** 2 - 2.5 page feature / 1570 words **

A brief history of Tariland

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The local Atari club in Auckland, New Zealand has been running since 1982 when the 8-bit computers were still state of the art. It is called Tariland, which represents Atari with the A removed in order to avoid infringing Atari's trade mark. In the past the club had a large membership but in the 1990's, along with everything to do with Atari, it began to fall into decline.

My father and I came into the club in around 1992 and when the membership consisted of about 10 enthusiasts. At that time Tariland was to be dissolved, but we took it up and revitalised the monthly magazine and all the other services which Tariland provided. In a couple of years we had reached a peak of 100 members, our meetings in Auckland were regularly attended by many Atari users, and interesting articles filled our magazine which gained a considerable reputation among various Atari clubs around the world.

Since then we have had to reduce our efforts and our membership has fallen from that peak, but we still manage to publish a small monthly newsletter and assist a number of Atari users from around the country.

Atari made some very good decisions and some big mistakes, but what ever you may say, their machines were ahead of their time in many ways, and even now I find I still use my TT for the largest part of my work. It forms the centre of our computer room which also includes four Pentium PC's and other Atari equipment. However it is true that the TT would long ago have fallen into disuse if it was not for the excellent MiNT operating system which is continually being updated and provides networking facilities comparable with any modern UNIX system, which is simply far in advance of anything else available on the Atari. Although there is little Atari development going on, vast amounts of up to date software from the UNIX world can all be used on the Atari thanks to MiNT.

Since the hardware can be maintained indefinitely, I see no reason why Atari computers, and of course the new clones, will not continue to be used for many years.

Hardware developments

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Apart from publishing Tariland's monthly magazine and attending to other club business, during the past few years I have been able to develop several useful hardware devices for Atari computers.

In the first place I designed the Serial Mouse Interface. With Atari mice becoming scarce, an interface to enable the abundance of PC serial mice, trackballs and touch pads to be used seemed useful. A serial mouse has a RS232 serial interface, this being totally different to an Atari mouse which is a passive device. The serial mouse interface is based on a Motorola microcontroller, or MCU, which contains essentially a simple 8 bit computer on a chip. The MCU is programmed to transform the serial data into 2 Atari mouse signals per axis. The phase relationship of these signals allows the computer to determine the direction of movement. Although the concept is simple obtaining smoothness of movement presented some difficulties, but these were overcome and the result was very successful.

Initially I had no particular idea of making this product available for sale, but when many people enquired about it I finished the design and made it presentable. Until now this has been the most popular of my products having sold close to 150 units, and although the initial rush is over, I am still selling more each month.

The next project that I completed was an IDE interface for the ST. Atari already used an IDE interface in the ST Book and the Falcon, and my one is compatible with these. There is really only one way to design such an IDE interface and there is not much to it in principle. However fitting the board in the ST proved to be difficult. The board attaches to the CPU, but there is very little room above the CPU in most STs, and there are no less than three different locations for the CPU depending on the motherboard revision. Making the board fit every combination was difficult, but I think I have succeeded by using a short (although expensive) ribbon cable to connect the board to the CPU.

I later completed an STE version, which is fundamentally the same but as the STE's CPU is almost invariably socketed, I was able to make the installation much easier by having the board attach to the CPU socket with no soldering or pin cutting required.

Despite all this, I have been working slowly on a fourth project for over a year now, and although it has proved to be one of those nightmarish projects that never seem to end, I have finally completed it during the last few weeks. I am referring to my PC AT keyboard interface, called Qwertyx. The Atari keyboard contains a microprocessor known to programmers as the IKBD, which handles all keyboard, mouse and joystick operations, in addition to several other behind-the-scenes functions. Qwertyx completely replaces the IKBD with an 8-bit Motorola MCU containing my own program. This program provides the same API as the Atari IKBD, but PC AT keyboard, Serial mouse, atari mouse and Atari joystick interfaces, as well as a configurable keyboard map stored in EEPROM and a number of other features. All of this is configured with a GEM program. Developing and debugging the firmware took a lot of work, but I am very pleased with the results.

Future projects

Currently I have two Atari projects "in the works," namely, a SCSI Ethernet adapter and a VME graphics card, both of which I hope to finish towards the end of the year, if all goes well.

The Ethernet adapter connects to an Atari computer via the SCSI port, and works with the Atari ST using a SCSI host adapter, as well as the TT and Falcon with their built-in SCSI interfaces. A possibility is an ACSI version for attachment to ST's without a SCSI host adapter. With this device and software such as MiNTnet or STiNG (for which drivers would be provided) the Atari computer could connect to any 10 megabit ethernet using TCP/IP. This enables data to be transferred between computers at speeds approaching a megabyte per second under optimum conditions, which is not much slower than some hard disc drives. With appropriate software, hard disk drives and printers can be accessed via the network, and an Atari computer could easily operate in a network with PC, Macintosh or other computers.

The VME graphics card suits any A24:D16 VMEbus system, including the Atari TT and Mega STe, and provides colour graphics capability suitable for connection to a (S)VGA monitor or another video display screen. The advantage of the card is that it provides much higher resolutions and more colours than are otherwise available. Resolutions up to 1280x1024 pixels are achievable at 65,536 colours without loss of speed.

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The heart of the VME graphics card is a large Altera FPGA and 4 or 16 megabytes of high speed SDRAM. This means engineers could use the card for all kinds of other purposes apart from graphics output, and the card is designed to be very flexible in this respect. But for most users, the card would be pre-configured for VGA graphics output.

A device that I designed some time ago but never finally finished is a CPU accelerator board with cache, which enables a 68000 CPU to be attached running at any clock speed, limited only by the speed grade of the CPU being used. Large speed improvements are possible because the 256Kb of cache memory operates at the full speed of the CPU, ensuring that the CPU is not slowed down by the ST's 8 MHz memory subsystem.

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Later I intend to combine many of the above designs, including the CPU accelerator (which would be updated to utilise a 030 processor), into a single card for Atari ST and STe machines, forming a single comprehensive upgrade.

In conclusion

I have already written at length and I have not yet mentioned my various Atari programs, including the Currency Converter and several GEM games, however you can read about these and my other projects on my WWW site or contact me by Email. I have not had much contact with other Atari developers but I would be most interested to hear from anyone who would like to talk about any of the projects I have been working on.

My internet addresses are changing and as I write this and I don't know what they will be so please refer to my advertisement in this issue. This will also means that by the time this magazine is published you should see me around on the usenet again, from which I have been absent during this year owing to problems with my news server.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have put such a great deal of effort into publishing this excellent magazine and wish them all the best. And thanks to all the dedicated Atari enthusiasts who keep the platform alive, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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Most of my projects start out on this "breadboard"