[Coco] NITROS9 internal question on serial output control

[Bill Nobel]

Hey Niel,  to get terminal codes to work correctly on Nitros9, the Coco3 Level 2 term codes will have to be ignored or dropped from the editor, they are built for the windowing system in Nitros9.  I have used the Level 2 Scred utility that uses the Termcap file for the screen codes.  If the utility you are using uses a Termcap type file then you are laughing.

Bill Nobel

> On Nov 1, 2015, at 3:01 PM, Neal Crook <foofoobedoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have Nitros9 Level 1 ported and running on my Multicomp FPGA-based 6809
> system.
> 
> I am trying to understand what I need to do in order to get a screen-based
> editor like MINTED to work on this system.
> 
> My current understanding is as follows. Corrections and other elucidations
> welcome..
> 
> 1. minted does cursor control (ie, draws characters at arbitrary points on
> the screen) using
> control codes like this:
> 
> curoff       fcb        $05,$20
> curon        fcb        $05,$21
> clrlin       fcb        $0b
> cls          fcb        $0c
> home         fcb        $01
> insline      fcb        $1f,$30
> delline      fcb        $1f,$31
> 
> 2. the complete set of these control codes is documented in "The NitrOS-9
> Level 2 Windowing System" chapter 5, "text commands"
> 
> 3. if I was running on a coco with a VDU, I might use term_vtg as my i/o
> device, and the output from minted would be interpreted by eg vtio.dr and
> covdg.io. Within those modules. the control codes are interpreted and used
> to control the output to a memory-mapped screen.
> 
> 4. if I was running on a coco and communicating across a serial port, I
> might use t1_scbbt as my i/o device and output from minted would be
> interpreted by scbbt.asm. Here is where my confusion starts. By inspection,
> I don't see  scbbt.asm do any conversion of the output codes. Therefore, if
> I connected to that serial port using a terminal emulator, would it
> understand the control codes listed above (ie, are they a "known" standard,
> if so what standard?)
> 
> 5. or, is there some conversion capability in SCF (a termcap-like facility)
> in which case, how s it controlled and is there some documentation that
> I've missed?
> 
> 6. if I want to talk to a VT100 (ie, ANSI standard escape codes) do I need
> to modify the serial driver to detect the NitrOS-9 control codes and
> convert them to ANSI codes?
> 
> 7. in my particular case, I am not actually using scbbt.asm on my system, I
> am using a 6850 driver that I wrote (well, "wrote" is rather a polite term;
> it's currently an atrocious hack of  sc6551.asm). The principle is the same
> though: sc6551.asm does not do any output conversion of the byte stream and
> neither does my 6850 driver
> 
> 8. if I wanted to use the same driver to talk to a dw4 server, I assume
> that I would want to transfer literal byte streams with no output
> conversions. Is there an existing flag I can use in the driver to
> enable/disable conversion (ie so I can have some device descriptors that
> use conversion and some device descriptors that do not, but all share the
> same device driver
> 
> thanks in advance for any explanations..
> 
> Neal.
> 
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