Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

If3).
\!;bI
Mac Mode
Stuff You Need to Know
While in Mac Mode
This section of the manual deals with using the Spectre 128/GCR
in Mac mode, and on how the ST in Mac mode is different from a Mac.
Ej ecting Floppy Disks
You MUST NOT eject the floppy disks unless specifically asked
to. To treat the Spectre like you treat the ST (changing disks anytime)
will likely kill your disks.
EDITOR: Not to mention the frustration involved !
If you've ever seen a Mac, you know the disk drives control their
own eject. In other words, the CPU sends a signal to the disk drive,
and the drive spits out the floppy disk; you do not have an eject button
on a Mac, as you do on the Atari. (Believe it or not, if the system
crashes, and you have to get a disk out, you have to stick a
straightened paperclip into a small hole on the front of the drive to
force the disk out. And believe it or not even more, this is an
improvement from Apple's first design; on the Lisa, if the system
crashed, you had to remove the front cover to get a diskette out!)
There's advantages to the Mac operating system knowing the disk
is locked in there. The Mac doesn't have to leave the disk in a "clean"
state every time it's written to, as the ST does (because you can eject an
ST disk, at least any time the light isn't on). So the Mac operating
system doesn't bother updating the "directory" on the disk; it just
keeps the directory in memory, until right before eject. Then, it writes
the directory to disk.
On the ST, you have the eject button, which is pretty dangerous
45