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

Wed Nov 4 11:35:30 EST 2015

One of these days when I get caught up on some other projects I'll have 
to have a look at Supercomm again.  When I wrote it we didn't have the 
internet like we do now and it was much more difficult to find/exchange 
programming information.  I'm sure that when you start working at baud 
rates above 9600 then there would be a need to look at how to speed 
things up to keep up with the data.  I *think* the fastest modem I ever 
used on my old CoCo3 was a 4800 bps model that I paid a pretty penny 
for...or it could have been 9600 bps.

Very interesting on the speedup with text in the graphics modes.  I 
assume the changes Alan made were in the grfdrv module?? I've got a 
80x28 and 106x56 font working in the 640x450 graphics mode of the 
CoCo3FPGA right now and they're pretty quick but not as quick as I'd 
like them to be.  Actually, I think most of the problem is with the 
hybrid BASIC/machine-language program I'm running.  Anytime you get DECB 
involved it slows things down quite a bit even if it's running at 25 
MHz.  I'm going to try a few routines written purely in m/l and see how 
fast they work.  Of course the memory for the graphics screen requires 
over a quarter megabyte so doing anything with it is going to be more 
CPU intensive.

At some point I'd also like to expand grfdrv to support the 640x450 mode 
on CoCo3FPGA.  Have any new gfx modes been created under Vcc?  I think 
it would be good to get the developers together for a pow-wow somehow so 
that some of the new stuff gets implemented in the same way on multiple 
platforms.

Dave

On 2015-11-04 10:01, L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
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>> 
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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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