Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Mac Mode
Inserting a Disk
When you turn on the ST, you're given two disk icons, for drive A
and B, immediately, regardless of whether or not you have floppy
drives hooked up or whether they have diskettes in them.
On the Mac, it's a different world. You only get a disk icon when
you put a floppy disk into the drive. There isn't the same "A" and "B"
icons as in the ST; rather, the disk icon is named whatever the diskette
is named. Sometimes it's easy to lose track of which disk is in what
drive. (Eject, however, will always tell you with the blinking A or B).
When you start up the Mac, you get one icon by default; it's the
one you started up with! If you then push a second diskette into drive
B, drive B will light up by itself, whirr a moment as the Mac OS
examines the disk, then put B's icon up on the screen, along with the
floppy's name.
Note the difference between the ST and Mac operating systems.
If you eject drive B (using Control-E), the icon will stay there, but
it will be "dimmed", to let you know that diskette isn't in a drive
anymore. (If you eject by dragging the icon to the trash, the icon will
disappear).
Now let's say you now insert a third diskette. You get a third icon!
You'll have the startup disk icon, the dimmed icon of the disk you
ejected, and the new one.
Note each icon has a name; that's the name of the diskette. Thus,
icons aren't really related to disk drives, as they are on the ST. For
instance, if you take a disk out of drive B, the icon will dim; if you put
that same floppy back into drive A, the icon will light back up!
I wanted to point this out to you because it's confusing to firsttimers.
tfS}.
How would you copy a file between diskettes? Just select and
drag the file as you would on the ST. Note, however, that just dragging
a file within a disk's own window will just reposition the icon; on the
ST, that would cause a file copy to happen. On the Mac, it just
repositions the icon. In fact, you can arrange your "Desktop" any way
you want. You can even drag icons out of the windows and onto the
Desktop! It's heady stuff.
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