0. About Prosit Apps

0.1. History

Since I always wanted to write my own operating system, and I found in the Ti92 a good platform, and because I learned 68k asm a long time ago, I tried some systems, such as the 'Big Joke' program (a bit limited) which crashed the calc half of the time on exit, and the more promising 'Xinu', which - even if it didn't work - still interests me (I've some projects on it and GCC on Linux, but Hey! it's TOP SECRET for now). But when Prosit came on the scene, I wanted to test it, so I wrote those little programs to see how it works and if I was still able to program. The ideas came from the LINES.PRG on Atari, the two others are from X Window accessories (AKA xmag and xosview). Enjoy. ;-)

0.2. About the author

François Revol is currently studying Electrical and Computing Engineering at ESISAR in Valence, Drôme, France. He knows about 68k, x86 and some 8 bits asm, the C language, and some others.

0.3. Credits

• David Ellsworth for creating Fargo.
• Xavier Vassor for creating DoorsOS.
• Rusty Wagner for the excellent VTi emulator.
• Niklas Brunlid for creating Prosit ;-)

0.4. License

This package is released under the same the license that come with Prosit:

You are free to distribute this software provided that nothing is added to or removed from the distribution, and that you do it free of charge. You may also alter the source code but if you distribute your own modifications you must clearly state that you are not the original author (and what changes you have made) in the documentation, source and/or the executable(s).

In other words: put it on a web page, in an archive, fax it, put it in a bottle and throw it into the ocean - just keep it... free :)

1. Lines

As I said, the lines program idea is taken from the LINES.PRG on Atari, (or the WinCrash© screen saver as you want). The idea is ; well, does anybody want me to explain ? Here is a list of the features it has:

• Vectors are set randomly; you can force them to change with the '!' button (just equ SHOW_INFOS to 0 and recompile to skip copyrights).
• One can change the number of lines (i.e. the number of polygons drawn before it begins to erase them) with the buttons 'L-' and 'L+'.
• One can also change the number of points in the polygons to have a line, a triangle and so on, with the buttons 'P-' and 'P+'.
• You can also change what we could name the 'nice' value with 'S-'/'S+', i.e. the number of BREAK_AND_COOPERATE before each redraw of the window.
• There is also a 'Quit' button to ... quit. :-P

The code is not very optimized, and there is some debuging stuff, but there are some comments to help reading it (and maybe understanding it...).

2. PMag

This program is simply a x4 screen magnifier. 16x16 pixels viewed centered on mouse.

This program has no options.

NOTE: This time PMag works correctly on the 89 too! ;-)

2. POsView

This program tries to monitor system resources. For now, only the two first bargraphs are active: the load, and the mem, which represent the use of CPU, and the used amount of memory. More things to come...

This program has no options.

4. My opinion on Prosit

I find that Prosit works pretty well, even if it crashes sometimes, and if I had to incbin the small and large fonts in winlib to see something readable on the emulator (maybe because the ROM was just an update, didn't want to make a ROMdump).

When writing these apps, and even before, I saw the main problem of all the shells, and other 'kernels' (don't think we could use this word, except talking about Prosit), and even Prosit itself: the relocation. It gives more problems than it solves. Here is my point of view:

• Advantages:
  • It is used by TI itself, all shells, and also Prosit.
  • It is more easy to write relocatable programs than PIC (Position Independant Code)
• Disadvantages:
  • For each instance of the program running, you need to allocate memory for program code, except for the first one. (maybe that's why Prosit doesn't allow multiple instances) -> waste of memory
  • You cannot relocate an archived program, you need to copy it first into RAM. -> waste of memory
  • You cannot move the program's code when running because of the relocation -> holes in the heap -> waste of memory

Anyway, enjoy it!

5. Things to come for Prosit

I've a lot of ideas, but I don't know if I'll enough time, anyway, Here is what I have in my bag:

• PTerm: I'd like to port FTerm to Prosit, or if someone else want to do the same...
• PSh: A shell for Prosit (I don't know yet how powerfull it will be, if I make it simple, or if I make a ttylib, like on UNIX)
• PFileMgr: A file manager/Launcher with directory tree, maybe file types, icons,...
• NetLib: A networking library, with both the I2C protocol and TI's one if it proves to be usable on a network (It could be faster since the hardware gives us bytes directly...)