DEFT AGS - Advanced Graphics for the CoCo

    At right is the opening screen for the shell program I wrote using DEFT Pascal and the AGS package. I used this shell program as the work center when I was using the CoCo for development. A small replacement for the normal TCESHELL program launched this shell in its place.
The AGS shell program always opened up a directory of Drive 0. It had functions to allow executing parts of the DEFT Pascal pacakage. It could view directories, allowing executing and deleting of files (but no rename - go figure).  
   One of the unique features of the AGS package was the ability to work with almost any input device. It could work with not only the keyboard and joysticks, but with the CoCoMax mouse pack (the HiRes Input Pack on the menu) and the Tandy X-Pad. The 1.6 version added support for the Tandy version of the HiRes input mouse device.
 The AGSSHELL program included a way to execute machine language programs from the shell. It was a (primitive by todays standards) point and shoot type of system - you selected which drive to run from , and then which file to execute. One feature - it could run programs bigger than 32K which you could not do from RS-DOS.  
   All this in 28K bytes of code. That's 28K of compiled Pascal code. Including the code for the graphics and window manager. I'm not sure that you can print "Hello World" on a Windows machine in 28K.
The AGS graphics package included a font editor I designed. The first font I had to hard code, but the rest I used the editor to create. Here you see the main screen of the editor, showing all of the available characters in a font. I patterend the "Saratoga" font after the Palo-Alto font I saw in Byte magazine - the font used by PARC. Why Saratoga? That's where I was living - Saratoga Springs, NY.  
   Here we are editing the letter A. The arrow on the top row shows the width of the character. The dot next to it is the cursor - when it was on the top row it was used to set the width of the character. The editor shows on the right what the character will look like with normal, inverse, bold and dimmed attributes.

The editor could run in either the white or green screen types. Gotta love that nuclear green.

Here it is warning me to save before I quit. Pretty obvious by todays standards, but most programs didn't do it at the time. You would have thought I would have added an entry that said "Save and Quit".

 


CoCo Disk Images

DEFT AGS 1.6


Manuals!

Well, text files, at any rate. Thanks to Tim Linder's fine CoCo disk / file program for the Macintosh I was able to rescue these from some disk images I had. Enjoy!

DEFT AGS Manual

Font Editor Manual

AGS Shell Manual

AGS Limitations Notes


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