Atari ST VT-52 animations

[Faicuai]

19 hours ago, drac030 said:

Will see. I planned to put it simply on my webpage, but since it is also a text viewer and there is currently no equivalent (the old LESS.COM only uses base RAM, XLESS.COM does not display non-Atari files), then maybe. But maybe XLESS can be expanded with this functionality instead (i.e. viewing PC files, not replaying VT-52 animations).

 

As about the Toolkit, do not expect revolution: there is some new (and good) stuff there, but most of the changes are bugfixes.

Fair enough!

 

A couple of things, before we close:

1. It would be absolutely wonderful to allow "TYPE" command to detect presence of RC_GR8.SYS, and auto-switch to 80cols during linear text-file dumps. EDDY, SDX Commander, and other utilities already do this, which spares me from being forced to load CON.SYS, which chews up a bit of ram, just for switching to 80col. Upon exit, TYPE can switch back to gfx. mode found during entry. If this happens, I may no longer have to use COL80 from ICE-T, which is wonderful and lightning fast, but suffers from a big drawback: I cannot pass a filename as parameter on command line, before execution.
2. Last but not least. having myself deeper roots on Atari and IBM/PC arena, I personally regard SDX as the pinnacle of serious Atari (and any) 8-bit computing. It is hard not to feel at home after being familiar with IBM/PC + MSDOS environment for so long (which reigned supreme, eventually).

 

Kudos to the entire team for such an amazing, kick-ass piece of work (SDX/upgrades), considering all the gymnastics required to make things happen on Atari's structured memory-space and HW resources.

 

Cheers!

Edited April 4, 2020 by Faicuai

[drac030]

16 hours ago, Faicuai said:

A couple of things, before we close:

"TYPE" is just reading bytes from its file and sending the out to the console, only checking the current character position against the right margin so as to avoid an uncontrolled scroll-up, and counting the EOLs. It is a very simple loop actually. As it relies on the screen driver maintaining the cursor position and its ability to do scroll-ups when necessary, it cannot be easily adjusted to use RC_* drivers, because these are low level screen drivers and do not contain any such mechanisms as automatic repositioning the cursor or scrollup, when the cursor reaches the lowest-right position on the screen (and note that Eddy or SC do not need scrolls either).

 

The other question is the size of the COMMAND.COM (as TYPE is an internal command), it is already quite big...

 

So if such a viewer should exist, I would prefer to make it a separate program. I am not sure if it is doable in this dev cycle, everything is practically closed now, apart from last bugfixes maybe, and such an app certainly needs testing.

 

17 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Kudos to the entire team

Thanks in the name of the team But this building is being made on the good foundations made by the ICD guys. I really would some day learn to know about the inspirations, because SDX is also internally like nothing else on Atari.