This is very good news! In addition to PlanetX3 and Petscii Robots, we now have Sierra Games with SCI0 from Benedikt and Sierra Games AGI from you! I'll test it today on my 8MHz Turbo XT + Genoa Spectrum CGA (Plantronics compatible).

Thank you and congratulations !

Awesome! I have a PC1640 and an ISA Paradise Pega1A I'm looking forward to testing this on.

It works great on real hardware (Plantronics capable CGA) !

In SQ1 (brown status bar) and KQ3 (residual command in blue) there is the suggestion that something isn't working as intended on the blue/intensity bank in all cases -- perhaps some unexpected behavior of the system BIOS. I'll check if it needs to be more resilient.

BTW, how do the help and inventory screens look on your system? Inventory should have an intense white background and no blinking characters.

this is a thread designed to make me feel guilty 🤣
excellent work as always ripsaw8080 , one day I will be able to add some 1512 shots here!

Awesome!!! Thanks very much for this.

Kinda regretting leaving Amstrads behind in the 90s now, even though I got them as ugly broken scrap, and only got them as far as working ugly obsolescent doorstops at the time. I am real tempted every time a portable turns up, only one they seem to have sold many of in Canada, or the only one that migrated with Europeans.

I will have to find a card that does plantronics though to play with this, got an inkling that one exists somewhere within 50ft of me, but not sure which/where exactly.

ripsaw8080 wrote on 2026-01-16, 17:33:

In SQ1 (brown status bar) and KQ3 (residual command in blue) there is the suggestion that something isn't working as intended on the blue/intensity bank in all cases -- perhaps some unexpected behavior of the system BIOS. I'll check if it needs to be more resilient.

BTW, how do the help and inventory screens look on your system? Inventory should have an intense white background and no blinking characters.

Your prediction was correct! I checked with the Phoenix ROM 2.27 BIOS that was originally on this motherboard (the pictures were taken with GlaBIOS 0.4.1) and the status bar is now white all the time (previously it sometimes turned brown) and the residual command characters are now white (previously it sometimes turned blue).

Inventory is like you said - white background and no blinking characters (also with GLaBIOS)
Help screen is: black background with white text (or maybe it is light gray because the contrast is not so strong ?) also nothing is blinking (doesn't matter if Phoenix or GLaBIOS).

zyga64 wrote on 2026-01-16, 18:50:

the residual command characters are now white (previously it sometimes turned blue).

Thanks for testing. GlaBIOS may be altering register values that it should not when returning from the scroll window function. However, to clarify, there should be no residual command characters of any color. Typed commands should be cleared away after pressing enter, leaving only an input prompt.

You are right. I described it incorrectly (-‸ლ). The behavior is as follows:

GLaBIOS:
When I type the first command, it's white. After pressing Enter, the text color changes to blue.
When I type the next command, it remains blue (overwriting the previous one).

Phoenix BIOS:
The letters are white all the time and after pressing Enter text disappears.

I can also check with Turbo XT BIOS 3.1 and Sergey Kiselev's BIOS

Awesome!!!
Thanks, works great on my Commodore Pc10-III.
... Now if I just could get picogus to play tandy sounds 😭​

Kekkula wrote on 2026-01-16, 20:32:

Awesome!!!
Thanks, works great on my Commodore Pc10-III.
... Now if I just could get picogus to play tandy sounds 😭​

By the way...
You are among the very few owners of the elusive GO 329 expansion card for the Olivetti M24, right?
That card's 640x200 pixel 16-color mode has largely the same frame buffer layout as the Amstrad PC1512 VDU in its 640x200 pixel 16-color mode.
The only major difference is that the PC1512's VDU only has one 16 KiB window in the system's address space, through which the four 16 KiB bit planes are accessed, whereas the M24 with GO 329 keeps all four bit planes accessible through one 64 KiB block.

That all in all rather minor difference means that an AGI driver for the GO329 is well within reach! 😀

zyga64 wrote on 2026-01-16, 07:09:

This is very good news! In addition to PlanetX3 and Petscii Robots, we now have Sierra Games with SCI0 from Benedikt and Sierra Games AGI from you!

The Plantronics ColorPlus code paths in Planet X3 and Attack of the PETSCII Robots are mine, too. 🤣

Benedikt wrote on 2026-01-16, 21:45:

The Plantronics ColorPlus code paths in Planet X3 and Attack of the PETSCII Robots are mine, too. 🤣

Of course I knew it 😀 You are a pioneer in this field! Hats off to you!

Sorry for the off topic, but I'll try to find time this weekend to setup the m24.
It's bit of a hassle since I don't have original monitor nor keyboard...

...continuation of tests

with Turbo XT Bios 3.1 https://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101
- inventory text is blinking !
- rest is normal - no unusual colors in top bar, nor residual characters

with Sergey Kiselev's 8088_bios (v1.01) https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios
- everything is normal (except for slow scrolling in text mode, i.e. dir., compared to other BIOSes, but games are ok)

zyga64 wrote on Yesterday, 13:35:

with Turbo XT Bios 3.1 https://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101
- inventory text is blinking !

Can you check to see if that's any different with the original CGA driver? After setting text mode, my drivers disable blinking characters not with BIOS but with hardware (clearing bit 5 of port 3D8h). This suggests that some character output function of the BIOS you're testing is re-enabling blinking characters, which would be incompatible behavior.

In normal CGA mode (which is very ugly BTW) inventory text is not blinking. Only in Plantronics mode (with this Turbo XT 3.1 BIOS) !

BTW. I checked screen shaking according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz1OrHzQIlw
It works ! 😀

Olivetti m24 with plantronics files.