I agree. The monitor listing is an indespensible tool. Nowadays though, 99% of my errors are because I forgot some syntax in the way my Assembler works, or my typing can't keep up to my brain and I drop an important instruction. Damn serial connection from my brain to my hands isn't fast enough.

Hi all,
The earlier comments about VT100 and so-on reminded me of the most amazing editor that was distributed with the HP1000 minicomputers. It depended upon the proprietary HP terminal escape codes, but the low-down was that you used the TERMINAL as the editor, in screen mode (some of the more expensive HP terminals had over 4 80-line pages) and you could type anywhere on the screen, insert, delete, scroll, copy & paste to you hearts content. When you wanted, you typed a simple control sequence (this was back in the very early 1980s - I can't recall what the sequence actually was) and the terminal read the entire screen (all n pages) and transmitted it back as normal ASCII text.

It was amazingly fast, and 'my' HP1000 5I was system mgr.) had over 20 users connected plus all of the number-crunching going-on in the background. I wrote 1000's of lines of assembler and Pascal with that editor.

I haven't really studied VT100, but I seem to recall that there are commands for reading back a line of text from the current cursor position. That basically all you need above the normal cursor positioning commands...

I was thinking of going down that road once I've got the WBC V1 up and running, and chosen a suitable VGA interface for it.

Well, that's my 1€'s worth. Happy new year to all.

(Edit. thinking about it, it is more probable that the terminal only transmitted line-by-line and the HP1000 editor linked the text correctly into the textfile, and sent the relevant escape codes)

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Glenn-in-France

I used to pride myself on being able to debug without a debugger, and spotting bugs without compiling the code, and it's a valuable skill. And there are things you can find using old fashioned tools like printf or other logging statements that are harder to find with a debugger - having a log of the system activity over time is very valuable. But there are also times when knowing how to make best use of more modern tools will lead you to a solution much more quickly - I think all of these tools are valuable in practice.

Indeed. I might place personal constraints on myself in hardware (and sometimes software), but ultimately it works or doesn't work, and I'd rather it work

Using my mini-monitor-thing for my simulator has helped a lot already. What I was seeing on the screen was fine, but behind the scenes it was chaos! Most of the bugs are fixed, and I'm reworking the 'defrag' next. After that is vertical scrolling, and then I should be done. At least done with the basics, I can go back and do copy/paste commands later if I *really* want it.

Thank you all!

Chad

Tsk, some people want everything!

Neil

Haha, yep Selfish and stubborn.

But it works now! Attached is my uncommented code, a GIF showing some features off, and then a PNG of what I'd love to eventually be doing with this.

Defrag seems to be working and vertical scrolling is VERY nice. The reason why it's slow to draw on the screen after Return and Backspace, yet fast after Page Up/Down is because it's not redrawing the entire screen each time... it's hardware scrolling! At least that's the plan going forward with my next SBC.

I have a couple more functions I want to implement, but 99% done now. Now, what am I going to use this for? A programming environment! I'm not sure if it will be version of BASIC, C, or something else, but I am planning on not using line numbers.

Well, thank you again, everyone, for the conceptual help. This was really neat Now onto the next thing.

Chad

Oh, excellent works! I'm happy to see all these solutions toward standalone 6502/65816. The diversity of solution is quite amazing.
Bill

Also, kudos for using proper Allman braces and proper separation in your fake C

Neil

But I just realized I needed:



Oops! Good thing it was fake!

Chad

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I made it SO much faster just now! I added a 4K character 'buffer' in RAM that captures any printed character to the screen. So then in my 'print character' subroutine, I just look at the character in the buffer, compare it with what I want to draw, and if they are the same I just don't draw it.

Further optimizations include eliminating the 'copy' of the text character bitmap on blank characters, just paste $00. I also took my compressed text character bitmap and expanded it to speed up the copy/paste portion, though that did little in comparison to the buffer.

Ok, NOW I'm happy with it

Thanks everyone.

Chad