Floppyshop 2/Floppyshop - 2.zip/Floppyshop - 2.iso/diskmags/0022-3.564/dmg-3449/text/sstships.txt

Text File | 1992-02-28 | 17KB | 370 lines

   SST SHIPPING! STR Spotlight                      SST, GCR, MEGATALK
   ===========================


                             SST Now Shipping
                             ================


 Compiled by Lloyd E. Pulley, Sr.
 Senior Staff Editor

 Since the SST from Gadgets by Small is now shipping, I thought I'd com-
 pile some of the more interesting and informative posts about it, the
 3.1 version of the GCR software and the new MegaTalk (not shipping yet).
 All posts are from the Gadgets Round-table on Genie.

 From Dave Small - Category 1, Topic 6, Msg. 1...

  YAHOOO!!

  We're all really pleased to announce that the SST is NOW SHIPPING; all
  types went out today, bare board, Option A, B, C, C&D! This marks the
  end of a long wait for the SST, and it's our third product as Gadgets.

  We'll be shipping to catch up on the backlog for a little while, I
  rather expect! :-)

  We had a couple of "unexpected holds" at about T-mimus 2 minutes when
  our printer shop couldn't get the toner to stick on the solid black
  regions of the manual, only on the backsides. (Weird! -- never seen
  that before).

  Already in the works is SST software rev 2.0 (current is 1.86), which
  will extend the SST in ways that I'm going to have a fun time with. I
  have always enjoyed getting new hardware after pretty thoroughly
  exploring the old.

  This also enables me to drop the 200% effort on the SST back to some-
  thing within the realm of "sane" and to taskswitch into 3.1 and fixing
  a snag in MegaTalk I caught during testing; it looks to be a straight-
  forward software fix.

  [GCR software version] 3.1 has been proceeding along quietly; I've been
  hacking at Sys 7 when I absolutely couldn't bear to look at another
  68030 chip, and TT SCSI is in the works, to let people use internal
  drives. It'll just take some time.

  There are so few times in one's life that you get to announce that the
  new product is wrapped and OUT THE DOOR -- this is a neat day for me
  and everyone here.

  Thanks for everyone who was very, very patient about the SST. We had
  some really frustrating delays in our pipeline, and outright defective
  chips, but George & all of us persevered. (The 450 line note
  chronicalling the fun we had is in the last issue of ST Report.)

                                  ------

 From Category 4, Topic 44, Message 44 in the ST Roundtable...

  SST shipped today in quantity in bare-board, Option A, B, C, and C&D
  configurations. Since some of them went via warp-drive shipping I
  expect you'll be hearing owner comments RSN.

  In the days ahead we will be shipping more (we have this backlog, see),
  and getting ready for software rev 2.0, which will add some interesting
  capabilities to the SST. Now that the platform is there, I can have
  some fun. (*chuckle*)

  The SST's manual is the hardest I have ever worked at a manual, and I
  hope you enjoy it both for the facts and for the interludes, which also
  were the hardest ones ... I had to do a Current Notes article after
  writing many Interludes and I found myself nearly empty. Sandy did the
  manual edit and layout in Quark X*Press on her IIfx; near the end, it
  became apparent we were straining even the 40 Mhz FX on the complex
  stuff (diagrams and so forth).

  If you see a box with an SR-71A Blackbird on the cover at the dealer,
  that's the SST.

  Oh, yes. Overseas shipments also started today.

  I felt that the best way to answer any questions on if the SST would
  ever ship that came up last week was to leave this message; at the
  time, we were fixing a problem at the printer (toner not sticking to
  the back side of a page ... now that's odd), checking out the release
  disks, disk labels, and all that last-minute stuff.

  This is the third product from Gadgets by Small; MegaTalk will ship
  pretty shortly, as soon as I fix a software snag I ran into (better now
  than after shipping!) and finish the PAL replacements (10 minutes), and
  that'll be # 4.

  If you've read a spec sheet on the SST anytime, you know about it; we
  haven't changed our specs (no need to). If I might borrow a phrase from
  Sculley, it's "wicked fast". To my knowledge it makes your Atari ST
  into among the fastest ST's in the world (depending on how much Mhz and
  how few Ns RAM you put in, and where wait-states stabilize.) Since
  there are other SST's out there, I can't say you will have THE fastest
  ST in the world, but you can sure try.

  I suppose it's time to mention that a design change to the SST logic
  sped up the SST. Figures on its performance are now out of date in the
  most pleasing way.

  Anyway, it's out. The champagne is upstairs and it's time for some;
  this has been as hard a haul as getting the GCR to format a disk, which
  was a killer.  I expect that Darlah is going to be a bit irritated at
  all the skid marks on the floor of the RT as people fire up their
  SST's...sorry 'bout that. And keep it throttled back in the middle of
  conferences, okay?

                                  ------

 From STACE (Sysop) - Cat. 9, Topic 2, Msg. 69...

  Several people have asked about SST pricing. I haven't checked with
  Dave or Sandy to see if these prices and/or product combinations are
  still correct but here is what I have:

  68030 SST bare board (w/ 20mhz and 33mhz oscillators)
   - the bare board does NOT include a CPU, FPU or any memory -     $599.00

  Option A: 16mhz 68030                                             $200.00

  Option B: 16mhz 68030 and 4 1-meg SIMMs                           $460.00

  Option C: 33mhz 68030, 68882, and 4 1-meg SIMMs (80ns)            $800.00

  Option D: 4 additonal 1-meg SIMMs (80ns)                          $260.00

  Please understand that none of the above options (A thru D) include the
  bare board.

  Also understand that you can put together a full-blown SST for yourself
  for less than these prices. (I've seen 1-meg SIMMs as low as $30 each!)

  Finally...and again... I am not 100% certain that these prices are
  still in effect. In fact, I am not 100% certain that these options are
  all still being offered.

  Please contact Gadgets directly for further information.

                                  ------

 From Dave Small - Cat. 1, Topic 20, Msg. 30...

  Hiya folks. It's 3:22 AM so don't expect TOO much coherence, but I'll
  try. Been testing SST's all day.

  The MegaTalk board plain should have been out by now, ok? You know it
  and I know it and we all know it. Something went wrong, and it's
  driving me batty ... because honestly there is nothing more satisfying
  than shipping.

  We had some difficulty getting MegaTalk PC boards (past the basic
  protos). The PALs got real tricky; there were 3 of them. There were
  interactions there, where if I recall right (this was awhile back) if
  you'd take one step forward on one PAL, you'd take two back on the
  others. Remember this is really tricky stuff; you're syncing up the
  Apple MHz clocks with the ST bus, and everything has to be in sync
  before the chip can twang.

  So some incredible absolute moron ships us CMOS main chips when we
  wanted plain old boring ones, too. (Said "NO CMOS" on the slip, too.)
  So we gotta return them, which is slow, because parts companies hate
  returns, and if they make it a pain, you won't bother. Right? (Sort of
  like insurance companies hassling you with paperwork before paying up.)

  Out come the CMOS chips. In go the right ones, which we special
  ordered, UPS red. (Look, we WERE trying to hustle, okay?)

  Because I saw out of the blue, into the black, the prospect of the SST
  and the MegaTalk shipping at the same time, something we had gone to
  GREAT LENGTHS not to happen, because there are not enough humans here
  to do both.

  Let me be painfully honest. Gadgets, financially, is doing fine (knock,
  knock, as always! *grin* But GCR keeps rolling along). Barb left us in
  November to set up her Scuba shop in Jamaica.  Dan Moore left to go to
  Oregon to work for Supra.  Suddenly all these people I had depended on
  more than I knew were ...*gone* ... and it was Sandy and I.

  Christmas happened (deck the halls) and I start testing MegaTalks.
  Serial I/O is completely $%^#$%^#$%'d on them. Nothing in Atari or Mac
  modes -- Appletalk down, MIDI down. Call George. Try PAL this-that.
  Everything starts working. Result: many many many bad PALs stuffed into
  MegaTalk boards gotta be ripped out, thrown out, new ones gotten,
  programmed (a little like EPROMS), and plugged in. Available labor: 0.

  At this point, the SST was taxing my sanity with its blasted disk
  problems (buffer overlaying code, it finally turned out -- with about
  88 blind leads!) This was precisely what I did not want, to do two
  products at once.

  In the meantime, someone puts their autodialer onto the Gadgets phone
  every 20 seconds (we know because we had to shut off Call Waiting); I
  mean, you put that phone down, RING!, you pick it up within 3 sec. You
  want to know why you can't get through? Because someone who is the sort
  that shoves into lines uses an autodialer.

  (Off the hook? HOOT !! I wish! You know how fried I am after a day on
  the phone?)

  But I think it's inevitable we will have to replace Barb. I would like
  to wait until this shipping insanity ends, until SST and MegaTalk are
  out there and stable, because anyone new will just hand tech calls to
  us!

  So I VERY carefully construct a cardboard protective box around the
  "Old Sparky" Electric Chair power supply of the Mega-ST, and ask my
  daughter if she would like to make some money. Key word: money.

  Zip.

  I went through it with her, with a checklist, a few times. And as she
  found a few bad boards, I felt better about it; she wasn't skipping
  steps if she found a MIDI-down all else okay board. We used an Adaptec-
  4000 with 40 meg drive (Adaptecs gen termination power) for SCSI, the
  LocalTalk (tm) network in the office for parallel, or printer, and MIDI
  for serial. Then we checked it out in all modes, making sure TOPS
  worked and MIDI, and that in ST mode the ports could talk. (There is
  not YET an ST-mode SCSI driver, but hold your breath).

  I did the PAL swapping; George got me a zillion new PALs to replace the
  bad serial I/O PAL. (Aren't you glad I checked?)

  Jenny hung in there like a trooper, checking boards, and got most of
  them done. Then I discovered something interesting.

  If you put the MegaTalk ST driver in the AUTO folder, as usual, with no
  MegaTalk -- you crashola, meester. Bug. Easy to fix; save A7 and bus
  error, point bus error downstream, restore them. Oh, well, no one
  thought of it.

  I also considered the relatively new BCONSTAT stuff where serial port
  can be mapped around to different devices like MegaTalk. Would it work
  with Mega-TOS (1.2) or would 1.4 be required? Or, oh joy, 1.62?

  So I have a little software tinkering to do. The boards is about set in
  hardware.

  That's MegaTalk.

  I know, I know. I did not want to ship it at the same time as SST. The
  Screwup and Delay division of Raving Idiot Chip Supply synced up really
  nicely there, dropping it on us. I am *surrounded* by SST boards in
  their packaging here, folks; I tested 'em all day. (Ever tried to track
  down a flakey FPU?)

  But that is how it happened. If I had full time on it MegaTalk would be
  out now.

  Good News: I think I'll get ahead on SST's shortly (Sandy is falling a
  little behind on the papewrwork) so I can get the software mods in and
  tested.

  I explained about the phones. Ever got an inch of FAXes?

  That means you spend all day answering them -- and at the end of the
  day, you have another inch of FAXes. No kidding.

  (You can see what I mean about getting help; I never quite realized how
  much Barb did. But that is awfully dangerous with this bad an economy,
  folks; I don't want to fold and leave you high and dry.)

  ...Getting a product out is like a huge AND gate. And if ONE part
  messes up (in SST, literally EVERY supplier screwed up at least once,
  no kidding -- thought Sandy would have a stroke!) ... then nothing
  ships. Like the CMOS chips or PAL.

  On your side you have Jenny, who is deft fingered, thrilled to be
  making money Like Dad Does (*chuckle* ... *sigh*), and who tests the
  devil out of the MegaTalks, checking off each thing to test. She's
  caught some subtle bugs -- told her to ask me if ANYTHING looked wrong.
  "Gee, dad, the screen stays black when I turn it on."

  Eric (10) burned the SST's EPROMs and did a fine, fine job. That is one
  dull job, but with the help of comics and a Walkman with the Turtles
  tape, he made it through.

  So I'm saying,it's the final hours, hang in there. Joe, I am tempted to
  hand- deliver.

  (Or at least let me get my Kevlar before you start shooting!)

  Finally, financially -- the amount of money we had to put into SST
  boards far, far, far exceeds MegaTalks. We actually had to use credit
  (*gasp*) for some things -- them 030's is EXPENSIVE, beaucoup bucks. We
  had to focus on SST's to ship first from where we were.

  Dod'z the truth, folks. SST is shipping as fast as I final-check them
  (they already been through the mill, this is a paranoia check), and
  MegaTalk awaits a little software, and a little research, I 'spect.

  I'm sorry to those who have had to wait so long. I hope when you get
  your packages that what we put in them makes up for it a little. It's
  very good to have such loyal customers, and the notes and calls of
  "hang in there" have made a big difference.

                                  ------

 George Richardson (Merlin Group) - Cat. 9, Topic 6, Msg. 1...

  I've fielded quite a few questions on the ability of the ST power
  supply to handle the load of the SST, so I figured to answer some
  questions and kind of place a little ad here at the same time. :-)

  An ordinary Mega supply is *usually* quite capable of handling the
  extra load of a 33mhz SST with 4 megs of fastram. We've only seen one
  failure, and that supply was in a machine that was flakey anyway, so it
  was probably on the edge. Chances are that if your machine was
  functioning without trouble before, it'll be fine up to 33mhz/4 megs
  with an SST.

  The 8 meg configuration is more difficult to gauge. We haven't had
  problems, but the noise level on the supply does rise, even though
  there really isn't that much of an extra load on the supply. Due to
  it's design, the DRAM only draws heavy current when it's being
  accessed. Since only one bank of 4 SIMMs is accessed at a time, the
  total current draw only increases by the small amount that the DRAMs
  draw when idle. This is still pushing it. So the bottom line on 8 megs
  is: If it works, fine. Don't be suprised if it quits though.

  If you've got some other add in besides the SST, like an ISAC, Moniterm
  or Megatalk (soon), You've fallen over the edge. Even if it runs, it
  may be flakey. These boards all draw a considerable amount of current
  on their own, and adding the SST is like handing an anchor to a
  swimmer. Down she goes!

  We've had this in mind for some time, So I've been looking for a
  solution, and I've got one. I'd like it to be cheap, but unfortunately
  it's not. It is however, not bad compared to the installed price of a
  new Atari or Best supply.

  If you want it you can send me either your machine, or just the power
  supply out it (*including the metal chassis*). I'll pull the power
  supply board off, mount the new supply, which requires some
  modifications to the chassis, and send it back to you for $100.

  The specs on the new supply are pretty good. The old Atari & Best
  supplies are 35 watt units, good for between 3-4 amps on the 5 volt
  line the CPU uses. This new supply is a 45 watt unit, good for 5-7 amps
  on the 5 volts.

  It also can run on voltages from 90-265 volts AC or 120-364 volts DC.
  It'll take line frequencies from 47-63hz. All this without changing
  swtches or jumpers.

  It's got UL, CSA, IEC, FCC class B (Atari take note! *grin*), and VDE
  approvals.

  It's also got a one year warranty.

  Just so you know, if you need it, we've got it. The only gotcha is that
  we've got to mount it. It doesn't pay to design new brackets for the
  thing, it'll just drive the cost up.

         George Richardson
         Merlin Group, Inc. Power Supplies "R" Us division

  P.S. The $100 price should be stable for a couple of months. After
  that, I'll see how much money I lost and possibly revise the price. :-)