[Coco] Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Challenge

[L. Curtis Boyle]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:32:25 -0600, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:

> Another good project would be to add wildcard support to the shell and
> utils.  I remember using some hacked-up version of shell+ along with (at
> least) copy and move utilities that added wildcards back in the day.  I
> haven't found such in current versions of NitrOS-9.  Maybe I'm just
> missing the magic incantations.  It'd sure be nice to just 'copy ^32 *
> /dd/cmds' and then get on with other work in another window.

Shellplus versions 2.1 and 2.2a had that support, and some utilities had  
wildcard support by themselves as well. Shellplus 2.9 (from the Level 2  
upgrade also had a lot of this as well, although I found their command  
history a little awkward compared to 2.2a.

> A better, end-user-oriented bootfile generator would be nice.  Something
> that keeps track of the size of the bootfile as you add and remove
> modules, and displays a running tally of stats on the screen.  Maybe
> even an optional GUI front-end, so you can click on modules with the
> mouse to add or remove them from the list..  Then click a button and it
> will build the bootfile and save it.  Highlight a disk icon and click
> another button and it will ezegen it in place.

    One thing I would REALLY like to see in the boot editor is intelligence  
when installing descriptors. Since the descriptor already has the device  
driver name, and file manager name, within the descriptor itself, it  
should be smart enough to either 1) make sure the file manager/driver are  
also installed, or 2) at the very least, tell the user 'Your device /d0  
requires RBF (already in your bootfile) and SDISK3 (not in your bootfile)'  
or something like that, to help new users (and even us oldtimers) to make  
proper, functioning, bootable disks at all times. It would also make sure  
that mandatory modules (IOMAN, OS9P2, SCF, RBF) are always present as well.
>
> How about some header files, documentation, etc, to aid in the creation
> of subroutine modules.  I've long thought that that was one of the most
> neglected features of OS-9.  Apparently they are somewhat complicated to
> write.  But a few appropriately selected, shared subroutine modules
> could add a lot of functionality to multiple applications at the cost of
> comparatively little memory.  Text and graphics processing routines come
> to mind as potentially useful shared runtime libraries.  This can tie
> back into a text editor project, and also a GUI bootfile editor...

    Having done some (for RUNB) myself, they are not that hard, actually...  
there is a sample INKEY one in the manual, and the Nitros9 project should  
have GFX and GFX2 as examples as well.

-- 
L. Curtis Boyle