Remember, DON’T PANIC. This is the new, improved introduction to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the BIOS, which describes the BIOS (and many other aspects) of Atari’s ST computer series. The introduction still won’t tell you much, but at least it tells you not to panic.
The Guide’s intended audience:
Application writers (who will find some of the functions and hints here invaluable) ;
Those wishing to make use of some of the ST’s hardware-specific features (hacking palette colors, configuring the RS232 port, and so on);
Those writing device drivers, video games, or cartridge-based applications;
The habitually curious (including trivia _ trippers, information junkies, and documentation addicts).
For many reasons this should still be considered a preliminary document. A whole host of things remain undocumented, many GEMDOS issues have not even been approached by our friends at Digital Research, and there are a /whole lot/ of features we’d like to add to the software.
Periodically, as our roving reporters discover new ways. to enjoy life on a roving reporter’s budget of one Denebian slime dollar a day, we will be updating the Hitchhiker’s Guide to reflect sudden, violent changes in reality. Those fortunates who do NOT own ae Sub-etha Net auto-regressive pan-galactic update droid (if you DO own one, you know how
difficult they are to get rid of) will have to call Atari occasionally to see if an update has occurred. We have no plans for another release before the end of September. Don’t call /too/ often; there’s an entire /galaxy/ of intelligent beings out there, and our operators are getting freaked out.
REWARD:
One Denebian Slime Dollar to the first discoverer of a misdocumentation
error. /Two/ slime dollars to the second discoverer, and so on ....
