[GEM Development] Apricot GEM: Screenshots and bugs

[John Elliott]

> Nice work, as always, John.  Looking at the desk accessories (that
> alternate colour scheme is horrendous!)

  It may have been done to match Activity. Compare

<http://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/activity.png>

-- or perhaps Apricot's folks just had a strange taste in these matters.  

> , the 'voice input' option you
> mention is intriguing -- I can't find much about that with a quick scout
> around, so do you have any pointers to more information on it?

  The corresponding chapter of the technical reference is rather sparse
(basically, "use the supplied driver and that's it"), but you can see it 
here:

  <http://www.seasip.info/Unix/QDAE/speechi.txt> 

  The driver is called SPEECHR.SYS, is copyright Dragon Systems Inc, 
1984, and is about 46k in size.
 
  Physically, the hardware is a Hitachi 6301 microcontroller, which I haven't
gone to the trouble of desoldering because I don't have a programmer that 
could read its contents. When emulating it, I implemented exactly as much 
of it as I needed to pass the self-test: on receiving command 9 (presumably, 
'test yourself') return a 4-byte packet {10, 2, 0, 0}  (presumably, 'all OK').

-- 
John Elliott