ATARI
ST GEM Programmers Reference
ATARI
ST INTERNALS (The authoritative insiders guide)
Published by Abacus Software
Distributed
in U.K. by First Publishing
ATARI ST INTERNALS and ATARI ST GEM Programmers
Reference are the first two books to be published that claim to be
'technical' manuals, rather than guides to using the desktop et al.
As such I bought them as soon as I saw them at the Atari User Show
in London, hoping that I wasn't just buying a pair of lemons.
The introductory sections of each book, especially
the GEM programmers guide tend to waffle on, and, in general, are
somewhat inaccurate. Not too inaccurate, but enough to annoy. For
example AES is said to stand for Application Environment System,
whereas DRI, ATARI and the rest of the world understand it to mean
Application Environment Services. Fortunately such trifling
inaccuracies do not stop the 'meat' of the books being very good and
useable. The GEM reference (414 pages) has three sections, the
introduction (including a simple guide to C), the VDI calls and the
AES calls. Ignore the introduction and you have a very good guide to
GEM, with ST specific comments on many of the calls. For example, it
says 'The Open Workstation function is not available on the ST and
tends to crash' under the vopnwk() information. This sort of thing
is invaluable information (and I am not being sarcastic) for ST
programmers, and this is the first time it has been put in print.
This book, like many other manuals, does not set out to teach you
GEM from scratch, it will however teach you a lot, and is an
excellent reference. If you want to use GEM in your programs, you
need this book.
The ST Internals book (446 pages) covers the
hardware and operating system side of the ST. The hardware side
gives pin-outs of both the interface sockets and of all the major
chips in the Atari. Basic technical explanations of all the various
parts, including the sound chip and mouse are covered. The BIOS,
XBIOS and GEMDOS calls are all covered with a fair amount of detail.
Unfortunately no sample 'C' call is given with the GEMDOS
information, but it can be worked out. The system variables are also
listed, and these differ in some respects to the list given by
Atari. It turns out that Atari are wrong, so I hope this bodes well
for the accuracy of the rest of the book. I have described briefly
just a few subjects covered by the book but there is also
information covering just about every subject you could think of,
and more.
Summing up this limited review, I would say that
if you are intending to program the ST in a language other than
BASIC or LOGO, you should have these books. You will find something
in each which fits your requirements. These books are not lemons and
will certainly bear fruit for programmers.
Copyright 1986. Matthew Jones.
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