Televideo Systems

From: Douglas H. Quebbeman <dquebbeman_at_acm.org>
Date: Sat May 4 04:47:03 2002

> > We had 25 of the TS-803 at RETS, and I've been haggling
> > for the only one I know is left from the guy who has it,
> > so far, to no avail. I have manuals and lots of software
> > for it, including TELE-WRITE and TELE-DRAW. We had a
> > MouseSystems optical mouse on ours that worked with TELE-DRAW.
>
> Cool. I'm pretty sure the TS-806 and TS/TVI-800's were text-only, but if
> the text-mode software still is compatible, that'd be awesome.

Well, when you were running CP/M, these were text-only too.
But they had 640 x 240 graphics, with primitives in ROM that
sped things up quite a bit. DRI's GSX-80 came with the systems
to provide a standard layer for the graphics support. Then
DRI's CBASIC had language extensions for drawing lines and
such. But the overhead was high, translating from a real-number
world coordinate system to an integer normalized coordinate
system and then to the integer physical device coordinate system.

I bypassed all that using some assembly language interfaces I
wrote and went straight to ROM. The application we'd written
in CBASIC using its "native" graphics statements took 6 minutes
to finish drawing the screen (an image of a prototyping board).

The re-written version drew the same inage in six seconds on a
4MHz Z-80.

-dq
Received on Sat May 04 2002 - 04:47:03 BST