Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Introduction
demoed for the first time that month.
It received a lot of publicity, and a lot of interest, so from February
to September 1986, I cleaned it up, added all the stuff you need to
make a "nice hack" into a "usable program", and unleashed it on the
unsuspecting public.
Well, it worked, but... Lots of popular applications crashed. Sales
were slow when word got around it wasn't perfect.
A
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I spent September 1986 to May 1987 fixing bugs in Mac programs,
which were causing the Magic Sac to crash. May 1987 saw release 4.32
of the Magic Sac, which finally started fixing the system crashes on a
widespread basis. I wrote some code which recovered from "bus errors",
which the faulty Mac programs were causing. (The Motorola
manual says this is impossible, but I'd long since quit listening to
words like "impossible".) I spent many hours online supporting users,
answering questions, and helping out; I set up support areas on Bix,
CompuServe, GEnie, and Usenet. I got to know many people and
made many friends there. They pointed out problems; I would put out
a new version of the software that (sometimes) fixed the problems; and
the cycle would repeat.
From May 1987 to January 1988, various goodies were added to
Magic Sac. Version 4.52 brought the hard disk online for the first time.
The Magic Sac grew to 23,000 lines of code. In 1988, version 5.9
brought HFS and the Translator One online, so the ST could
read/write Mac disks directly. The Translator was a long, exhausting
project, and wiped out Summer 1987; an 11,000 line Z-80 assembler
program to control it, tricky hardware to read/write the weird Mac
disk format, and keeping an external device in sync with the Atari over
a variety of adverse conditions is not a trivial project.
When released, the Translator One was like a slow motion
disaster; the boards didn't work right for a variety of reasons. Many
were the days I left the office at 3 AM. Thus went winter 1987-1988.
In about March 1988, I left the company (Data Pacific) I'd helped
build. The circumstances are much too painful to recount in what is
otherwise going to be an upbeat manual. Suffice it to say I wasn't
happy with the direction the company was going.
From March 1988 to June 1988, I more or less retired, taking it
easy, having a long, long needed vacation. I turned 30 in April 1988,
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