In the beginning of Collapse OS' Forth version, the readline sub-
system was optional. This is why we had this separate RDLN$ routine
and that the input buffer was allocated at boot time.
It's been a while since the RDLN system has been made mandatory, but
we still paid the complexity tax of this separation. Not anymore.
... and rename it to KEY?. Then, add KEY from KEY? for its blocking
version.
I need this for an upcoming Remote Shell feature. If a Collapse OS
system remotely controls another shell, it needs to be able to poll
both the remote system and the local keyboard at the same time. A
blocking KEY is incompatible with this.
In some places, the polling mechanism doesn't make sense, so this
new KEY? always returns a character. In some places, I just haven't
implemented the mechanism yet, so I kept the old blocking code and
added a "always 1" flag as a temporary shim.
I have probably broken something, but in emulators, Collapse OS runs
fine. It's an important reminder of what will be lost with the new
"dogfooding" approach (see recent mailing list message): without
emulators, it's much harder to to sweeping changes like this without
breaking stuff.
It's fine, I don't expect many more of these core changes to the
system. It's nearly feature-complete.
The buffer's implementation wasn't buying us much in exchange for its
complexity. A modern machine was still too fast for it (copy/pasting
text from a modern machine would send bytes too fast for the RC2014)
and in the (theoretical so far) case of COS-to-COS communication, the
buffer didn't help in cases where the baud rate was faster than the
processing of each byte received (for example, if the byte was written
directly to EEPROM).
I'm scrapping it and, instead, use the RTS flag to signal the other
side when we're ready to receive a new byte.
Also, implement driver for channel B in SIO. I will need it to talk
to my TRS-80 4P.
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.
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.
Add _TRA!, _THA!, _TRB!, _THB! routines to easily handle those pins'
value without stepping on other pins like the drivers previously
did. For SDC driver, it's going to be important soon because it turns
out that I can't get away with "always on" CS, so I'll need a scheme
where it's important that TH/TR pins have stable values.
Theoretically, it works. I can access an emulated SD card on it.
Will it work on real hardware?
I've also made SMS emulation faster. It was unbearably slow for SDC
access.
My idea of plugging a RC2014 bridge directly onto a Sega Master System
cartridge doesn't work. The SMS eats all I/O addr space, we can't use
it. Therefore, this naive idea, in the emulator, of reusing sdc.c in
sms.c as-is, doesn't work either.
I'll have to find another way of communicating to a SPI device on the
SMS. I'll probably do it through a controller port. Meanwhile, I need
to decouple SPI from SDC in the emulator code so that I can reuse
sdc.c. This is what is done here.
With KEY and EMIT being switch words, most of the high layer can
be defined before drivers.
In addition to this change, I've compacted core blocks which were
becoming quite sparse.
The idea is to consider assemblers as "runtime" apps instead of
placing them in the "bootstrap" section of the blocks. These apps
will be used for much more than bootstrapping.
Moved its documentation to doc/asm.txt and made its code blocks
more compact.
Working on programming AVR chips exposes a glaring omission in my
first design of the SPI Relay: not allowing multiple devices make
this task hard. I constantly have to unplug my SD card before, plug
the AVR chip holder, then play a bit, then unplug the AVR holder,
then replug the SD card...
My prototype for a SPI relay design is built, but I haven't tested
it yet. I need to adapt the code first, which is what I do here.
When the prototype is tested, I'll update the SDC recipe with a new
schema.
Only its jump at 0x33 remains.
I've also fixed a strange offset oddity in 8086's (n) placement.
It was off by 2, but strangely, it ran properly. Anyway, now it's
fixed.
Previously, recipes that began spitting binary contents before
loading block 282 would end up with VARIABLE code in their binary,
thus breaking them. We fix this by making this loading process
2-part.
