And I can hear a lot of you asking, "Why the hell would you buy GEOS when you can find it for free online?" Great question. Valid question.
On the one hand my excuse is a practical one. I have a C128Dcr I'm still learning how to use, and getting original disk images to physical floppies took me a weekend to figure out thanks to a ton of help from Mitchell Dayton. (I'm still not able to write D71 images but I soon will - but that's a discussion for another day, though.)
On the other hand there is some stuff I really prefer to have the original, physical copy of that I can pick up. Looking at the box and flipping through the manuals sort of tricks my brain into imagining what it must have felt like back in 1986 had I been so lucky to have this software back then. It's sort of a mental Delorean.
I've been thinking about this for a long time and I've boiled it down to a bumper sticker philosophy.
Retro is a fountain of youth for the soul.
And having physical objects from BITD trigger that internal reward faster and more deeply for me.
Anyhoo, check out my latest acquisition: GEOS 128! GEOS128 comes on floppy and will auto-boot the disk when inserted into a C128's drive. No "Load..." typing here. Many 128-mode programs can auto-boot, too. I haven't had the heart to cut the sealed packets open yet. Before I did that, I told myself, I needed to figure out how to get 80-column mode operational with the C128D.
I bought a simple 9-pin serial cable off Amazon, based on the recommendation from EzdineG. I've decided to use my 1084S monitor with the D for now. It looks like a fantastic match, aesthetically speaking. How does sound work when using RGBi, though? Bah - doesn't really matter. All of the 80-column software I have is either business software or text adventures. There is no sound!
I grabbed the copy of Infocom's Trinity, and put it in the drive. Powered on the machine. It auto-boots! And yeah, it looks just great. 80-column mode on an 8-bit machine really is freaking sweet.
But the 1084s doesn't let you just flip from 40-column to 80-column mode (it is capable of both modes). At least, I haven't figured out how to do it.
To that end, I couldn't see a way to go to 40-column mode using the serial cable for RGBi. Is it possible to use the "normal" 9-pin DIN cable to RCA jacks (including audio) for C64 mode - and keep that cable plugged in - while also having the serial-to-RGBi cable plugged in for 80?
That way, I can just power off, press a button on the back of the monitor, and power back on in the new mode? This would give me chroma/luma/audio for C64 mode (which is ideal IMO) and RGBi for 128 mode.
Lastly, I asked the sysop of ParticlesBBS (icbrkr) what his favorite C128 terminal is. He recommended Dialogue 128, which is an 80-column program.
There's even a d81 image for it!
Unfortunately, the C128D user port - which is how I connect to BBSes these days - conflicts with the 128's internal drive. I have to get a modem that severs the trace for what's called the U9600 hack.Triple Point Software, programmed by Gary Farmaner. Dialogue 128 is quite an amazing terminal with support for the Swiftlink RS-232 cartridge, 1351 mouse, 1700 & 1750 RAM expanders, 40/80 column mode and much much more. Docs are on the disk.
Back to GEOS128, it includes a built-in GUI word processor called GEOWrite. And over on cbmfiles.com, there is a massive amount of software for GEOS programs and utilities. One such program lets you pass GEOWrite files back and forth between Windows and even Amiga. That's a future project I look forward to cracking open!