Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

["Russg" <russgilb@MUNGEsbcglobal.net>]

<heuser.marcus@freenet.de> wrote in message
408ecbae-5123-4571-81a8-0daf48109f2a@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com">news:408ecbae-5123-4571-81a8-0daf48109f2a@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> 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
I remember someplace that Wozniak's floppy drive
interface/controller was a major reason Apple ][
could be made/sold for the price.  ie. Floppy controllers
were very expensive and Woz made one from
cheap parts.
I read the article, sorta, up to page 43 or so.
I don't know the speed of a Apple ][ floppy,
I do know the basic speed was 10 times faster
than a Commodore 1541.  Seems I remember
that the Atari can go about 52K baud, which is
about 5K bytes/sec.  The bus speed of an Atari
is 115K cps I think, so that is a limit on its
I/O.  The Atari PBI with hard drive interface
goes at about that 115K bit/sec rate, I think.
I'm a hardware wannabe, but not.
Rick Cortese is a hardware man, and maybe
Rick Detlefsen (A8Maestro).
For instance, does Apple ][ have a serial,
parallel or USB interface disk drive emulator
for the PC? or Mac?  Atari has a very useful
interface that allows using a PC for a hard or
floppy drive.