Windows on an 80s Word Processor?! | Amstrad PCW GUI!
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- Join me for a cozy exploration of SymbOS - a newish GUI for the Amstrad PCW 8256/8512 that looks like Windows & some say is as fast as Amiga Workbench! Made possible by our friendly sponsor PCBWay.com - great PCBs from $5!
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#retrogaming #retrocomputing
As a programmer, that is DAMN IMPRESSIVE !!! Multi-tasking Pac Man and calculator running at the same time. Mind blown indeed! Someone has gone to a lot of hard work.
As a fellow programmer, I fully agree to this statement!
@@McFluchtfahrer What makes it more impressive is that it was running on a PCW8256 so having just 256k of memory!
You wanna see it playing video and music along with whatever else you throw at it.
Those systems support large RAM upgrades, and SymbOS can access a couple of Megabytes 🐏
On the other end of the scale, it runs on the Amstrad CPC464 with as little as 128KB RAM.
@@ShR33k It runs on a CPC with 64K of RAM.
@@Nibb31 Now that is impressive!
Damn, that's some efficient code. A testament to how efficient assembly code can be.
Its running under CP/M so most of the firmware coding calls has been done. I notice its doing sweep left to right redraws, so I suspect its doing char$ RST16 ( calls to CP/M Print#1"" ) type drawing the screen rather than by pixel. Ie its like a VT100 VDU screen emulator and a virtual server sending commands.
@@pqrstzxerty1296 So it's basically using the printing subroutines to draw images in linear blocks instead of pixels? Or is it basically using textmode to emulate graphics? I can see how either would be more efficient than going pixel by pixel and how they might be less taxing on the frame buffer.
see geos on PC and Comodore 64/128
@@ironhead2008 I bought a CPC6128 in 1985. At one point I read the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine, which was the SmallTalk special issue, with articles about just about all aspects of SmallTalk-80 and the Xerox Star computer, including the language, the user interface, and the graphics algorithms, especially bit mapped graphics, BitBlt, and bit mapped fonts and text display. I wrote a BitBlt CopyBits algorithm in COMPAS Pascal based in part , designed a bit mapped font, and with the help of _Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics_ (Newman and Sproull, probably the 2nd ed., 1979) I also implemented some drawing procedures (lines, circles) using Bresenham's and DDA algorithms. I also implemented a popup menu that would save away the area on the screen and draw the menu, with the selected item inverted, using my BitBlt and font. Looked very similar to the pictures in the Byte articles, and was quite fast too. I remember having a few problems due to the way the screen memory of the Amstrad's Motorola MC6845 display controller was organised, with the horizontal lines interleaved. I even made a simple drawing program, so I could draw bitmap images by hand (using cursor keys), and save them to the floppy. All in compiled COMPAS Pascal (Turbo Pascal predecessor), I dont't recall using any inline machine code. It was quite fast and efficient anyway. Alas, I never managed to write a complete GUI system.
When the disk emulator is more powerful than the computer itself :D
How did a vic20 compare to a 1541?
Differently, @@lsorense, since the 41 isn't an emulator.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. And I just checked and the 1541 has less ram than the vic20 and the same cpu so even the vic20 was more powerful than the floppy. So yes the emulator sure wins by a lot.
@@lsorense same power, the 1541 doubled the CPU-Power :-)
if you useing the CBM 8050, you have two 6502 in it an have 3 times CPU-POWER :-)
I'm a simple man; I see Ladyfractic, I click the video.
Blind mowing bick daite! Now, please... let me watch the damn video in peace!!
HDDs were indeed a thing on the PCW. Several were released - I have a 40mb drive on mine and a 2mb RAM upgrade. That machine was so good I used it as a daily driver until 2001 - email, web, you name it. I used to code for it in the mid/late nineties and wrote a few articles for the magazines that were about - The Disk Drive and PCW Today. Fun times. :)
How did you get email and web on there?? Please tell me
Aww man you got me. My jaw dropped when I heard the TTS thinking "OMG I can't believe technology so old sounds so great" then had a good chuckle when you admitted you just added it in post. LOL. 😁
When I was 11, I went to a small private school where there was a teacher who knew everything about locoscript, there were two of these machines, an 8256 and an 8512, the 8256 had upgraded ram to 512k like the 8512, so I know it can be done. When I was 12, I passed RSA Word Processing stage I with distinction and was awarded a bronze medal, using locoscript on the 8512.
I had one of these, when they came out, to replace the old typewriter in my office. It didn't last long.......burglars took it. So I bought a PCW8512 complete with a daisywheel printer. The PCW's were revolutionary at the time, so cheap and really brilliant. I did all my business correspondance on these things.
Absolutely mind blowing. I would have killed for something like this when I was a kid, basically Windows 95 on an old Amstrad CPC system. What an amazing bit of programming!
The way how you make videos is amazing. Each aspect of it is on PRO level
Thank you so much!
The girl is Kara Monaco, Playboy's playmate of the year 2006. Another mystery solved.
You can't afford Lady Fractic. That was COLD 😂.
But funny! And a bit true...
Programmers love a challenge. I remember seeing a stripped version of MAME running on someone's DSLR *camera* running the Pacman ROM, and playable with the camera's D-Pad!
PCW wasn't just a word processor. It was SOLD as one, but it's a straight up CPM monster.
It's really cool to see people making WIMP GUIs for old pcs like this!
That's amazing coding to get that working so well on that word processor. The reason I'm loving your page is the ingenuity shown and the memories that can come flooding back with a quick glance at something onscreen. The Amstad CPC just took me back to playing Harrier Attack for hours on it ❤
Happy to see Jörn "Prodatron" Mika getting the coverage he truly deserves. Great guy! He designed a RISC-processor to drive a menu system on the CPC-T-REX (CPC hardware emulation in a Cyclone-I FPGA), and he also wrote the nice menu system. Which keeps running in parallel to the hardware-emulated CPC464/664/6128 with all SymbOS bells and whistles. I learned a lot about FPGA and circuit development from this system.
Couldn't agree more!
I used a PCW8256 when, whilst still at school, I wrote magazine articles on telecommunications in the mid 1980s - mainly for Popular Computing Weekly.
At 3:17, that's a Talent MSX2, an Argentinian version of the korean Daewoo! So much memories, my first contact with a computer was in a Talent MSX.
I am blown away by:
A) how awesome this interface is.
B) how awesomely well made and fun and informative this video is.
C) how awesome this channel is.
D) all the alternatives above.
I am choosing option D and subscribing to this channel. REALLY GREAT CONTENT!
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
Jesus christ man, don't ever do that spill joke again. I jumped from my chair when it fell and the sparks flew!
Haha apologies!
@@RetroRecipes that's ok, but the sheer terror on you face sold me the disaster completely. It took me a while to recover. 😅 Great video, btw
He should get an Oscar (no, not the one in a trash can :-) )
This is great!! I feel the same about how awesome it is that there is a community advancing the development of the computers that I love! And I get exited every time I get to try it out!! Keep up the great work!!
Very clever of the guys who made SymbOS I couldn't imagine a GUI on an Amstrad machine from back then.
“That’s actually quite a complex file viewer this”. The rest of the viewers, wow. Pretty lady.
🤣
I love seeing people keep these old machines relevant or usable long after their "time" as it were. I am impressed by the default keyboard mouse keys, quite clever, indeed. I can't help but wonder if there is a version of IRC for it and if you could use the terminal to telnet into a Linux machine, lets say, and open up a whole array of very capable terminal applications. You COULD make this a very pleasant, distraction-free machine for writing.
Yes, you know, I often think about using older machines for writing. For now I just use the old Macintosh keyboard. And I renamed Apple Pages to MacWrite 😉
There is in fact an IRC and Email app for it. I don't think there is a network card for the PcW though, so only CPC/Enterprise & MSX can use it
I've often thought about getting a PCW to write the articles for my Amstrad CPC fanzine... I'd need it to be really seamless to move the articles to a PC though. Can a PCW save to the cloud?
SymbOS is arguably the most impressive OS for any 8-bit micro computer since it so closely mimics something like Windows 95 it's multitasking is also impressive and the version for the MSX is even more mind blowing seeing it it full colour.
Is it bad that my biggest memory of the Amstrad Word Processor PC that my mum had for her work, was that my dad had Samantha Fox Strip Poker on it?
Awesome DAD do you still have it
@@paulthompson8613 sadly not it made way for a Windows 95 desktop. :(
Sam Fox is only 54 and she still exists. Amazing how much money was made from her natural assets. At the time the pictures of her in the Sun were black and white and they sold the paper. So green and black on the Amstrad with the thrill of gambling was pretty fun. Tantalising even.
@@pdsnpsnldlqnop3330 Ha,Ha, living the dream (moist) this sounds like the time of only 3 channels on tv and petrol 50p a gallon as my dad used to say.
All the US viewers 🤔???
Born and raised in the USA and I've always understood "homely" to mean the same as you (wholesome/nice) but at the same time meaning that they aren't flashy, glamorous, or hip. To someone who strives to be fashionable, they might take it as an insult.
My PCW8512, is currently sat under my desk. I last used it a few years back, when I replaced the Disk Drive belts. I think I'll be bringing it out at some point, for some modifications :).
is getting closer to 100K subscribers . Great to see.
Thank you!!
As an American, I thought 'Homely' to have the same meaning as UK. I guess I listen to / read enough British media that that's the meaning I understood! My girlfriend didn't respond too well when I said she was homely 😅
I'm American and once in a while, I've always heard of "homely" as meaning ugly, referring to a woman. But it is one of those words that is so rarely used, that I can imagine some folks never hear anyone say it. It's certainly a strange meaning / usage. Probably refers to ugly women staying home, I guess? lol
I came to say the exact same thing:
Born and raised in the USA and I've always understood "homely" to mean the same as you (wholesome/nice) but at the same time meaning that they aren't flashy, glamorous, or hip. To someone who strives to be fashionable, they might take it as an insult.
@@emmettturner9452 Yes, but I mean, I think I only had one family member who would say the word, once in a great while. I can easily imagine that many people live their lives without ever hearing anyone say the word at all. It's almost an extinct word, in American English, as far as I know...
Remember this computer it was quite a model for the Amstrad in its time also loved the light pen facility good fun back then.
Yep! Check out my video about how light pens work for more PCW!
Impressive!
Thank you for showing us these bits of retro hardware with recent software. I love the green screen!
P.S. Don't ever lose your humour!
I love that people are still developing for defunct technology. Imagine having this at your finger tips back in the day. Amazing stuff.
Right, of course you're not gonna do today's work on that machine, but it is fun to see an old machine's limits pushed like that. Nice video, thanks! Now let's see you do that with the CP/M side of a Commodore 128!
The green CRT low resolution (high resolution for that time) has it's own charm.
God bless, Rev. 21:4
Fun & lighthearted, with terrible jokes!
Decent content, decent topics! Well done!
I click the video for equal parts interest in old technology and for the soft smooth vocal ASMR.
The keyboard on that thing sounds awesome!
I'm always pleased with the quality of your videos! From the content to the info, to the asides. They're so good. Reminds me of the attention to detail in your music, which makes sense! Keep up the great work.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
Wow amazing. Good memories of using the PCW at my school in the UK in the 80s didnt even know you could get games until I saw your old video being playing the library of games on the MiSTer.
Pushing the limits of older hardware to do more modern things or more than originally intended has always been very fascinating to me.
This is arguably the most impressive bit of programming I'd seen since 8088MPH.
The Amstrad was my first "computer." Haven't seen anything on it in years! Thanks! Go Green-screen, or don't go at all!
Wow, I remember writing Spectrum game reviews on an Amstrad machine similar to that when I started working at Newsfield around 1986-87 (I can't remember the exact date now). The late 80's is a bit of a blur for me, partly as it's over 30 years ago but I suspect also partly because there were a lot of pubs in Ludlow at the time. I do remember having to save my work on a disk, and several times I forgot and a power cut wiped out everything I'd written in the last couple of hours.
I had a PCW 8256 for years. There was an optional hard drive which clipped on the back, as well as a mouse. Both of these were way too expensive for me. The best thing about this machine was learning to programme in Mallard BASIC. I was able to come up with a few games and some business software. They translated very nicely into QBasic when I got a Microsoft PC (Windows 3.1).
You will love the PcW16 GUI. OS was called Rosanne. I still have it. John Elliott made a CP/M layer for it so you could run old Joyce programs. I learned Mallard Basic 🥰
Just wow. I used one of these in college as a word processor. Just look at it all grown up!
Love how creative you two are great work! CP/M I mean I feel like a kid again!
Good to see you guys are staying safe ! Ah memory lane with the old PCW that I used with supercalc for my early day accounting.. Damm that was a work of art.. Great vid as always thumbs up guys and continue staying safe !! 👀👍
Yes! It’s about time we received a new episode! Thumbs up if you agree.
just watching....waiting since this morning, checking every ten minutes or so 😘
Good to see I was not the only one!
@@ch.3.mist123 a good community always keeps an eye open 😉
Fantastic who would have thought this was possible.
goes to show how amazing the Z80 is as a CPU and how good the programmers are to get that performance out of it. Now just to get a TCP/IP stack into it :)
At this level you're actually better with something like a wifi232. As far as the vintage hardware is concerned it's just dealing with a vintage modem and all the messy tcp/ip stuff is dealt with by a faster microcontroller.
I have such a soft spot for the PCW (8xxx series, naturally!), to this day remember how I watched with awe its 'perfect black with tiny letters' screen when I was a kid, blown away by its resolution (being myself stuck to ZX81). It now has prominent place in my collection, have always been looking for extensions like the light pen you've just showed, the printer2scanner conversion (now have them both) or any software that went beyond its 'wordprocessing' capability ('mindblowing' games like Batman or Tomahawk).
Never understood how did it NOT become a worldwide hit with what it offered for the price...
I'll definitly get the SymbOS now, but will try a 'purist approach' (i.e. on a floppy) :-)
Yeah me too. But 8 million sales ain't bad.
@@RetroRecipes 😎
Wow, that is an impressive piece of software. Well done Jorn!
This video was awesome! No need to wait for CollapseOS if this works so well!
Used logo on the 8512 when a kid was great.
yeah ! hi RR, Amstrad PC7 486 SLC was my 1st PC at home, I used the PCW at school for learning multiple spreadsheet , my fist exercice in classroom was to make a complete Worksheet in 20 minutes with the ascii command (alt -144 for a line lol !) awesome video, always a pleasure to look !
My late mother used these as they were compatible with the Daily Mail and a couple other newspaper's emerging IT solutions and Locoscript was also very good for her screen and scriptwriting when she did her degree at Bournemouth uni (mentored by the Scott brothers no less) but sadly the dreaded C got her before she got to grips with anything major, did some Eastenders and other BBC jobbing stuff. She also had the Amstrad portable PCW for when travelling and wanting to work plus her Uher and Marantz recorders and a battered old Sony direct to Betamax camera that ate batteries just looking at 'em lol
:D - Time to order a non-spill "Sippy cup" for Christmas? (Just kidding!).
Idea for the merch shop...?
I love it That's a great video
Awesome to see a GUI running on that old word processor. 😃
Right?! Thanks!
Ok, that is very impressive, imagine having that back in the day
Excellent video 👍🏻
I grew up with the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and tried myself to write a GUI. You can tell a lot of work has gone into that! 🙂
I had a 464 myself, but to think it having a GUI would of been amazing back in the day. I've seen graphics demos done on a standard 464 and they are just amazing. Probably equal to what an Amiga could of done. Give somebody a little time to get used to the hardware and they can create something which is pretty mind-blowing. Great stuff.
You had me for just 1/2 second when it started to talk.
Lol sorry
It should be possible though, RealSound was a thing, so if that got ported over to CPM, you should be able to do it; it worked with complex games not using assembly code in 640Kb ram, it might also be up in the higher 384Kb memory area, or in expanded memory, so 256Kb might not be enough, but I don't think so, I suspect it should be able to work.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound
Yea! You did the SymbOS episode!
I sure did!
Yep am a Dip Chipper haha, great video guys and that green screen back in the day was the bee's knees would of been even more so with that GUI. An the poor puppys face when he was doing his business had me in stitches bless. Looking forward to your next video as always so until then you guys take care :-)
I have always loved 8 bit systems & anything with a Z80 in it. My dream build/mod would be a computer like yours with the motherboard of an original Gameboy, so you could then have the entire Gameboy library of games plus all the basic programs for productivity all running on a system like that natively & you would be able to insert Gameboy carts into it for full screen gaming, how amazing would that be? I know it is possible. I always wanted a Z80 computer for writing but then I also always wanted a Gameboy that could be a computer to. If only someone would merge the 2, I bet it would not be to hard. & you have to imagine that the motherboard from the Gameboy is the most advanced basic z80 ever made with lots of nice features :)
FWIW, this machine has more RAM than the original Macintosh's RAM + Toolbox ROM, so it's not like a GUI is unprecedented on this scale of machine. The multitasking is especially impressive though, and the Mac 128K's OS couldn't do it.
5:45 My memories of "The Pawn" on the C64 was : very very long loading time for an amazing picture (y) I loved this adventure game !
I knew it. I used to use my dads word processor from the 80s to type my papers for school and for fan fiction stuff. Recently I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to run Windows or games on it.
I would definitely wanna see a video of that light pen.,definitely!!!
What an achievement! My mind really is blown. The multi tasking must have been so difficult to do. It wasn't until windows 95 that windows properly multi-tasked. So yeah. That must have been quite the 'task' to code 😜
Was that the MSX doing that mad demo later in the video? Internet connectivity as well?! Do the Amstrad versions do internet? Crazy! Great video as always Sir and Lady Fractic 😁
I do not think it's more difficult to do on Z80 assembler than on any other assembler. The only problem specific to the Z80 is managing the RAM bank switching. That's very limiting. BTW, microsoft already did proper multitasking far before 95 (in 1979 with Xenix8086, in 1985 with OS/2 and in 1993 with NT). Let's get the historical record straight.
@@chirchir8126 yes I wasn't accusing ms of not doing multi-tasking pre win-95, simply windows itself! I do think that MS acquired people from DEC that wrote the multi-tasking kernel in NT 3.51 tho.
At least one of the screens was SymbOS running on MSX (probably the Panasonic FS-A1GT MSXturboR) indeed.
BTW, the SymbOS MSX version only supports MSX 2 and above.
Great vídeo!
You're a lucky man Perifractic, retro computers, a beautiful wife who shares your passion. Truly you da man
And the dogs, too!
Thank you! I'm very fortunate indeed, and love sharing the fun with you guys. 👍🕹️
and he was in star wars!!! pah he is just a show off!!!! :P
@@terraspent May the Force be with you
@@RetroRecipes likewise good, Sir. infact in my emperors gown bu ha i mean dressing gown, with a big hood and all bearded i kind of feel like a jedi! :)
I remember reading Symbos could not be ported to the C64/128/Plus4 because you couldn't relocate zero page like on other 8bit CPUs. I am pretty sure there was the AMX Mouse package for the PCW too not just ZX/BBC/CPC computers and that was all the rage on machines not from Commodore running GEOS in the home/budget computer market for people not rich enough to get the original Macintosh.
What's impressive is back in around 90 or so, I ran bbs software that technically multi tasked. If someone was online, you could do various things in the sysop control panel and the user online wouldn't know you were doing it. Like look at their account, stats, enable or disable parts of the board, and type out "pages" to send to the user "page from Sysop : hi"... And it ran in basic... Like I had to be super careful to not hit runstop, or it was all over. Commodore 64, btw.
Iirc, it was Image BBS software. Easily the best software I ever used for a bbs. (I ran a board for almost 8 yrs. and used 4 different software's.)
There was a GUI for the PCW8256 called the AMX Desktop which came with the AMX mouse there was also a desk top publishing package called stop press.
They say that this OS works with the AMX mouse OOB.
Amazing idea someone made, never seen a full blown GUI on this kind of machine/CPU outside of C64/C128. Great find.
Gotta have that Tardis sound... Also, that Amstrad tickles my nostalgia bone.
I just received my Amstrad PCW 9512 with a GOTEK drive. I'll have to get used again to the CP/M commands.
' Ladyfractic, I think you are really homely...'
Me: 'awww so cute'
Ladyfractic : xwtf you say?!' (To paraphrase emotion and word.
Dang.. dude..stuck out worse than my early years at high school trying to sound sophisticated..lol.
The SymbOS is freaking so cool! I'm going to load it up on my Amstrad PCW 8256 straight away. I have upgraded mine to 512KB, so it will be interesting to see how things run with more memory. Bonus points for playing Pac-Man on the Amstrad PCW as well. I'm a huge Pac-Man fan. Waka Waka :-)
Hard disks were available for the PCW back in the day, the two I'm aware of were the Gem and the Insyder. There's also a modern attempt at a PCW hard disk interface which was published on Hackaday, which was very interesting due to the weird way the PCW boots without a real ROM.
Mouse interfaces were available too - I've got an AMX one somewhere, but I've never tried Symbos with it.
I had a Cirtech Diamond 40MB hard drive for my PCW8512. It's still around here somewhere, boxed up in storage. I'd love to find out more information about the more modern hard disc interface on Hackaday. Could you point me in the right direction?
There were also a few mouse interfaces - I had a Keymouse, from Creative Technology, which worked with their Network GUI and MicroDesign (and other) software. They also had a very impressive 256 grey scale hand scanner. All of this combined made a very effective DTP setup on my PCW. Such a primitive and underpowered computer should never have been able to run that complex software and hardware setup.
I ran it on my CPC6128 a while ago, definatelly a soother experience with the addition of sounds and colors. Especially when it comes to the music videos and the Winamp-clone, not to mention support for dual sided disks
So cool. I missed the old day
oh wow, I remember the old Billy Guyatt's stores - got my Amstrad CPC 6128 from there.
Ah the Amstrad pcw again, making me all nostalgic for school again, I wish you'd stop making me do that 😜
That is pretty amazing. Thanks for sharing. I wish I had original hardware... emulation is nice, better than nothing... but to have my original C128 and Amiga 500 with extra ram... That would be sweet.
I still use a PCW8512 with CP/M ProText for a lot of my Word Processing. It's just an enjoyable machine to use. (Just to put it in context, for Christmas my wife gave me an Alienware M51m to work alongside my MSI GT72 6QD Dominator G).
And yet my old CPC6128 and PCW8512 are still a lot more fun to use.
That’s amazing. What printer do you use?
@@RetroRecipes Epson LQ-300
@@diogenesesenna9323 o7
Mind blown is an understatement. This is some amazing work!
I was equally surprised at the claims and blown away by the accomplishments of this OS. My comments during it were EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh EE-Oh
Wow, that really is impressive, would be so curious to try that on my Amstrad CPC. Never realised there was a GUI for it. Got a colour monitor on that, but liking the idea of getting the green screen after seeing the PCW.
That's genuinely impressive for a green screen office computer from the 1980s. I imagine it has similar guts to the CPC 464.
Speaking of The Pawn... it's still available for sale in the Android Play Store. Along with Guild of Thieves and Jinxter, two other Magnetic Scrolls games.
You know, digitized speech on a PC Speaker is possible, there was this technology called RealSound: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound. I don't know if it could function on a 256 Kbyte word processor, but it existed for PC.
Very impressive! Reminds me a little of the MicroDesign suite of software for the PCW - a full blown WYSIWYG desktop publisher with handheld scanner (ProScan) and image manipulation software (Tweak). All with a full mouse-driven GUI. Amazing what fitted in a few KB back then!
I wonder what happened to the developers behind that software (Creative Technology)?
They're still going! www.cict.co.uk/
@@CPC-Fanzine That's amazing! There can't be many small software companies from those days who are still in business.
That was my setup as well, on the PCW8512. Of course, I had various hardware thingies plugged into the expansion port - the 2MB memory expansion pack, a Cirtech Diamond 40MB hard drive, and a HP Deskjet 500 inkjet printer. I also had the ScanAlign thingie to make sure that my scans with the ProScan hand-scanner were rock steady and free from any of the wobbles that freeform scanning with these devices usually exhibited.
Along with MicroDesign 2 (and later v.3), Tweak and other Creative Technology software, it made an impressive DTP system on a computer that was never meant to run that level of software/hardware combination. It was many magnitudes better than earlier PCW desktop publishing software such as Stop Press or Newsdesk International. CT even developed The Network, a GUI for the PCW, which was the perfect companion for running all their software (and a lot of other CP/M software, too).
I used to talk to CT programmer Simon Hargreaves regularly on the phone (I was always buying stuff from them, and asking about new products), and I remember him telling me that they had pushed the PCW's Z80 processor to the absolute limits of what it could do, so that it was literally "bursting at the seams". I don't think they could've gotten much more out of it. I have no idea what happened to Simon and the other Creative Technology guys. I'd love to find out anything about them, if there's any info out there.
Nice video, hopefully it's not a problem to add some comments based on my experiences in the topic. SymbOS is very nice and the best thing that every platforms it was ported to, can run the same binaries then. I have even helped the author (though of course the absolute majority of the honour is his, not mine) to port SymbOS to the Enterprise-128. Btw, if you disable desktop wallpaper and that memory/cpu widget at the right top corner, you can save some amount of RAM. Actually SymbOS should even start (or at least started ... when I tried last time) with 128K RAM only, but that's so minimal then, you can't even do anything too much (especially in version 3, it used to work in version 2). SymbOS does not run in/on CP/M just use CP/M for the loader, but then it drives the hardware directly, no CP/M too much there (unlike old windows versions ...). The SymShell is not CP/M at all but SymbOS' own CLI based shell interface (any given SymbOS app can declare itself as console or GUI app, IIRC also and information in the SymbOS executable header) - we had some chat with Jorn once to have CP/M running under SymbOS as a shell, but it's hard to do because of the totally different memory layout requirements and other factors. Also don't even mention network support which is another very interesting aspect (though there you can't expect too much that it implements a full TCP/IP stack, so it relies on devices like an attached wiznet W5200 module). But then you can have even network games between two computers throughout the network on different hardware (like one MSX, one let's say PCW - is there is network support hardware ever made at all there ...) and still can co-operate.
Regarding the "not enough memory for Tetris" problem: if you set the background image to "no image", maybe this will give you just that bit of more free memory you need (but then, the image may be not that big, so you probably won't get enough memory back to get you anywhere in that regard...)