Don't think so. It's not a games engine, and (as far as I remember) any graphics are just a wrapper round GDI. You would be much better off with unreal et al.
My neighbor was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, the one mentioned in this article who came back with over 100 bullet holes in his helicopter after the rescue operation: https://historynet.com/rescue-in-death-valley-with-hhm-163-t... That rescue wasn't to retrieve a pilot, but nearly 200 surviving soldiers being overrun.
It's difficult to squeeze stories out of him, mostly because it was so long ago and ancient history to him. Just to put his timeline in perspective, after the war he befriended a captain of the White Russian Navy who had to flee after losing the Russian Revolution. Alot of White Russians ended up in San Francisco, which is where my neighbor settled down in the '60s. He was also a military escort for Nelson Rockefeller, I think during one Rockefeller's campaigns. Once a staunch Republican, needless to say he's not a fan of where the Republican Party has ended up since then. Still a gung-ho Marine, though, who keeps insisting on climbing over our 10-foot fence whenever he locks himself out of his house, which means I have to jump the fence. Were it anyone else I'd just call and pay for a locksmith myself, or badger him to finally give me copies of his keys.
>Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 miles per hour (200 km/h). It arrived on board uninjured, but in a disoriented state. When it recovered, it attacked the crew.
Iranian Air defense getting lucky is different to it being impenetrable.
This is not a binary situation, and a lucky F-15 kill would not make it a good idea to concentrate more assets in an area where the US will now focus more resources.
…against the viet cong, where the biggest risk was the pilot getting pierced from small arms fire (in addition to the helo going down from pilot error). Quite different from the anti-air weapons modern day Iran possesses.
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
I didn't have to google for it to know - Mike Collins. I also knew the the name of the third guy to walk on it - Pete Conrad, and what he said getting out of the LEM (perhaps not precisely): "That may be a small step for Neil, but it was a big one for me"
You can do a lot of horrible things with setjmp and friends. I actually implemented some exception throw/catch macros using them (which did work) for a compiler that didn't support real C++ exceptions. Thank god we never used them in production code.
This would be about 32 years ago - I don't like thinking about that ...
If I recall it's been done on both (emulator and real hardware).
The original version of GEMDOS (the replacement for DOS or CP/M when running on 68k) was in fact developed on the Lisa as a 68k dev machine [also some Motorola VME dev boards I think?) before actual Atari HW was available. So it's a full circle thing.
Yep, I know about all that - I had big cupboard full of the damn things in my flat in london [various ataris (6502 and 68k based ones), dragon 32 (coco lookalike), peculiar IBM pc clones, and other stuff]
A few years ago I got my nephew to do up the flat for sale, and he junked the lot - at some point you have to get rid of things.
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down to being floppy disk based.
Not trying to be funny, I used the assembler a lot, but I really can't remember who supplied it.
Oh, just had a thought - this was on Research Machines 380Zs, so perhaps it was Research Machines home-grown one?
Yes, there were one or two third party assemblers available. From memory, the issue was with the downstream tools - so for instance on CP/M 3.0, I think you had to use the DR one to be able to build an RSX (equivalent of a TSR under DOS. You could count the number of 8080 CP/M 3.0 machines on the fingers of one foot.
You've reminded me that I have a 380Z or 480Z in the loft - I must get it going again.
> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development
Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for MIDI, and I don't think there was so much piracy, or at least not compared with other platforms of the time.
The reasons I didn't develop anything much for Gem - a) It was quite difficult b) Not well documented c) I was too busy playing Dungeon Master.
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and marketed as MS Write instead.
Write was the extremely basic free wordprocessor in Windows 3.x -- and so the name did the ST version a grave disservice.
>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.
It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.
I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!
Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.
Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
> Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good
The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something.
Man I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle.
Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
Is the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
I have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with.
But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.
I got all the GEM docs through Archie at umich.edu. You could get everything there including the entire GNU toolchain and MiNT so you could have a real development environment.
I got the full set of GEM documentation when I attended the launch of it, can't remember how you could get it later. It was good enough for me to write bindings to DR C and Lisp then several applications.
Oh, I thought this was going to be about the old trackball arcade game. Or perhaps it is? Same sort of rules? The maths is going so far over my head I can't hear the whoosh.
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