alt Hacker NewsDongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.
As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
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cmrdporcupine • today at 1:43 AM
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.
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> 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.