Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: To Fix or Not To Fix
Message-ID: <605@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 19 Aug 88 06:30:03 GMT
References: <635@ihnet.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 36

In article <635@ihnet.ATT.COM> bryan@ihnet.ATT.COM (b. k. delaney) writes:
>
>There is a very simple solution to the problem of fixing things in
>the ROMS that cause bad programs to break.
>
>If you have a program that does not work with the old version of the OS
>then boot from Floppy the old version of the OS and use your program!!

This will work ... a bit.
It's OK if your program takes a long time to run (read: it is worth the
effort to reboot).
It is a problem if you have an environment in which you want several
programs to run (and you can't afford to reboot each time) of which
some old ones are bad in the above sense and some new ones are broken
by the OLD TOS and/or GEM (remember it wasn't perfect, to use an
euphemism 8-).

>Remember the Original 520ST came with a floppy that booted in the OS

Sure I do. Some of the more annoying problems were
1) the buggy memory allocation: after having started a number of programs
from the desktop you couldn't open a floppy disk icon anymore. I think
the problem was in the desktop.
2) problems with eight character folder names. When I created a folder
whose name consisted of 8 characters all files put into the folder
magically vanished. Also floppies from a friend that had this type of
folder names couldn't be read (the folder seemed empty).

Maybe Atari should redistribute an improved O.S. (e.g. the one current
in the ROMs) on floppy together with the new ROMs. Or (alternative
solution) have code in the ROMs for both old and new programs
(triggered by the date of the program); the flag old prog/new prog
could be set by Pexec and put into the basepage, to be picked up by
GEMDOS calls.

                Leo.