Guru input needed on possible development path idea

[+arcadeshopper]

you guys have seen mousedesk right? course it's xbasic with ea5 loader routines.. but pretty much does what you want to do in 48k.. We need to finish rewriting the xb driver for the TIPI mouse and I'll put that in

 

[x24b]

I was at Utah and remember him.

His biggest problem as a real lack of memory to get it to work as he was loading off DF80 files a lot.

 

I remember suggesting AMS (SAMS Card) to him as a fix.....so where did he go?

 

Thank God my memory is not totally gone!

 

You were there too. He was real and I did not imagine it.

I was the guy selling the pamphlet size yellow book and disk called Easy Assembly. I'm still crap at programming, but I'd like to take a crack at writing a better, longer and more involved book with examples and a disk showing bit map mode. That was my proudest thing back then. Actually, without help and just reading a book and TI assembler book, getting bit map mode running and tinkering with it. I had NO help and nobody to even bounce ideas off of. I wanted to help others understand assembly because the learning curve for a newbie was SO steep.

 

I love these forums. That is one of the reasons I want to get back into the TI. Help is at hand now, and I'd like to help if I can, even with my limited knowledge.

 

Back to our regular scheduled programming... GUI's

[RXB]

 

Thank God my memory is not totally gone!

 

You were there too. He was real and I did not imagine it.

I was the guy selling the pamphlet size yellow book and disk called Easy Assembly. I'm still crap at programming, but I'd like to take a crack at writing a better, longer and more involved book with examples and a disk showing bit map mode. That was my proudest thing back then. Actually, without help and just reading a book and TI assembler book, getting bit map mode running and tinkering with it. I had NO help and nobody to even bounce ideas off of. I wanted to help others understand assembly because the learning curve for a newbie was SO steep.

 

I love these forums. That is one of the reasons I want to get back into the TI. Help is at hand now, and I'd like to help if I can, even with my limited knowledge.

 

Back to our regular scheduled programming... GUI's

I had his card but no one ever answered his phone???

[x24b]

I was clueless back then. I should have gotten his card as well. I was afraid of bothering him too much with endless questions. I never saw him again.

[iKarith]

I've been thinking about this a bit… I know the desire would be to create a modern desktop metaphor GUI, but … do we need or even want that? If an alternative to Matt's 32k giving us a TiPi-compatible SAMS were to be created, or a P-box SAMS card with TiPi, you'd have access to a modern mouse. All for that! F18A Mk 2 should be able to give us the option of more colors, more sprites, more graphics in general.

 

What I wonder is … what if the text screen and the graphics screen were essentially the same screen? That's not far from how the stock VDP operates anyway, but let's maybe improve upon that. What if a program can take over the screen or part of it to render graphics on top of the text? Again, almost the VDPs native mode, except there's no coordination or standardization.

 

I think about Contiki, a GUI program on the C64, but plain text for faster speed on the Apple II. But its TUI tries to implement ASCII icons. What if it could just draw graphics there? What if it could use colors to use the text screen more like a GUI screen, and instead of being a character cell MouseText "arrow" or inverted block, the cursor were a mouse cursor that moved like you'd expect?

 

From where I sit, the desktop metaphor is going away. It's not really used on modern versions of Windows and is increasingly less used on macOS. The desktop is becoming a scratch space for a current project and the usual menus and the like are being replaced by program finders or selectors—pop up screens full of programs to choose from or search through. A setup like this might lend itself nicely to a Norton Commander style file manager, or maybe you could run a modified beginners or extended BASIC that ran under it. Multitasking maybe with a model like screen/tmux, either full screen or in subwindows, or maybe both? And because programs would be cooperating, you could mix GUIs and text. This IMO capitalizes on the fact that the TI, like most 1980s vintage computers, is pretty good at text, but still give you the power to use graphics wherever you need them.

 

I know I've often wished I could just switch tmux on my Mac or Linux machines to a tab with a GUI web browser in it. I don't often tile things because I like being able to see what I'm doing with large fonts, but a split screen does have its advantages.

 

Throwing a pipe dream out there.

[RXB]

STEP A:

Make a SAVER program that allows unrelated software to be loaded than saved to disk or hard drive.

Example:

Load Funnel Web 40 column then save SAMS 32K running it.

Load MG Explorer then save SAMS 32K running it.

Load TI Artist then save SAMS 32K running it.

NOTE: THESE ALL HAVE XB LOAD PROGRAM THAT RUN THEM.

 

 

STEP B:

Stitch all SAMS 32K sections into a single Dis/Var 255 file. (Perfect format as no one has ever used this format ever.)

NOTE: Dis/Var 255 would be excellent to edit even using a XB program to find and look at sections.

 

 

STEP C:

Establish RXB 2018 SAMS program that on boot up loads entire SAMS memory from a file named "@@@SAMS@@@"

In RXB 2018 this can be done at boot menu with the / (divide key).

After the / (divide key) is pressed it asks for ANY drive number to load from, or press 0 (zero key) for WDS1.@@@SAMS@@@

 

 

STEP D:

From RXB 2018 PROGRAM MODE or EDIT MODE switching 32K to programs loaded with CALL SAMS("32K",address)

NOTE: This currently works in RXB 2015 using FUNNELWEB if you type:

OLD DSK1.LOAD change CALL LINK("FNLWEB") into RXB command CALL EXECUTE(-7428)

Thus using CALL SAMS("32K",address) already has half the working parts.

(I always said CALL LINK("NAME") SUCKS! RXB since 2001 has had CALL EXECUTE(address) is much better!)

 

STEP E:

From RXB 2020 look for F18 MK2 being utilized.

 

P.S. Testing shows 1Meg SAMS file saved to disk is 4057 Dis/Var thus is huge so quad density disks?

Edited June 30, 2018 by RXB