80-Bus News

Who among you has suffered the trauma of having purchased at great expense a wonderful new colour card and then realised that you have weeks of work ahead of you creating some sort of software interface to your favourite language? As is often the case you will have to create a library of low level primitives armed only with boundless enthusiasm and a manual whose flashy cover does not reflect its contents. Fear not, for the cavalry is on its way. The Digital Research GSX graphics system will relieve you of this tiresome task, leaving you time to get on with what you originally had in mind (Maybe seeing your family and friends once in a while.)

GSX (Graphics System Extension) allows you to write application programs in any language that supports BDOS calls, and provides you with an environment that is independent of the device(s) that will eventually display the end product. Along with 2 other DR products, GSS Kernel and GSS Plot, you are able to program graphics applications that conform to the emerging Graphical Kernel system (GKS), a draft international graphics standard. Kernel and Plot are not essential to you, and you do not have to use them in order to produce graphical routines, but they do provide a friendlier interface to GSX giving you access to a standard library accessable from popular high level languages. DR have specified Pascal, Fortran and PL/I so far. The whole thing is similar in concept to the relationship between the BDOS and BIOS in that you have a standard interface to custom built device drivers.

Having decided that this is for you, off you trot to your friendly software dealer with your loot in your hand and swop it for the GSX80 (or GSX86) disk. For your money you will have received the following:

GSX.SYS – This is the actual GDOS that will load itself into memory and process all your graphics calls.

GENGRAF.COM – A utility program which is run against a graphics program once it has reached the .COM stage. GENGRAF attaches a GSX loader to your program. The GSX loader receives control as soon as the program is run, its purpose is to handle the loading of GSX.SYS, the rearrangement of the BDOS pointers, and then the loading of the assignment table ASSIGN.SYS (see below) along with the first device driver that is specified, which must also be the biggest. Once it has finished its work the loader brings down the application program from its position above the loader to the start of the TPA at 100H and executes it.

ASSIGN.SYS – This is an ASCII file containing the device driver numbers and names that you want to use in your particular system. As it is possible to have only one device driver in memory at any one time GSX has to refer to the table contained in ASSIGN.SYS in order to select new drivers when they are required by the system. The copy that you find on your master disk will contain the names of a few of the sample device drivers supplied to you on the disk, and as such will have to be altered to suite the drivers that you will be using.

A number of ready to go device drivers – This sounds good doesn’t it? We have just bought the disk and we are off already. However, the bottom line here is that unless you own a Hewlett Packard 7220 plotter, a Digital Engineering Retro-Graphics colour monitor, or an Epson MX-80 with Graftrax plus, these drivers are not going to be of much use to you.