Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Introduction
And sometimes an idea comes to you, you code it up and try it,
and it works. And the limits of "possible" get pushed out a little
farther.
&
Watching the Spectre 128 plotting "Welcome to Macintosh" for the
first time is that feeling. Watching the hard disks unleashed for the first
time at full speed is like that. Seeing HyperCard come up and fly is
that feeling.
If you've ever heard the sound of a well tuned, high compression,
long overlap cam engine winding up ... or heard the clipped square
wave sound of a guitar pushing an amplifier a little past its limits
(listen to Foreplay/Long Time on Boston's first album) ... then you
know the sound that's in my mind every time I go through the envelope
in software.
That's why I do it. It's just another form of art.
Welcome to my latest little hack. It's called the Spectre GCR. In a
way, it's four years of my life - and I don't get too many four-year
timeframes in my whole life. It is the best program I have ever written.
It is the fastest I have ever pushed a piece of computer hardware. It is
far and away the most compatible Mac emulator in existence; in many
ways you will notice, it is faster than the Mac.
I very much appreciate you paying your money to see it and use
it; that money allows me to feed my family and continue doing
something I love to do.
I've watched many friends who used to be independents go to
work for big computer outfits. They get paid a great deal more than I
do. But they don't seem to push the envelope much anymore; they
write things like text editing boxes or spelling checkers or whatnot.
True, I could make a great deal more money than I make with Spectre
if I was to work for, let's say, Apple, but I've only got this one shot at
living, and there's this envelope waiting for me ...
I wrote this introduction because I want you to understand that by
running the Spectre, you're pushing the envelope, too. There may be
times you "crash and burn". We're doing something here, you and I,
that is supposed to be impossible - running Mac software on an Atariand
it actually works better than a Mac in many ways.
8
Your Atari CPU moves things around 20% faster. If you've used a