[Coco] The early days of Hacking and Coding a CoCo Was: Here's a CoCo 1 ...

[Steve]

Well Art,

The terminal keyboard would only send the key pressed to the CoCo and 
would be the same as the CoCo own keyboard.

The magic of EDTASM is how it does the output.  Microsoft EDTASM was 
design to interface with a Terminal.  So they would not have to change 
this part of the I/O and Edit systems, they wrote a CoCo screen output 
driver that took standard Terminal commands.

The only patch that was needed was to send the display output to both 
the screen driver and Serial port on the back of the Coco.

By the way, terminal that I like using were the ones that removable 
keyboard so it looks (and worked) like a monitor.

Oh the days when Hacking was a good thing.

Steve


On 1/18/2014 4:53 PM, Arthur Flexser wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 12:04 PM, Steve <6809er at srbsoftware.com> wrote:
>
>> And we have a winner!
>>
>> I just used a common data terminal of the time that had a extra keyboard.
>>   (So it setup like a another monitor.)
>>
>> Datasoft got a early version of the EDTASM cart and I patch the to send
>> the CharOut to both the display and the CoCo's serial port.
>>
>> What most people did not know is that EDTASM had it own display drivers
>> that emulate a Terminal.  Why?  Microsoft's EDTASM was design to use a
>> terminal to control the cursor for editing a text line.  So, sending the
>> CharOut to the terminal worked without modifying anything else in EDTASM.
>
> If you weren't using the terminal's keyboard, I'm not clear on how you were
> able to take advantage of those cursor controls in Edtasm.  Wouldn't that
> require inputting escape codes to Edtasm?  Or did your keyboard have a
> processor inside that generated them?
>
> Art
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco