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ChartreuseK / PETTERM

Commodore PET 2001 Bit-banged serial terminal
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
24 stars 8 forks source link

Can we channel to a printer or buffer? #3

Open WatsonAC79 opened 2 years ago

WatsonAC79 commented 2 years ago

Hi there, I was wondering if any future development was planned - if we could perhaps toggle to home and open a channel to the printer or perhaps some buffering?

Thinking about BBSs and snagging a command menu or messages to read later.

ChartreuseK commented 2 years ago

It could be possible, yeah. It's not as simple as using some Kernel calls to change the output device as the code is writing directly to screen memory for performance. Would need a alternate putch routine that dumps to the printer (while mostly ignoring ANSI codes).

I do still plan to do some future development, one thing I'm wanting to do is add XMODEM support for downloading and uploading files. However the disk or tape handling part of that is a bit tricky (especially tape as the whole file would have to fit in RAM as fas as I can tell). As well I need to determine which zero page locations the kernel routines use and preserve them before the call, but that shouldn't be as much of an issue.