[GEM Development] Talking of interesting screenshots...

[Dostal, Chris E.]

<snip>ISTR they wrote the driver for Amstrad's 16-colour CGA, and of
course they provided DOS Plus to several OEMs and GEMDOS to
Atari.</snip>

Ben,

If it's the amstrad (semi-pc compatible) keyboard based machine (i think
it was a 7xx series) which was blue in color and had a 3.5in FDD on the
right hand side, it actually contained a very interesting graphics
controller.

I remember it running GEM - it appeared to be rom based, and was
actually in EGA mode which had 16 colors at one time, out of a possible
64 (i think?). I remember california games on it, managed to use more -
but I could be wrong.

Cheers,
Chris.

-----Original Message-----
From: gem-dev-bounces at simpits.org [mailto:gem-dev-bounces at simpits.org]
On Behalf Of Ben A L Jemmett
Sent: Monday, 7 March 2005 4:02 AM
To: GEM Development
Subject: Re: [GEM Development] Talking of interesting screenshots...

John Elliott wrote:
> Acorn went on to make the Master 512, which was a similar sort of 
> thing from a technical point of view and came with GEM/2; there's a 
> screenshot at
<http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/GreatestFind/512-14Big.html>.

That's rather interesting, I thought GEM/2 and newer only ever appeared
on the PC.  Thanks for the Apricot screenshots, BTW; I've seen one of
those machines running GEM before, but assumed it was IBM-compatible.

Anybody know how much engineering effort the OEMs contributed to these
versions of GEM?  I presume DRI did the bulk of the work on GEM itself
(although I doubt much was necessary, since these machines are x86/68k
based it's mainly a case of altering the OS bindings?), but would they
have also written the drivers and/or underlying OS?  ISTR they wrote the
driver for Amstrad's 16-colour CGA, and of course they provided DOS Plus
to several OEMs and GEMDOS to Atari.

>  A quick Google failed to turn up anything about ICL systems that run
GEM.

Hmm, this is from the September 85 article?  I wonder if this is the ICL
project that had some connection to the 'real' MS-DOS 4?  ISTR Larry
Osterman mentioned on his blog that ICL were interested in that.  If so,
it brings up some very interesting possibilities.

Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
(http://www.jemmett-software.co.uk/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)


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