80-Bus News

Fig 2. GSX memory arrangement for CP/M 80.

The final washup

Well, what do you think? Is GSX the answer to the maidens prayer or is it too cumbersome in its constructs to be of any use to you. One thing is for sure, you will never be able to achieve the same fast animated graphics capability that you can get by ‘Bareback’ colour board programming, due to the number of processes that have to be gone through before an element is displayed. But it is a much needed standard that will allow Joe Public to tap a variety of software sources, without ever having to find out which ports his cards are mapped to.

However if you were to give GSX the push you would never be able to use the new generation of graphical software that will shortly become available; I’m referring in particular to the desktop emulator that DR were showing off at COMPEC this year, it is similar to the things that we have seen from Macintosh so I’ll say no more except that as a CP/M user you know it will run on more than one type of machine.

Before I return to “The happy hackers’ holiday home” (Quote P.Greenhalgh, Gemini), I would like to mention the hours of innocent fun that I have had using DR DRAW to test out the Pluto GIOS. I would thouroughly recommend it to anyone who is passing through their second childhood, (and serious business users of course). The latest fun activity being the creation of a picture of a door, which to all intents and purposes is quite harmless, but if you zoom in on the keyhole and have a peep through you will find out whatever it was that made the butler blush............