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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recipes contain bits and pieces of hardware-related knowledge, but
these bits feel sparse. I've been wanting to consolidate hardware-
related documentation for a while, but always fell at odds with the
recipes organisation.
We don't have recipes anymore, just a /doc/hw section that contains
hardware-related documentation which often translate to precise
instructions to run Collapse OS on a specific machine.
With this new organisation, I hope to end up with a better, more
solid documentation.
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.
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.
Virgil Dupras