Inside G+DOS restored

Description

Inside G+DOS is the title of an article series written by Stephen Warr for the Format magazine. It was published in 5 parts, from Volume 2 Number 8 (1989-04) to Volume 3 Number 8 (1990-04).

G+DOS is the disk operating system of the ZX Spectrum’s Plus D interface, by MGT.

By the time Stephen Warr wrote these articles he was developing Uni-DOS, an improved version of G+DOS for Plus D and DISCiPLE (the older brother of the Plus D, also by MGT).

Motivation and goal

I found this article series in 2016, while searching the Format magazine (which can be found in JPEG and PDF formats in the archive of World of Spectrum) for detailed information on G+DOS, during the development of Solo Forth, and it was very useful.

In order to make the original articles easier to read and study, and also to preserve them for the future, I started converting the original scanned pages into an Asciidoctor document, which can be automatically converted to any other modern format.

Differences from the original

• All addresses are also in hexadecimal (in the original, some addresses were only in decimal).

Tools used

• pdfimages and pdftoppm (from poppler-utils)

• tesseract

• Vim

• Asciidoctor

All of them running on Raspbian in a Raspberry Pi 2.

History

• 2016-03-01: Prepare the images.

• 2016-04-01: First OCR.

• 2016-04-11: Edit and finish part 1.

• 2017-02-14: Edit and finish part 2.

• 2017-02-17: Edit and finish part 3.

• 2017-03-12: Edit and finish parts 4 and 5.

• 2017..2018: Fix and improve minor issues.