Getting a BASIC program in ASCII from my computer into MESS

[minivanmegafun]

Yay newbie questions! I'm sure this has been touched on before, but my searches are coming up blank.

 

So I've figured out how to get a program out of MESS into ASCII format using LIST PIO, but I haven't figured out how to get the edited program back onto the system.

 

I am trying to work out a sane development cycle (edit in a proper text editor, transfer to emulator, test, possibly export changes, commit to a source control system, rinse, repeat) for writing BASIC programs.

 

I'm not coming up with a good way to automatically get a BASIC program into the emulator. I know v9t9 allows abusing the virtual keyboard to accept a text file to press keys, but that seems less than efficient.

 

Is there some way to transfer the file over the emulated serial port, or possibly write it to a disk on my modern computer and flip it into MESS?

 

Thanks!

[RobertLM78]

Your wishes have been granted!

 

I believe this is what you are looking for:

ftp://ftp.whtech.com/Geneve/9640news/CAT10/TEXTLDR.ARK

or here is a disk image in my dropbox:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95921622/TEXTLOADER.dsk

Edited September 22, 2014 by RobertLM78

[RobertLM78]

BTW, I'm not sure this will work with console BASIC or not - I can't remember. It is pretty straightforward though, just import your text into a disk image using Michael's TIImageTool or Fred's TI99Dir.

[minivanmegafun]

I figured I was on the right track while playing with TIImageTool.

 

Does anyone know what version of the JRE it behaves best under? It keeps locking up for me. I haven't yet dug into why or poked around in visualvm to see why, though.

 

I'm running:

java version "1.7.0_09"

Java SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_09-b05)

Java HotSpot 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.5-b02, mixed mode)

on OS X 10.9.4.

[+Lee Stewart]

...It keeps locking up for me....

Does this happen every other time you hit 'p'? That's "pause" and it trips me up every now and then. I usually have to choose "Full Emulation, UI: Disabled" to avoid the "pause" problem. There must be a better solution and Michael will probably weigh in soon.

 

...lee

[RobertLM78]

Does this happen every other time you hit 'p'? That's "pause" and it trips me up every now and then. I usually have to choose "Full Emulation, UI: Disabled" to avoid the "pause" problem. There must be a better solution and Michael will probably weigh in soon.

 

...lee

I never knew about that about ImageTool - or are you thinking of MESS?

 

 

Minivan, I'm using the following, and haven't ever had problems with ImageTool.

java version "1.6.0_32"

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.13.4) (6b32-1.13.4-4ubuntu0.12.04.2)

OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.25-b01, mixed mode)

[+Lee Stewart]

I never knew about that about ImageTool - or are you thinking of MESS?

...

Sorry...I was talking about MESS.

 

...lee

Edited September 23, 2014 by Lee Stewart

[+mizapf]

Hi there,

 

some information on MESS and TIImageTool on this first autumn morning here:

 

1. Currently there is no way to reliably paste text into MESS, and I am not really positive that there will be one soon. There is already a support for pasting in the core, but this is a generic feature which does not take into account the specifics of the emulated systems.

 

Pasting is generally done by sending a sequence of keystrokes. However, if the TI BASIC interpreter takes a slightly longer time to process the pasted line, the emulator core has no chance whatsoever to detect that delay and will continue to send characters (just as if you were blindly typing). So this has to be slowed down considerably beyond the line of fun.

 

2. As a remedy, I plan to extend TIImageTool's features to create a BASIC program on a disk image (which means to solve problem no. 1 by delegation). What you can do a this time is import/export of plain text, so your dev cycle would already work for assembly language. I did it this way already. BASIC programs can only be viewed at this time because I did not yet include a parser to create the BASIC program from text. Will be there in the next version.

 

3. I heard of lockups of TIImageTool under OSX happening more frequently than under other operating systems. I already fixed some issues (after I learned about the strange concurrency issues in Swing and how to use invokeLater). That means that the most recent version 1.6 may be more stable. What version are you using?

 

If you experience lockups in TIImageTool, please start it again in a command line so that runtime exceptions may become visible and tell me the exact error message.

 

4. The P key is the pause key in MESS in "Partial mode". You can redefine it in the OSD menu ("Input (general)" / "User Interface"). However, I would not recommend this because other keys may also be redefined, and you won't notice that you are in the wrong keyboard mode anymore.

[RXB]

This is the main reason I have not moved to MESS yet. It takes forever to get TEXT from Notepad into MESS unlike Clasic99 and Ti99Dir

 

I can take Ti99Dir to turn Notepad files into a TI File then turn into a DSKIMAGE then IMPORT using TI Image Tool,

but as you can see that is one giant pain in the ass.

 

The other is I can not get MESS to SAVE a Configuration file ever. Just do not know how to create my own that works.

Only once have I got MESS configured the way I wanted but it locked up one day and would never work again even from the copies of MESS.

 

I am totally mystified as to why MESS will never save a Configuration file in Windows 7.

And no I do not want to use OS X as I can not run Classic99 from OS X and do not want to switch back and forth constantly.

[Gazoo]

This is the main reason I have not moved to MESS yet. It takes forever to get TEXT from Notepad into MESS unlike Clasic99 and Ti99Dir

 

I can take Ti99Dir to turn Notepad files into a TI File then turn into a DSKIMAGE then IMPORT using TI Image Tool,

but as you can see that is one giant pain in the ass.

 

The other is I can not get MESS to SAVE a Configuration file ever. Just do not know how to create my own that works.

Only once have I got MESS configured the way I wanted but it locked up one day and would never work again even from the copies of MESS.

 

I am totally mystified as to why MESS will never save a Configuration file in Windows 7.

And no I do not want to use OS X as I can not run Classic99 from OS X and do not want to switch back and forth constantly.

 

It DOES NOT 'take forever' to get text into MESS. I did ALL the programming for all the recent multicarts with Wordpad, and assembled them in MESS, and it was a cinch. Way, way easier than any other way I've tried.

 

While you have your Source file open in Wordpad (or Notepad), click edit then select all. Now right click and select copy. Open TiImageTool and open your Disk image. Click edit and import text content, paste it and save it. Now assemble your source in Mess. Link it if you want. You can then use TiImageTool to save it as a PC image file to do with as you please - for me it was inserting that code into a binary file in the right place to make the multicart image.

 

BTW, Mess will save a configuration file every time as long as you exit correctly. Click file and then click exit.

 

Gazoo

Edited September 23, 2014 by Gazoo

[Tursi]

How to load a text file from Windows into Classic99:

 

-Save the file in your DSK1 folder with a ".txt" extension (assuming file mode and not disk image mode)

-Open the file in the TI as "DSK1.filename.txt"

 

 

That's different from a BASIC program listing, of course, as those are tokenized. You can Edit->Paste into TI BASIC under Classic99 then use TI99Dir or TIImageTool to copy the resulting file to a disk image for MESS, though, if nothing else is working.

[RXB]

 

It DOES NOT 'take forever' to get text into MESS. I did ALL the programming for all the recent multicarts with Wordpad, and assembled them in MESS, and it was a cinch. Way, way easier than any other way I've tried.

 

While you have your Source file open in Wordpad (or Notepad), click edit then select all. Now right click and select copy. Open TiImageTool and open your Disk image. Click edit and import text content, paste it and save it. Now assemble your source in Mess. Link it if you want. You can then use TiImageTool to save it as a PC image file to do with as you please - for me it was inserting that code into a binary file in the right place to make the multicart image.

 

BTW, Mess will save a configuration file every time as long as you exit correctly. Click file and then click exit.

 

Gazoo

Thanks Gazoo I think I will try that for importing files into MESS that way.

 

For Classic99 I use Ti99Dir I just have it open all the time to a folder on Desktop click Convert DoS Text to .\DSK4\ and all done in one step.

 

You can not have a file open to a location all the time in TI Image Tool thus takes many more clicks and steps to do the same thing.

If you save to the location and use TI Image Tool like I do with Ti99Dir it crashes as it says the file is already open.

Thus I have to go through all the steps every single time.

 

P.S. I have a issue with Windows 7 and Windows 8 in MESS.

No matter how many times I change the MESS folder from READ ONLY to READ/WRITE it does not change the Configure file in MESS on exit.

Exiting correctly makes no difference. It works fine in OS X but in Windows it refuses to change that Configure file.

Installing MESS multiple times makes no difference or moving MESS to another location same results.

Even reinstalling the entire OS makes no change.

Edited September 24, 2014 by RXB

[minivanmegafun]

 

3. I heard of lockups of TIImageTool under OSX happening more frequently than under other operating systems. I already fixed some issues (after I learned about the strange concurrency issues in Swing and how to use invokeLater). That means that the most recent version 1.6 may be more stable. What version are you using?

 

I'm on 1.55. I'll have to track down 1.6 and give it a whirl. Nothing got printed to the console when the lockup occurred, though I didn't play with it very long.

 

If I start digging into the code of that app and make changes, how would you like patches submitted?

[+mizapf]

I just saw I did not yet upload 1.6, so better stay with 1.55 for the time being. 1.6 still has some glitches and is not complete yet.

 

How exactly does it lock up? Mouse pointer showing wait state? Empty window on start (try resizing the window)?

 

The ugly thing is that although I make frequent use of it, I just don't get lockups. Which means that there are differences in the behaviour of Java under different OS which should actually not be. My guess is that these issues come from concurrent changes to the Swing components which I have fixed in 1.6. Hopefully, I should add.

 

If you have patches please send me the edited Java source files so I can include the patch.

[minivanmegafun]

I just saw I did not yet upload 1.6, so better stay with 1.55 for the time being. 1.6 still has some glitches and is not complete yet.

 

How exactly does it lock up? Mouse pointer showing wait state? Empty window on start (try resizing the window)?

 

The ugly thing is that although I make frequent use of it, I just don't get lockups. Which means that there are differences in the behaviour of Java under different OS which should actually not be. My guess is that these issues come from concurrent changes to the Swing components which I have fixed in 1.6. Hopefully, I should add.

 

If you have patches please send me the edited Java source files so I can include the patch.

It locks up shortly after trying to create a new disk (File > New > Floppy Image..., type in a name and click OK).

 

VisualVM sees that it's deadlocked - from a cursory glance it looks like it's waiting on the Aqua file chooser to return. I've thrown the stack trace up as a gist at https://gist.github.com/cswingler/b43e920b0c56b4ca979f.

 

(This is still on 1.5.5 by the way)