2.5. What's MGR?
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This article is from the 3b1 computers FAQ, by John B. Bunch with numerous contributions by others.
2.5. What's MGR?
MGR is an alternative windowing environment developed by Steve Uhler at Bellcore and ported to the UNIX PC by Brad Bosch and Brian Botton. The MGR windowing environment can replace the standard /dev/window environment on the UNIX PC quite nicely (it does prevent some UNIX PC specific programs from being run since the wind.o loadable device driver is not loaded). MGR's user interface is quite similar to a SunWindows environment, and raster operations are quite fast. MGR is a user program, not a driver (besides the pty driver), so it doesn't take up precious kernel space. It does require a hardware modification called the VIDPAL. The VIDPAL (developed by Brian Botton [...!att!iexist!botton]) is a daughterboard that sits sandwiched between the 68010 CPU and the motherboard and allows direct access to video memory from a user process.
At one time, Brian had provided VIDPAL kits but no longer does so. If you want to try out MGR, but can't get a VIDPAL board, you may want to try out John Milton's VIDPAL emulator -- a software-only solution to video memory access. It is certainly slower than a real VIDPAL, but is interesting none the less. The VIDPAL emulator was posted to comp.sources.3b1 and so should be archived at standard archive sites like uunet.uu.net.
A beta source distribution of MGR is on OSU, and can also be gotten via anonymous ftp from max.physics.sunysb.edu (129.49.21.100).
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