Spectre GCR

[Dal]

No reason why you can't perform the above steps on a Mac. Make sure you format the Floppy on an ST - the Mac should be able to read it iirc...

[bid]

Hi,

I have just joined the Spectre GSR Club, and I have been sent a 'home made' GSR from France. Its an amazing build quality, and the guy that made it machined all of the case from a solid block of plastic. He is a professional machinist!!

The PCB is also home made, and it is very solid.

I am just collecting together information. And I want to compile everything that I need, for when I have time to install it. I do not have an external drive, which although not essential, I think probably helps.

But if anyone who uses this, wants to help me walk through the install, I would be very happy. I plan to put this on a 1987 desktop Mega ST4 with a 60MB Megafile.

So system 6 is the last version to run on it?? I dont mind doing the floppy install, I think that this would be more fun, and ultimately satisfying.

On a side note, this Mega ST4 is now running very well with NVDI, softload TOS2.06X and all the trimmings, and is very Mac like (and fast!). But then adding Magic, really shows the machine can do quite a lot! I was surprised.

So with the GSR I am expecting great things, and lets find out if this really was a 'Mac Killer'

[bid]

Spectre GSR looks great. I have just tested the hardware, and it works fine.

The Roms are asking for the System 6 install disks, with a Question Mark?

So can anyone tell me how to get Mac sit.bin files from the PC onto Mac Formatted disks??

Cheers, Bid

[bid]

Now I have the files coverted from SIT.BIN to raw image by using Aladin Exander 5.

But I cant find a decent way to write these files to disk using the PC ?? Can anyone advise??

[Mark_G]

Hello,

Diskettes issues :
The drives are in 800k format, and you need a mac, capable of reading and writing 800K diskettes for writing the files to disks.
I think it don't work with a pc, nor with recent macs.

Harddisk :
When using SPECTRE GCR, you need to partition your harddisk in different parts. (Can use Hddriver).
With the SPECTRE program, you can convert the reserved partition to an apple partition.
This converted partition is NOT directly accessible under TOS.

When you arranged the partition, you can straight boot to the MACatari mode

Mark

[bid]

Thanks Mark! Great info there!!

Yes, that is what I have discovered too. The hardware on the PC just cant write GSR disks for the Mac. And that is what the GSR Cartridge on the Atari does also, it emulates the chips that run the Mac format.

So it is very hard, if not impossible to get a modern Windows based PC to do it reliably.

So where can I get some original Mac System 6.0.5 disks from???

Regarding the hard disk. Its remarkably easy isn't it, to set up Spectre GSR (if you have the Mac system floppies of course), so Dave Small did an excellent job!

Cheers, Bid

[jd]

Good news bid, I found my MAC system disks and even ran up Spectre GCR again , seems like it is running 6.0.8

I have 6.0.5 and 6.0.8 the Spectre manual says 6.0.5 works fine and only mentions upto 6.0.7 but as i have 6.0.8 running fine it shouldn't be a problem.

If you want a copy of either 6.0.5 or 6.0.8 or both you could send me a self addressed jiffy bag with 4 blank floppy disks (or 8 disks if you want both versions) and i will copy them for ya.

PM me if your interested.

[bid]

PM me if your interested.

Brilliant!

I did'nt get very far with the Classic mac forums, as I found the typical Mac user not to be too technically savvy!! lol.

They seem to be bred to accept Steve Jobs simplified, cottony candy type world. So getting them to format a floppy disk was becoming a tad complex and tiresome!

I am off on holiday for two weeks. So I will PM you when I find a wireless hotspot!!

Thanks very much again!

[wongck]

I am off on holiday for two weeks. So I will PM you when I find a wireless hotspot!!

Download the app WIFI Finder (free) from iTunes.
Enjoy your 2 weeks.

[bid]

Hi, I have found a wireless hotspot.

Its free... whoop whoop.... And its very hot!

And the music here keeps going whoop whoop.

So when I have had a bit of sangria, and a sleep, and some nosh I might feel like doing some emailing.

But I am def taking it easy. I have been needing a holiday for some time!!!

[tyk]

I found intresting stuff from:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090807065 ... elist.html
"
Last Known Gadget's Small Projects
Spectre GCR/Falcon - Only heard rumors on this one. No idea how far they got.

Spectre GCR 3.1 - Dave Small mentioned to me that he had would send the source code for 3.1 to put on this website when he found it. From what I gathered, he was not able to get System 7 to work when he was working on Spectre so we can cross that one out. But apparently there were some improvement to established bugs and errors they had run into.
"
So has anybody seen that source code? Somebody might want make ROM-image and disk-image loader for that so we don't need that hardware

[shoggoth]

So has anybody seen that source code? Somebody might want make ROM-image and disk-image loader for that so we don't need that hardware

No, but I'm all ears. I've fooled around a lot with the Basilisk 2 sources on the Falcon, and it becomes fairly messy quite easily unless using the PMMU and zapping the OS completely. The Spectre GCR sources would be interesting, obviously.

[Rustynutt]

"Now in my 30's"
A funny statement, as I'm in my 60's

I discovered MagiC Mac and for years used it on my 50mhz (DiiMo Cache 050) Quadra.
Right, it's not the same, but at the time far Superior than running Mac O/S on a TOS machine. Mainly used it for DTP as Mac and standard printers (with adapter) could be used, networking, wow. Not sure how that would work now without a truly functional browser. Of course that's the opposite of the topic. The Quadra being such a huge machine has set in the closet for many years, since I was 30

BTW, any Spectre users run the hardware on a PAK equipped MEGA and PAK 2.06 ROMS?