80-Bus News

Referring to the last item, it seems that most members of the 80-BUS fraternity will have to stop and think at this point. “I now have GSX, but what about the device drivers for MY system?” Well you have a choice of two options, the first being to write your own device driver or secondly, wait for the one you want to be released.

Writing your own does seem to defeat the object of the exercise, doesn’t it? However it is possible, you are able to implement as much or as little of the standard as you wish depending on the capabilities of the device. A word of warning here. The device driver specifications supplied with the GSX disk are attractivly bound and the contents well laid out, but trying to write a GSX device driver from the knowledge contained therein should not be attempted unless you are sure of your sanity and/or you have a hot line to Digital Research in Newbury. During the creation of the Gemini device driver for the Pluto board I have needed to refer to both the GSX80 and GSX86 manuals for information, the GSX86 one being by far the better of the two. Test software is yet another problem, as writing your own will not confirm that you have got it right. All testing for the Pluto driver so far has been done using the DR DRAW drawing package, a fine piece of software, but it will cost you £232 at current retail prices. The DR compiled BASIC, CBASIC, will also help you as it contains inbuilt commands that allow you access to GSX, and you will find yourself £393 the poorer for this experience. So in a nutshell, unless you are sure that you are committed to the subject it might be better if you waited for your device driver to appear on the scene.

But will they arrive? Well Gemini will soon be releasing a device driver for the popular Pluto board that will be configurable for the 640 and 768 versions in both high and low res. Input routines have been written for keyboard, digitiser and mouse, and seperate drivers may be supplied for each of these devices. They also have a driver for their GM837 colour card under development though no release date can be forecast for this just yet. As far as other devices are concerned, who knows, but I suppose if the demand is there others will appear.

So how does it work? Lets first take the source program that you yourself will write. You forget all about the target display machine and its limitations, frame size, aspect ratio etc, as GSX will sort all that out for you. This concept means that your program is capable of being displayed on any graphics device for which you have a GSX device driver. You have at your disposal up to 33 graphical routines depending on the particular device driver you have installed, these include old favourites such as line drawing and text display, along with extra goodies like complex polygon fills that will cater for a number of fill patterns. Each GSX function is invoked by a special call to the BDOS (115 in C register). All the data associated with a function call will have been stored in special arrays of your own creation and their start addresses passed across using the GDOS parameter passing conventions. (This is where GSX starts getting a little complex – but more on this later.)

The 32767 X 32767 virtual frame size means that you can afford to be lavish with your coordinates and even include some form of zoom feature in your emerging bijou of a program, providing that those around you don’t take offence at the constant stream of expletives and apparent recurrence of brain death associated with such activities.