On Mon, 26 Dec 2005, The Wizard of Oz wrote:
There is something nobody has talked about yet. Possibly because it might not have made it out of Winnipeg. M$ made a CP/M card for the Apple//. It worked in my ][+, sort of worked with my //e clone, and wouldn't work in my GS.
Try running the GS in 1 MHz mode.
It was intended to be a text only display using the Apple as a display unit. I think someone locally wrote a unit for Turbo Pascal which used the Apples memory to display HGR graphics. I took a look at the calls and figured out how the author did it. The M$ card had a special routine which allowed the programmer to directly access the Apples soft switches. The RAM wasn't on the CP/M card. The card just rearranged the available memory from the Apple and had a limited amount of RAM and I guess ROM to replace what was used by the Apple. The memory was allocated and the unit was a series of routines which built on the plot of a single point. It still displayed graphics in colour.
There is a version of MBASIC that supports the graphics commands from Applesoft. I've used it on real hardware (knockoff, not M$ brand). Doesn't really work well on the //e because CP/M insists on running in 80-column mode.
-uso.