I got bitten again, I've over-designed my solution. The last time
it happened, it was that memory mapping thing I was wanting to add.
The indirect memory access feature I was adding was to solve a
specific problem: Allow Collapse OS to cross-compile directly on a
AT28 EEPROM.
It began well. As long as we were staying in the assembler realm,
things were looking good. However, when we got into the xcomp realm
(B260), things became ugly, and I had to creep up indirection where
I didn't want to.
All of this because I wanted to solve my initial problem in a
slightly more generalized way. The broad idea was that these indirect
memory access could allow xcomp into a broad kind of memory-like
devices.
This idea broke on the "@" part of the equation. If I want
indirections to be two-way and allow xcomp to work properly, I have
to add this indirection to FIND (and possibly others) and this just
isn't practical or elegant.
So, I'm taking a step back and accepting that the solution I design
for now is exclusively for the AT28. What I'm thinking is to add a
low-level hook for memory writing, at the assembly level.
Also, rename "Addressed devices" to "Indirect memory access".
I do this because I need to add indirect versions of !, @ and ,
to allow boostrapping directly to EEPROM and that A,, thing I've
added to assemblers felt like really bad names.
With this change, I'd like to generalize the use of the * suffix
for aliases.
This word, suitable to plug to A, , increases HERE before doing its
verification to minimize waiting time: While we increase HERE, the
AT28 has the time to do its programming, and thus we'll need to idle
for less time afterwards.
Also, made the mismatch check silently ignore MSB. Previously, writing
a value larger than 0xff with AT28! would always result in a mismatch.
This brings us a bit closer to TYPE from Forth 2012. I don't think
I'll add TYPE (sig "addr len") anytime soon because there is few
use cases for it, but having "STYPE" instead of "(print)" feels
cleaner.
Doing SPI bit-banging through a controller port is already really
slow, but doing so with the Forth version of (spix) was really,
really slow.
With this pure z80 version of (spix), it's more bearable.
At-XY+EMIT is slow compared to direct CELL! usage. It is seen very
clearly on a SMS when VE is doing its initial clrscr (yes, I could
manage to load VE from a SD card and run it on a real SMS!).
The grid protocol wasn't there when I wrote VE initially. I only had
AT-XY. Now that we have a solid protocol to build on, let's do it.
I hadn't noticed yet, but making CVM use the Grid subsystem made
me lose scrolling. It's fine because that scrolling was "artificial"
in the sense that it was provided by curses, not Collapse OS and I
prefer having something that closer emulates a real machine.
However, CVM didn't properly clear the new line when entering it.
Fixed.
Scrolling behavior will come back when it's implemented in the Grid
subsystem.
In CURSOR!, I was using a write commande to read from VRAM and the
emulator didn't properly behave and did as if everything was fine.
The result on a real SMS was that the cursor would contain the
inverted glyph of the contents of the *old* cursor position.
I do this by adding an inverted version of all glyphs in the upper
range of the pattern memory. This is a big waste of the pattern
space (only one inverted character is needed at once), but it's the
simplest way to proceed. I'll change this if I ever need more
pattern space.
Also, remove _blank. It was wastefully blanking the whole memory.
Only the name table needs to be blanked on initialization.
Replace the "g" arg (glyph) with "c" (character). The reason why "g"
was used was to save a "0x20 -" operation at all CELL! implementations,
but this came with too big a drawback: it made CELL! hardly usable
outside of the Grid subsystem, mostly because the user of CELL! would
often have to do "0x20 -".
For example, I want the SMS's Pad driver to use CELL! directly instead
of having to do EMIT+XYPOS-messing-around. I would have had to do a
"0x20 -" there.
With the move of CVM's forth to the grid protocol, we've lost the
cursor's visual indication. Now, we have it back.
The challenge now is in implementing it in SMS' text mode. In mode
4, it's easy to mark a cell as inverted, but in text mode, that's
not possible.
In VE on the SMS, the first contents line would always be cleared
because of NEWLN being called when the FBUF would spit its last
char. Inconvenient...
I've added a "graphical" mode to the grid subsystem to inhibit this
behavior in a graphical situation such as in VE.
Also, write a more complete Grid documentation.
Working in "blk/" folder from a modern system is harder than it
should be. Moving blocks around is a bit awkward, grepping is a
bit less convenient than it could be, git blame has troubles
following, etc.
In this commit, we modify blkpack and blkunpack to work with single
text files with blocks being separated by a special markup.
I think this will make the code significantly more convenient to
work into.
I'm planning on de-hardcoding columns in VE a bit to add support
for screens narrower than 67 columns. There's a lot of hardcoding.
Let's begin with not using core's LIST anymore. This allows us to
spit 1-16 numbers only at startup.
Because that mode behaves exactly like in a regular TMS9918, a new
driver for TMS9918 has been added in blkfs and SMS' VDP now uses it.
Also, fix broken 5x7 font.
I'm planning on supporting Text Mode soon, and SMS' VDP, when mode
4 is not active, behaves mostly like a regular TMS9918.
By having this behavior in a separate unit, we'll be able to use it
in other systems.
Also, rename CLRLN to NEWLN and make it clear that it's only called
on entering a new line. This way, we can set Z offset in there for
the TI-84+ LCD driver.
Rename ROWS to LINES (it's what VE uses). Also, don't use COLS and
LINES as immediates in the Grid subsystem: we expect those words to
be available at runtime.
On the real machine, I ended up at some point getting a weird "bottom
mirroring" issue. It turns out that it was because when I revamped my
VDP flags in an earlier commit, I hadn't read the whole technical
notes about register $02 and falsely thought that B0 was ignored. No
it's not. When set, it mirrors the bottom 8 rows.
I've noticed that under certain conditions, such as a stack overflow,
I would segfault, something I though was impossible because my memory
size is 0x10000 and all my integer variables are uint16_t.
After having re-read my C handbook, it seems I wasn't sufficiently
knowledgeable about type conversion rules.
If a line has a char below 0x20, we consider the line ended, we
stop the EMIT loop for this line and spit our NL.
This makes LIST stop wasting rows in environments with a tight
screen.
This allows us (in the following commit), to stop unvariably
spitting 64 chars by line in LIST. This way, short lines don't use
3 rows per line (the line number uses 3 chars, which brings us to
67 chars per line).
If we don't do that, we end up with the old contents of the line
being kept at the right of the printed line.
