PLATOTerm for Atari ST

[tschak909]

The first output from PLATOTerm for the Atari ST. This is in ST High mode aka Mono, (640x400). It uses the 8x12 font previously plotted, and is based on the original 8x16 PLATO font. Now onto the 8x6 font for 640x200 #irataonline #plato #atarist

 

 

 

The application is being cross-developed with the latest m68k-atari-mint toolchain, with GEMLIB WINDOM. The big problem that I still need to solve, is the redraw...

 

-Thom

[tschak909]

I spent the last day and a half plotting the 8x6 font required for 640x200 medium resolution, and with the appropriate scaling tables in place, the result:

 

 

(yes, the font will be tweaked)

 

And this is alongside the low resolution version, which uses the already refined 5x6 font:

 

 

Now onto changing text output to use vrt_cpyfm() and implementing a proper draw and refresh tree.

 

-Thom

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Nice to see medium rez supported like that. Watching progress on this with great interest!

Edited August 23, 2018 by TheNameOfTheGame

[tschak909]

Right now, am writing a set of linked list functions to implement a drawing queue, which I need to properly implement my window redraw functions.

 

-Thom

[tschak909]

And with the implementation of the I/O functions, the terminal starts to work! It's connecting to the service, and is interacting with it quite nicely. Text routine still needs to be replaced with calls to vrt_cpyfm() (harder than it should be), and lots of work still to be done, but it's working!

 

 

And I recorded a video showing it in action!

 

 

More to come!

 

-Thom

[krupkaj]

looks really nice. Did you try it on the real machine already?

[tschak909]

Nope, do not have any actual hardware. only emulated.

 

-Thom

[+DarkLord]

Also following this with interest.

[tschak909]

I have a policy, anyone who contacts me to ask for a build, at any time, gets the freshest build off the compiler...whether it works or not. (I know I kid, but really, things are very much in flux, and this build is pre-alpha, so expect falling rocks. I do it because if you're willing to tap me on the shoulder and test...)

 

-Thom

[Fletch]

Tried this on my Mega STe and Falcon030 today. Really nice. I look forward to diving in deeper soon.

[tschak909]

I just added paint and color support to the ST terminal.

 

ST Mono:

 

ST Medium Res:

 

ST Lo-res:

 

TT Medium Res:

 

The program resets the palette on each screen clear, and allocates palette colors on a first come, first serve basis. This becomes evident when running in windowed mode:

(attached at bottom of thread, as AA doesn't want to display it.)

https://i.imgur.com/is7emyH.gif

 

Still a lot to do, but it shows what's in store for the 16-bit terminals, such as the ST and the Amiga, and PC.

 

The ZX Spectrum terminal has some color support (but no paint),

and the TI-99/4A terminal will have color support (but again, probably no paint)

 

So, marching forward, what do you guys think?

 

-Thom

Edited September 3, 2018 by tschak909

[+DarkLord]

Haven't actually tried it yet but it looks like its coming along nicely.

 

Keep up the good work!

[tschak909]

Thank you.

 

I am currently mired in getting the palette management to work properly. It's a bit sticky, because PLATO tends to send foreground color first, then background, which, when creating a new screen and you're using a simple round-robin palette assignment, this gets backwards.

 

Once this works, I will continue to get the rest of the app hooked up and into a functional state (UI bits mostly, select baud rate, exit program, etc.)

 

and then finally tackle the dreaded redraw code (which is actually pretty complicated..if I could reliably just store a bitmap of the whole window, I would just do that. But that takes up too much memory for even a 1MB ST.

 

-Thom

[JamesWD]

Did you get this working with Sting yet?

[Bikerbob]

No JamesWD.. he is not using real hardware so the EMU does not use STing. If you can get STing to work, this should work no issues as it really is just TELNET. Nothing exotic in the networking stack.

 

James

[JamesWD]

I've got Sting working fine on Mega 4 and falcon (via Netusbee), also changed plato config file to remove the AT commands and left just DNS name and port for connection.

 

Doesn't work on either machine (unless there are other config required?) .

 

I would presume most people using their atari to connect to the internet use Sting via an Ethernat driver nowadays so would be nice to update Platoterm to cater for these users also.

[tschak909]

The code is publically available here:

http://github.com/tschak909/platotermst

 

I'd love for people to start taking ownership of these individual platforms, to help out, as I need to start branching into building the community.

 

-Thom