Conference 7.286::atarist

>    	2 - Has anyone in the US successfully ordered/received stuff
>    	    from England?
    
  Yes, about a year or so a go I ordered Populous from England. It took
  about 4 weeks to arrive, in spite of being sent air mail! After the
  first three weeks I thought it got lost, and requested another copy,
  which they sent. Even the second copy took about 4 weeks. I never did
  find out what took so long, and I've avoided ordering from England
  ever since (to order, I phoned them and used my VISA card).

>    	3 - Will I have problems with software and hardware due to
>    	    the difference in power requirements?
    
  I had no problems with that particular program.

    Just to warn you good folks, in one of the disk-mags available over
    here (ST-Format, (the best of the lot IMHO)) an American Gentleman
    wrote in to the letters page to point out that the software he'd bought
    didn't work on his American-spec ST. The editors answer mummbled on
    about 'rare but possible', and 'publishers had no plans to correct
    problem'.
    
    	Caveat Emptor.
    
    		Stuart P.

    
    Hi,
    
    Its not unusual for some of the programs given away by the ST comics
    NOT to work on ANY machine!!!!!
    
    PJK

    
    besides, I have a question: just from means of hardware/software, why
    should software developed on a machine with the power requirements of
    110V/60Hz not work on the same machine with 220V/50Hz. Should there be
    any relation? I mean, the clock is not line dependant but comes from a
    crystal and most SW even runs on turbo-tuned STs with 16MHz. Internal
    the ST runs on 5V/12V DC anyway, regardless of the power supply's
    input. I know there's a difference in the HF output of STFMs, but the
    signal (NTSC/PAL) is generated out of RGB to the apropriate standard.
    I do not know if there's a difference in the RGB however.
    
    Bernd
    

    I understood there to be slight differences in TOS to allow for
    'nationalization' of the keyboard etc. After all, you good folks in the
    States aren't too interested in � signs, and neither of us are
    interested in �,�,�,� or whatever, whereas our European friends are.
    
    		Stuart P.

    European machines have RGB that is matched to the PAL/SECAM standards
    rather than NTSC.  This means more vertical resolution which may be
    part of the problem.
    
    							-Dave

    
    But this still would mean that SW should run on the monitor (color or
    black/white) as the monitor resolution is the same (640*400, 640*200
    aso). So as I understood the only problems could happen with the HF-
    output regarding SW-compatibility US <-> Europe? I think no, because
    the RGB-VIDEO-HF conversion for sure is different in matching the
    countries TV standard, but the source still is the Atari's picture
    format (one of the three possible resolutions) which are the same in
    Europe and US. I mean a program developed in the US for med-res
    will run on an european Atari with color monitor in med-res also, when
    using the HF output the european Atari will convert the med-res format
    to PAL/SECAM as the US Atari would do for NTSC. Sorry, but I still
    can't find any possible reason why SW shouldn't run on both sides of
    the Atlantic (besides possible differences in the before mentioned
    keyboard coding).
    
    Bernd
    

    Oh Yeh...
    
    	While running the playable James Bond "The Spy Who Loved Me" game
    on the ST Action disk, I noticed some white horizontal bars at the top
    of the monitor display.  The program stated "adjusing tracking", and
    they slowly went away!
    
    _John_

Unless I'm mistaken there is a vertical blanking interrupt which equates
to a frame rate of 50 or 60Hz depending upon whether you're NSTC or the
rest of the world.......if software is using this interrupt then certainly
you could face problems. Programs displaying more than the designed number
of colours by playing with palette information use interrupts related to
the screen refresh rate (and number of lines/frame....625 vs 575?).

Now, ALL STs have the ability to be switched from NSTC to PAL under software
control, so the software remains compatible but you monitor is not (with
the possible exception of the b/w monitor which uses 70Hz frame rate in
Europe......).

As an example suppose an application uses the 50Hz interrupt and adds
several calls to interrupt routines and it works.......but at 60Hz you
don't complete them all before the next interrupt.....TROUBLE!

Nigel

There's a translation program available. I bought a game from Europe at the
Bit Bucket and was given a disk with a program that converts the US ST from
60 to 50 Hz. It works during boot time and prompts you to change disks before
booting. If anyone is interested I can post it somewhere.

								John.

    	I bought a "ST Format" magazine at a local store and can only get
    1 of 10 programs to work properly...  The failures are all different. 
    In some cases the program just exits, in others a crash happens within
    a few minutes.  In one case I open a TOS file and I get the show/print
    GEM message.  I don't think there is a problem with the disk.  The
    directory all looks like the magazine says it should, and I can read
    all the text files ok.
    
    Brian
    

    It's fair to point out that some of the software that comes on UK based
    Atari Mags just doesn't do what the mag says it will do, Sometimes it
    takes more memory that it says or needs moving into a top level
    directory. Also remember there's not just USA-UK issues at stake but
    different revisions of TOS.
    
    ST Format claim all programs are STE compatible, so I don't know what
    this means for really early versions of TOS. However I never even sunk
    as low as only 1 out of 10 even for ST Format. What's your version of
    TOS and which programs did or didn't work ?
    
    		Stuart P.

    	I found that something in my "desktop" had been corrupted....  Upon
    deleteing desktop.inf and starting over again (I also created a new
    "desktop" disk to be safe), I managed to get all but 2 of the programs
    to run properly.  Now I wonder what corrupted my disk in the first
    place...  Something managed to happen to make TOS believe that programs
    were text files rather than executable images.
    
    Brian