| Posted By
crock
on 2014-03-31
06:18:15
 |  Magic Desk for the Plus/4
Some sort of workable demo certainly existed back in the day which included speech capability for the 364 but AFIAK no copy has yet been found. Is this still the case?
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Posted By
Luca
on 2014-03-31
07:04:25
 | Re: Magic Desk for the Plus/4
From SWC:
"One intriguing option ROM idea, unfortunately never completed, was the Magic Desk II option ROM set. Commodore press releases detailed the option ROM as an updated version of the original 64 cartridge, with "Lisa-like" pulldown menus and icons. It was even supposed to have speech synthesis functions when used with the Magic Voice cartridge, which, since the Magic Voice device was intended for the 64, implies that Commodore was also mulling over a Magic Desk II version for that platform as well. However, the prevailing opinion in Commodore's RandD labs was that the original Magic Desk was little better than a toy application, and an update equally useless. It isn't known if programming even actually commenced on the Magic Desk II project, but Bil Herd in On the Edge comments that Jim Butterfield was demonstrating a 264 and Magic Desk (p336), although this could have been a cross-ported Magic Desk and Jim doesn't really remember."
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Posted By
MMS
on 2025-01-06
16:44:42
 | Re: Magic Desk for the Plus/4
After @George 's last great video about the Plus/4 demonstration package, the Magic Desk topic popped up.
I checked beforehand the C64 Magic Desk, and I personally also felt, that it looked like a toy application.
I mean the applications were not bad at all for their time, but THAT hand pointer, and the general GUI did not really look professional.
Magic Desk C64 for the ones who do not know it:
 
Certainly creating a new GEOS is useless. But with the help of PETSCII (that was NOT really used to it's max by past programs) could make it less memory demanding, than the HIRES gfx mode of GEOS. Certainly a lot of options are not possible at once (like scalable fonts in editor, or picture drawing), but what is the best we can took from such a concept?
Without a working Mouse such a system is not easy to use. That's why I created some mockups, but I dropped the idea, when the RS232 mouse project stopped..
But in 2024 BSZGG's Mouse Driver became a reality, Amiga mouse already works, 1351 is almost good, and the team
just working to clarify the missing point in RS232 mouse standard.
So just for fun I share the mockups I created. I wanted to create a GUI much more modern and professional, than the original Magic Desk, but do not want to be a new GEOS, and certainly using only character mode (for speed). It should work with Floppy drives and datasettes too (major drawback of 3+1 package)
Also, if the project could succeed,it it may fit into 32KB, it could be turned into a CRT ROM file and I may swap the 3+1 package to have mny office "at my fingertips" (as promised by Commodore  )
I wanted to be faithful to the original concept, and during my search for ideas I faced Magic Cap Desktop GUI from General Magic from 1995. It looks like that:
It also had some weirdo concepts
It looked to be a good start, if it was OK enough for PC in 1995, I may try to clone it, because concaeptually it is the same as Magic Desk, and may realize some ideas from the mentioned Magic Desk II.
So this is how it looks, certainly the main input device will be the mouse, and soon(ish) I will try to put together a small demo on the GUI behaviour. sure, my skills are mainly related to BASIC programmings, but maybe give the idea
So this is pure PETSCII, as I see I did not change a single characte. In some cases a small modification on the fontset would help to look better in some places, but I have to think about the necesary space too. Using the built-in ROM font costs no space in the program.
Start screen without data:
Screen with Date, time (built-in RTC would be nice for l264 series):
Help (by pressing our famous Help button):
How a Small text editor would look like?
With the built-in Calculator:
And the REAL Word processor, a character based, GEOS looking editor's GUI.
I think @Litwr's compiled Word procerssor is a great base SW for this, original was 13KB, compiled (compressed) version was 10KB.
If we have free RAM (the program runs from ROM), it could be decompressed from ROM when initiated.
How much more memory the GUI would require? Questionmark. Maybe not all the function required.
Any comment is most welcomed!
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Posted By
George
on 2025-01-06
16:20:23
 | Re: Magic Desk for the Plus/4
@MMS
really great concepts.. Would be also really interesting to find the orignal Desk II files to see where they were heading. But i can understand, whey they cancelled all the 264 line, there were better alternatives on the market.
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