Re: A92: Re: Shells and assembler

To: assembly-92@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: Re: A92: Re: Shells and assembler
From: Betelg@aol.com
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 21:27:22 EDT
Reply-To: assembly-92@lists.ticalc.org

IInteresting, all.  ROM, I forgot (not much of it on the 83, at least not 
much to worry about.  92 shoves it in your face... wait, what).. Douh!  That 
stuff stinks.  I guess I was just reminiscing about old telneting from the 
83.   But what's all that 60odd k
 under the "system" label in the mem area?  isn't that the kernel?  I beleive 
that is easily (ormore at "possibly") modified. one of the things I've always 
been a fan of is symbolic grafics.  I don't like graphicks, accept on sgi's, 
where they belong.  Imagine how powerful a 400Mhz pentium II would be running 
a DOS-like OS, where the "graphics" were all in the bios.  I'm thinking, that 
if the ti keeps stuborndly refering to it's "graphics driver" (speaking of 
which, I know they make backlights for the 85, can they do that for 92?  or 
rather, does someone have a barely working 92 they could experiment with to 
devel a procedure?), then why don't we just use it for text, and just have a  
powerful however user-unfriendly mathematic calculator as well as computer.  
I'm saying Graphics nothing, that's not what computers were made for.  
Graphics are for graphing and not wasting processor cycles to make the text 
look better.  And sure, A new OS wouldn't be for everybody, but it would 
still fill a nich.

> m sure Ellsworth knew what he was doing.  The TI-92 is a graphing 
calculator.
> 
>  That is its only purpose in life--perform mathematical operations and 
> visualize
>  the results.  David, knowing this, figured that most people would need to 
> use
>  the calculator for both assembler programs and for its original design.  
> With
>  that in mind, he considered how the TI-OS would deal with assembler code.  
> By
>  encapsulating assembler inside of "BASIC" program, the TI-OS would 
> automatically
>  deal with file transfer and file management.
>  
>  Of course no one is perfect.  David never figured out how to prevent the 
TI-
> OS
>  from re-writing the program if you accidentally tried to edit it.  We just 
> knew
>  never to open an assembler program.
>  
>  I don't follow how writing our own OS will help us.  The TI-OS is 
> implemented
>  in ROM.  Our OS would MOSTLY be in RAM (assume we borrow SOME functions of 
> the
>  TI-OS).  This will take up our most valuable and most limited resource--
> memory.
>  I personally would never want to program file management or file transfer! 
 
> It
>  is hard enough for me to read the stupid keyboard matrix!
>  
>  . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . 
. .
> 
>  
>  I was thinking about my old Amiga 1000 sitting near to my Pentium II 
400MHz.
>  (The Amiga was one of the first multi-tasking systems.)  If we had a multi-
>  tasking system for the 92, we could simply "console" applications by 
> providing
>  a "stdin" and "stdout".  The kernel would deal with reading the keyboard 
> matrix
>  and rendering the text.  Or better yet, one module provides text output 
and 
> a
>  different module does tile/sprite graphics.  Your program switches to the 
> other
>  module to do graphics output.  Since only kernel modules are rendering to 
> the
>  screen, you can ensure that only the foreground app's graphics are 
displayed.
> 
>  The last module you could add would be for 3D graphics.
>  
>  Assuming this system was already built, would you programmers use it?  Or 
do
>  you prefer to do your own I/O?
>
Follow-Ups:
Re: A92: Re: Shells and assembler
From: "Aaron Hill" <serac@lightmail.com>