't try the original
    disk, that is tucked away for safe keeping).  This is NOT the beta
    test, this would probably be considered a field test in DEC terms.
    
    The update is only available to registered developers at this time,
    and currently only on disk, a PROM release is supposedly forthcoming
    for developers, I suspect that will have to hit the streets before
    a general release.
    
    						-Dave

    I got a working TOS 1.4 about 3 days after I put in a call to Cindy
    at Atari.
    
    As expected, it eats up about 192K of my RAM space. Also, as I
    expected, I found two minor bugs that I'll report. But essentially
    it seems to work well on the little testing I've do so far.
    
    The file selector now has a drive selector area, but that's about
    all that's visually new. So there's no real competition to the enhanced
    file selectors on the market now. My guess is that Atari may have
    wanted to add new features, but just didn't have the room in the
    ROMs.
    

    The most important and visible feature to me was the preservation
    of time/date information on file copies!  Hooray!  That was my
    personal request when Atari was taking input on features to add
    (I am sure a lot of others requested it as well, if not, you can
    blame it on me :-).
    
    Of course I do like the drive buttons on the file selector as well.
    The file selector also seems to remember paths for specific drives,
    but this may have just been a coincidence of the way I was using
    it at the time.  I haven't found a bug yet in my limited use,
    Flash, Whack, SEDT, Superbase Professional all seem to run just
    fine, as well as a few little TOS programs I have written.
    
    						-Dave