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

[Bill Pierce]

Dave, implementing the new CocoFPGA graphics modes for NitrOS9 would be no simple task for sure. The NOS9 drivers implement a lot mor functionality than "just" the resolution... Graphics drawing functions would have to be rewritten (line,circle, fill etc), font display would have to be reworked, all things relating to the windows would need expanding, etc. Just thinking about it makes me wonder if there would be enough room in the boot for all of it. Probably a better answer would be to redesign the drivers to support ONLY the new higher resolution. You would have multiple boots.. new and old.

Since there are sources for MultiVue and Basic09, they could be reworked as well to support the new resolution, but again... probably best to do old and new versions.

Currently, NitrOS9's graphics are 100-200 percent faster than RSDOS Basic's. The only way you could get that kind of speed in RSDOS is to write your own ML routines and ignore RSDOS.

As for VCC.... There are only 3 people on the developement team, Joe (original author), Gary, and myself. Joe disappears for weeks at the time so his "fixes" are few and far between. Gary doesn't have the time to work much on it but has made the most significant contributions, and I don't know as much as I should about "MS Visual Studio 2015 Community" to do much at all (i just got this all together to open source), and am better as a "poweruser/betatester". So as you see, not much is happening for VCC. We need some good C/C++ programmers (with free time) with DirectX knowledge to help with the project or not much will happen anytime soon.

I have the latest binary build but was waiting on one small bug fix, but haven't heard from anyone in over 4 weeks, so I'll probably release it "as is" (keyboard mode stays in "OS9" and will not go to "Basic" layout). The WinXP compatibility was fixed, so at least something was done :-)
I guess I should post a release package since I see no bug fix coming.
As for new enhancements... ain't gonna happen without help. I had over 50 people "hounding" me to get VCC to open source and not one has offered to help work on it. At least it is more stable now on newer machines.
 


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Wed, Nov 4, 2015 11:35 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] Supercomm fails to load on NitrOS9 lvl 2 on my CoCo 3 with 128K, and a couple of other questions?


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