Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Introduction
Introduction: There and
Back Again
THIS IS NOT AN INTRODUCTION WHERE THE AUTHOR
THANKS HIS MOM AND DAD AND WIFE AND PET GILA
MONSTER. THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY WORTH READING. IN
FACT, NO ONE IS THANKED HERE (WELL, ALMOST NO ONE).
IT WILL, HOWEVER, GIVE YOU A VALUABLE OVERALL "FEEL"
FOR THE SPECTRE.
Four years ago, I began working on an impossible project:
bringing up the Mac operating system on the Atari ST.
I had little idea ' what I was getting into. I knew that the
functionality of the Mac was contained in two 64K ROM chips; I knew
I could physically connect the chips to the ST, and I knew a tiny bit
about the Mac operating system. This was back when the ST didn't
have its operating system on chips; you had to load it from disk. So
plugging the Macintosh ROMs in wasn't any big problem, you
understand!
As I looked into the challenge, I learned that there wasn't any
problem I couldn't overcome with a mix of elegance, hacking, and
(usually) sheer force, which translates to lots of late night
programming sessions, coffee, and so on. I think I can honestly say I
pushed myself to my very limit in making the Mac work on the ST - it
took lots of hard work, real creativity for otherwise unsolvable
problems, and imagination to figure out why something was failing.
From November 1985 to February 1986, I wrote around 12,000
lines of code, and brought up what was called the Magic Sac. It was
,. or I would have gone into the ice cream truck business instead
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