U00170@HASARA5.BITNET (12/07/86)
I would also like to know what the GDOS is? Could someone please write an article about it. What does it do, wich extra functions an you use, and can you combine it with TOS in ROM etc. Tanks in advance, Berend F. de Vries.
c160-bv@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young) (12/10/86)
GDOS is the part of GEM that handles interfacing with other devices. At present, the only "device" that GEM really handles is the screen. GDOS allows the use of fonts (we've all been waiting for proportional fonts) on the ST (check the ad in Newsweek, it shows Atari Write, with different fonts on it), more than one font at a time. Also, GDOS is supposed to handle the translation of screen representations of objects to the format appropriate to whatever output device you want to use, so that all you have to do, as a programmer, is write some commands to a metafile, and GDOS uses these and interprets them to produce the correct output on the desired device. Actually, I still haven't seen GDOS, and all this is based on infor- mation I found in STart and in the Dev Kit. If I've made any mistakes, please don't hesitate to correct me. Warner Young "I am not affiliated with Atari Corp, Microsoft, or any other money-making company."
braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (braner) (12/13/86)
[] What is still not clear to me about GDOS: Is is a TOS program? When do you run it? Where does it install in RAM? How big is it? How big are its scratch areas? How does it link to GEM? To device drivers? Can GDOS functions be called from an existing compiler (e.g. Megamax)? Where can we get documentation about those functions? What device drivers are available? Where? How much? Is it feasible for the weekend hacker to write a device driver? Where do we get documentation on the format of "metafiles"? etc. I would be especially interested in simple ways to draw graphics primitives (e.g. points, lines, circles, text characters...) to a metafile, using C; and in obtaining a Postscript driver (and, of course, the elusive GDOS itself - or as the buyer of a non-dev-pak compiler I'm shut out in the cold?). BTW: what is the status of the official Atari documentation book? - Moshe Braner PS: Thanks to Neil Harris and Jim Titsler at Atari for answering former questions about the IBM emulator. (reminder: 8088, 8087 socket, up to 768K, 3.5" OK)