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From: seah@ee.rochester.edu (David Seah)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: New Apple IIs...
Message-ID: <1990Dec7.181010.21107@ee.rochester.edu>
Date: 7 Dec 90 18:10:10 GMT
References: <5769@crash.cts.com> <1645@madnix.UUCP>
Organization: University of Rochester Department of Electrical Engineering
Lines: 36

In article <1645@madnix.UUCP> rat@madnix.UUCP (David Douthitt) writes:
>
>bill@pro-gateway.cts.com (Bill Long, SysOp) writes:
>| 
>| For one thing, they would have to copy the GS's ROM, which would promptly
>| draw a lawsuit from Apple, I'm sure.
>
>Why, why, why! hasn't a decent clone manufacturer used the clean room
>method and created a new GS ROM (or Apple II ROM) the way Phoenix
>Associates created their IBM ROM?
>
>The way they did it, they just told their programmers "Here's what the
>ROM has to do, go write one." and sealed them up (how much, I dunno!)
>until they did.  Each completed ROM was sent to engineers OUTSIDE the
>"Clean Room" to test, and if the ROM failed their compatibility test
>it was sent back to the programmers with a note telling what the
>compatibility problem was.
>
>If they can do it, Laser can.  If they can do it, Franklin could've.

Although I'm not an expert IBM programmer, I have written assembly language
utilities for it under MS-DOS.  The IBM BIOS is not a complex thing.  It
does things like "get a character" "print a character", "scroll a text
window" and so on.  It's roughly comparable to the functionality contained
within the F000-FFFF range of the Apple II ROM...which Laser HAS cloned.

I conjecture that cloning QuickDraw II and the dozen-odd toolsets would be
quite a bit more challenging than cloning a "plot a point on the current
text page"-class of low-level routines.  I suppose that the firmware itself
is relatively simple.  Maybe Laser could introduce a "toolless GS" for the
FTA :-)
---
Dave Seah |       Omnidyne Systems-M         | INET: seah@ee.rochester.edu  |
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