Most of register fiddling routines (which is now the only thing contained
in care.asm) are used by almost all userspace apps, often in inner loops.
That makes the penalty of using jump tables for those a bit too high.
Moreover, it burdens jump tables needlessly.
Because this unit is very small (now that string routines are out), it makes
sense to always include it in binaries.
There's a couple of bit fiddling instructions that didn't have their
IX/IY variant implemented yet and without this commit, each of them
would have required a special routine. Not anymore.
This was mostly lifted from my "tihello" example, but it required significant
adjustments.
This commit also introduces a font management system. A lot of fonts are
available online, but sources aren't always clear so to avoid copyright
landmines, I re-created my first 5x7 font from scratch.
As it is now, this resulting ROM gets "Collapse OS>" to be displayed on the
LCD screen. Much work still left to do.
ref #41
We use zasm's ability to use labels in .equ directive.
We didn't do it before because for a while, we were in between scas
and zasm (scas was used in automated tests) so we needed to use the
lowest common denominator: zasm doesn't have macros and scas can't
use labels in .equ directives.
This forced us to add this layer of indirection. But now that we are
completely cut from scas' dependency, we can use this nice zasm's
ability.
The goal is to avoid mixing those routines with "character devices"
(acia, vpd, kbd) which aren't block devices and have routines that
have different expectations.
This is a first step to fixing #64.
* Fix for tools/zasm.sh being dependent on readlink -f (an issue on macOS, preventing builds)
* Wrap zasm.sh shebang in /usr/bin/env ; remove comment about BSDs
I've tested RAM usage when self-assembling and there weren't as high
as I thought. zasm's defaults now use less than 0x1800 bytes of RAM,
making it possible, theoretically for now, for a Sega Master System
to assemble Collapse OS from within itself.
I'm about to split the global registry in two (labels and consts)
and the previous state of registry selection made things murky.
Now it's much better.