[Coco] Supercomm fails to load on NitrOS9 lvl 2 on my CoCo 3 with 128K, and a couple of other questions?

[L. Curtis Boyle]

Cool. I did two “extended character set” fonts - the IBM one, and ISO-Latin whatever that was one of the web standards (and included copyright symbols,etc.). Both should be in there now.
I know that Alan had the 640x192/200 2 color text actually running slightly faster than the stock OS-9 hardware text mode (on 6309/NitrOS9). And the experiments I did with faster serial port reading were something I was going to expand on in NitrOS9 itself, but never got past the planning stages.

Dave - the trick I used to speed up serial port reads was to use the GetStat call to see how many characters were in the serial read buffer. I would make the call once, sleep 1 clock tick, and then do it again. If the number of chars waiting stayed the same, then do an I$Read of all chars at once (letting OS-9 stay in the SCF <-> ACIAPAK/SACIA/DACIA processing loop without exiting system mode constantly back to the user program, which is a lot of overhead).  I also had it check to see if the serial read buffer was getting too full (how much that was depended on which driver you used - ACIAPAK I think I used around 128, SACIA/DACIA was higher, depending on the speed you were connected at, and how big of a buffer you had defined in the driver - up to 3840 bytes if I remember correctly). I also had it forced to do a read after so many ticks (so that you wouldn’t get long delays before the screen itself updated). I would also write to the screen in multi-char chunks, taking advantage of Alan’s 32 byte SCF -> direct to GRFDRV routine. My eventual plan was to add flags to SCF drivers and descriptors to have the 32 byte buffer work for any of those, vs. just GRFDRV, and fall back to 1 byte at a time if either/or the device descriptor or device driver didn’t have that mode bit set (that way, you could mix different types in the system at the same time, if needed).
I do remember that I was able to keep 9600 baud text going pretty well full speed using these tricks, without resorting to direct screen writes.

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



> On Nov 4, 2015, at 9:45 AM, Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Curtis, it's all there (and more) :-)
> The graphics text scrolls are much faster than they used to be. The IBM extended font is in the sys dir and actually looks pretty good. I have about 15 different fonts. I used to have more on my old system, but apparently that disk wouldn't read. I had a homemade font editor in basic09 that I used to create about 30 or 40 fonts of all kinds, mostly just decorative stuff to use on graphics.
> 
> And Dave, using a graphics screen on a 25mhz CocoPFGA, um well, that's going to be faster than using a text screen on a Coco. I run Vcc at about 78mhz most of the time (for compiling speed) and full graphics screen updates are just about instantanious. But yes, a 1.78mhz Coco 3 is still a little slow, even with the new speedups in NOS9. But it's still much faster than a 51 column PMODE4 screen was on a Coco2, which I used for a couple of years until the Coco3 came out.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bill Pierce
> "Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull
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> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: L. Curtis Boyle <curtisboyle at sasktel.net>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Wed, Nov 4, 2015 8:02 am
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Supercomm fails to load on NitrOS9 lvl 2 on my CoCo 3 with 128K, and a couple of other questions?
> 
> 
> Nitros9 (at least, as of version 2.10 that I last worked on) had support for 224
> character fonts in graphics modes (and 25 lines), and I did an IBM extended
> character set font for it as well, specifically for that reason (Alan Dekok also
> had sped up the printing of graphic fonts drastically from the original). I used
> it with some simple terminal programs to see those characters on BBS's. The one
> issue it had was that in order to get 80 columns, you could only go up to a 4
> color screen, so not all colours were supported (to be honest, I usually only
> used it in 2 color mode, as it was a little faster). 
> I also had disassembled
> Supercomm, and had started optimizing the serial read routines to speed it up,
> but I honestly don't remember if I completely finished that, or released that to
> the public. 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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