LINE A EMULATOR!
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 Some people (developers and users alike), are blaming software for not 
 being well written, if a particular piece has problems running on some 
 of the new graphic cards available for the ST. Here's some enlightening 
 comments from Charles Johnson (Codehead Software) on Delphi...
    This "well-behaved software" issue needs some discussion. I think too 
    many _perfectly_legal_, written-by-the-rules programs are starting to 
    get the bad rap of being "badly behaved", because there is suddenly a 
    popular idea that the only way to write legal ST software is to use 
    nothing but VDI calls, and avoid Line A.
  
    This is NOT TRUE.
  
    In fact, the Line A calls supported by TOS have always been documen-
    ted parts of the operating system. The documentation actually urges 
    developers to _use_ Line A in some places -- because it has less 
    overhead than VDI and works faster in some instances.
  
    Recently, Atari seems to have decided that upgrading Line A to work 
    with the new high-res color boards was too much work; so instead they 
    essentially nuked a documented part of the OS, and started saying 
    that developers should avoid Line A.
  
    Do you see my point? A program that uses Line A is _NOT_ necessarily 
    an ill-behaved program. When it was written, the programmer was using 
    a documented part of the ST's operating system, in a documented 
    manner. There was no way anyone could have predicted that Atari would 
    have chosen to simply erase Line A calls from their documentation.
  
    This is kind of a sore point with me, because I've written programs 
    that use Line A. I don't like having my work called "ill-behaved"; I 
    follow the rules as scrupulously as possible. And I don't like being 
    blamed for not knowing in advance that Atari would be too lazy to 
    update their documented system resources.
  
    By the way, while I was in Germany, I heard about a "Line A Emulator" 
    that would let many of these "ill-behaved" (faw!) programs work with 
    the Matrix and other high-res boards.