ATA Support :: Documentation

Use ATA Cards with your Newton

Welcome to ATA Support

Welcome to ATA Support. This software is the result of more than one year of research and development. It lets you use ATA cards for storage on NewtonOS 2.x more or less like linear cards. Indeed, NewtonOS can only use linear cards natively.

The Newton MessagePads can only use SRAM and Linear Flash cards (and only some of them). This is a problem because those cards are harder and harder to find. On the contrary, ATA compatible cards (ATA cards, CompactFlash, Sony MemoryStick and SmartMedia cards with an adapter) are more and more common because of digital cameras and other devices using them. Besides, linear cards are technically limited, because of the PCMCIA interface, to 64 MB (well, there are 128 MB linear cards, but those are incompatible with the drivers in the NewtonOS). On the other hand, there are 1 GB ATA and 2 GB ATA cards on the market.

Apple knew that the exclusive use of linear cards is a major drawback for the Newton. They tried to implement ATA support in the ROM. The development headers refer to ATA error codes and ATA constants. However, it was thought that such a software wasn't possible because it was believed that the Newton accesses data linearly which it doesn't most of the time.

ATA Support software is divided in three parts. There is an ATA driver to interface with the ATA cards, a transactional persistent object store engine to interface with the system and a user interface to interface with you :). The User Interface has been written in NewtonScript (there is no other option on NewtonOS) and everything else has been written in C++ (mostly) and assembly language (some little hacks here and there).

The software intensively uses the paradigm of P-Classes to interface with the system (cf the DDK Introduction about P-Classes). However, nothing was really planned in the system to provide support to other storage devices, so there are some limitations due to the hacks used to make it work.

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