Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

On Apr 15, 3:22 pm, "micrologix1...@yahoo.com"
<micrologix1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> you know what I want to know?  How does the apple interface
> to a floppy drive with so little hardware?

In short:

Atari drives as you surely know are intelligent - with a 6502-
variant, ROM, RAM and interfaces.
Apple drives are "dumb" - most of the "digital stuff" happens
inside the Apple on a small but very, very clever interface card.

Read the respective chapter in the seminal Apple hardware
explanation book "Understanding the Apple II" which you can
do here: http://victa.jamtronix.com/display/page/4313
If you don't recognize the wizardry of Woz here, then you'll
never will ;-)

Some other bits:

The Apple drives peak at around 11KB/sec and - because of
their design - very flexible to program for. A multitude of DOSses
exist but there are really only two standards: DOS 3.3 and ProDOS.

I don't know if the Apple drives & controller were cheaper but
they surely were cheaper to produce and made good profits.

The Atari drives for all their complexity were flawed from the
beginning: Shitty interface with 2KB/sec which was planned for
tape recorders and modems only, low capacity compared to
nearly all competitors, the need for a DOS in the Atari's RAM
in spite of the ROM in the drive (the Commodore 1541 saved
much memory - other flaws aside).

The only real technical advantage I see for the Atari drives is
that they can be used to stream data into RAM and the
application runs mostly undisturbed (display list interrupts
have problems, IIRC) while the Apple has to "stop" the game,
loads and then continues.

bye
Marcus