[Coco] My latest project

Sun Dec 22 21:45:51 EST 2013

Gene, the dw4 limit comment was meaning that running my new MShell on a non-dw4 system (like vanilla MW OS9) would run, but would be limited to non-dw4 operations only. MShell on a dw4 system will have fully functional dw4 communications. In fact, I may be getting up with you later and finding out how to set up a terminal similar to yours to test some new functions for MShell.

And yes, those graphics functions are from scratch. MShell uses the same methods as Ultimuse3 in that the main program pipes all STDOUT to a graphics handler running in another 64k workspace. This gives room for more code. I'm also using a virtual memory system giving me about 256k of data buffer space and up 1.5 meg on a 2 meg system. If the memory is not mapped, the program will use it. I'm also using Ultimuse3's method of mapping in 8k submodules into the main's 64k workspace treating them as part of the main, therefore allowing me an "unlimited" number of modules I can run. Also, since any module forked" from the main will inherit the main's pipes, if I fork a module, it automatically sends it's output to the graphics handler. It's taken me about 3 years to understand how all this works within OS9. The cool thing is it's all transparent to the user.
You gotta love OS9 :-)

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
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-----Original Message-----
From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sun, Dec 22, 2013 8:54 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] My latest project

On Sunday 22 December 2013 20:08:17 Bill Pierce did opine:

> Gene, no gshell or cgfx library used. It's all custom graphics routines,
> most in ML. It's a 2 color 640x192 screen (16k). It uses no part of
> cowin's menu capabilities or graphics calls. The screen is copied into
> the graphics driver's workspace and accessed with ML routines, all
> using legal OS9 calls. The screen refresh is twice as fast as OS9's
> graphics calls. It uses Ultimuse3's graphics driver, custom written by
> Mike Knudsen. It should run on ANY OS9 system from vanilla MW to
> Nitros9 3.2.9. Only the dw4 capabilities will be limited. I have my
> Coco 3 sitting right next to the PC and the 2nd test run is on the Coco
> with each test and on a Coco 3 with Cm-8 monitor, it looks great :-).
> It's all black & white so no color conflicts.

>From scratch, not even using cowin? 

Thats Great(TM). Sounding much better Bill, except for the dw limits 
comment.  Are those not something that can be handled by a custom keyboard 
template used on the pc to translate the pc keyboard output into something 
the coco can use?  That is one of the glaring shortcomings of the z shells 
running on the pc, they have no concept of what to do with the arrow keys 
for instance.  They are treated as an ESC=oef, so the shell re-spawns 
itself printing the [ character plus gets one of ABCD as the key-press, 
looking like [A etc on the minicom screen.  Fortunately, the backspace 
works as a backspace, delete, backspace, so a cleanup works.

That translation really shouldn't be your problem at all, but dw's.

Minicom, running against /t2 has the same or very similar key miss-match 
problem as dw has.

One can edit the minicom key-map, but I haven't gone to the trouble of 
getting a printout of the existing key-map here, nor collating a coco key-
map so that its translation table could be intelligently remapped.  There 
is just a hint of that in the window descriptors, but a full translation 
would need about 1 kilobyte of stuffs for xmode to deal with, completely 
impractical. And we both know that is one of those "taint never gonna 
happen" things.

So it needs to happen here on the PC.  Preferably right in the DW.jar so 
its universally applied.  My use of /t2 to run a terminal program is not 
something that the majority of DW users have ever considered, so my use  
may even be a minority of one, similarly to my use of a serial mouse, a 
night to day difference from the spasticity of the coco's collected mice, 
all of them. ;-)  But within those limits, I was using the coco from here 
20 years ago when "here" was a big box Amiga.  It was 1998 when I built my 
first PC and put Red Hat 5.0 on it.  This is the 4th box since, and its 
getting tired.

> Bill Pierce

Cheers, Gene
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