Derek_Stewart wrote: Sat Nov 23, 2024 12:06 pm
ICE is just a programme launcher and file manager it needs extra software to allow a certain degree of multitasking.
There is ChoICE, which is a Supercharged compiled programme to all memory management on a limited scale.
There no extended channel usage in ICE, which allows windows to be displayed in the screen like in the Pointer environment or with QPAC2 giving the Extended Environment.
Yup, ICE is pretty rudimentary. It follows in line with some early GUI's that kind of got out of the way once a program was launched as it doesn't provide windowing and mouse support for the launched program. Then again, it was only version 1 and was done by a third party and only in 16K of ROM, so those are all pretty amazing things. Plus with the amount of icons it provided, a couple of simple desktop apps, and a mouse version that also tied into some software they created, makes it all pretty cool. Imagine if the QL stuck and these folks ended up extending that GUI to support windowing and an API to that windowing, it would have been a nice start IMO.
Note though that it's more than just a program launcher as it also provides a simple file manager which does add some capabilities that the QL otherwise doesn't offer. For instance, and I used to do this incessantly on early Windows, organizing the file system to have things copied in a certain order becomes a breeze in ICE as you can just select the files in the order you want to copy them with a simple mouse click. Without ICE this becomes a bit more tedious. The task manager, CHOICE, also seems to have some ties into ICE because the TSK files it produces are tiny, so ICE itself must support task management internally -- i.e. I don't think TSK files are fully stand-alone programs that do all the work themselves.
But back to my earlier question, how do you determine free memory in QDOS?
