zeST provides specific drivers to improve the use of zeST. They consist in Atari binary files to be placed in the AUTO folder of your boot disk. They are located in the zeST binary archive, in the drivers subfolder.

Extended video modes

When (and only when) the extended_video_modes option is enabled, zeST includes additional, nonstandard screen modes. There is one for each of low and medium resolutions. They basically correspond to the hardware equivalent of demoscene fullscreen techniques. This allows to achieve resolutions of 832×276 pixels in medium resolution mode, and 416×276 in low resolution mode.

Technically, those extended modes are made available to programs by enabling bit 2 of the ST's resolution hardware register (at address $ff8260).

You can have the GEM desktop use these modes by copying the supplied extmod.prg driver program into the AUTO folder of your boot disk.

PC keyboard support

Since zeST uses a PC keyboard instead of the original ST keyboard, some keys do not exactly produce the expected characters because what zeST does is simply map each PC key to the most equivalent ST key.

To overcome this issue, zkbd has been written, and provides drivers for several modern PC key maps.

Pre-built binaries for zkbd can be found in the downloadable zeST archive, under the drivers/zkbd directory. Just copy the one corresponding to your keyboard into the AUTO folder of your boot disk.

GEMDOS drive stub

The GEMDOS drive stub program gdstub.prg is required when you are using the GEMDOS drive not as the boot device. In that case, place the program in the AUTO folder of the actual boot device.

This program is not necessary when booting on the GEMDOS drive.