| ▲ | Lio 2 days ago | |
That's true but all the cool SMC-70 features, like the graphics modes, were custom to it. CP/M programs written for other machines couldn't really make use of any of that unless they were rewritten specifically for the SMC-70. If you just wanted the CP/M text compatibility and not the extended features you could buy a machine capable of that for much, much less. As Kalleboo points out, if you wanted to buy off the shelf CP/M software you'd probably have to buy an external 5 1/4" disk drive too. | ||
| ▲ | rbanffy 2 days ago | parent [-] | |
Digital Research had GSX, which provided a rich set of graphics primitives. Sony would need to offer a device driver or, alternatively, make the console/terminal emulate a graphics terminal such as the DEC VT-240 (and GSX would use a Tek4014 or ReGIS backend). A lot of CP/M machines had graphics-capable built-in displays. Unfortunately, publishing software in machine-native media was a real chore back then, a bit like in the 1990's, where we had a "Unix version of NetScape" which was actually 27 slightly different versions for 27 different operating systems and binary architectures. | ||