3 ms·

I found ae; later versions build but they're kinda big (45kB, yikes), and while the unobfuscated early version is amazingly simple it handles redraw by refreshi

I found ae; later versions build but they're kinda big (45kB, yikes), and while the unobfuscated early version is amazingly simple it handles redraw by refreshing the entire screen on each keypress. If you've got curses that's easy, and quick, but if you don't have curses, hrm. CP/M terminal emulators are frequently painfully slow and you want to minimise screen refreshes. Right now I'm wondering about writing my own in another livecoding session; that original ae is a masterpiece of simplicity. The trickiest part would be handling screen updates... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/335qpDFPuE0 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/335qpDF... Re Amstrad emulators: I haven't played much with these, but I'd probably suggest Joyce: https://www.seasip.info/Unix/Joyce/ https://www.seasip.info/Unix/Joyce/ That said, I've been running the Kaypro cpmish port using MESS, and it's surprisingly solid. There's even a good debugger. So it might be worth giving that a try. Re microcontrollers: there are very, very few Von Neumann architecture microcontrollers, and they're mostly just boring low-end ARMs. The one exception is the MSP430, which is nice but still not a Z80. I think the eZ80 is all there is.

kragen 7y ago
Thank you! Yeah, 45K is pretty huge, and redraw logic was pretty commonly the most complex part of editors of that time period. The version you linked compiles for me to 2316 bytes of amd64 machine code (in .text) with cc -Dindex=index_ptr -DBUF=4096 -DMODE=0666 -Os ae.c -o ae -lncurses, but of course then it's linked with ncurses. Ah, and it looks like Howe did dedicate it to the public domain! That's nice. I didn't remember that it refreshed the screen on each keypress. The terminals we used on actual CP/M machines were usually pretty snappy, faster than terminal emulators are, at least if you don't count the slow phosphors. But typically they were only 9600 baud, so redrawing the whole screen would take two seconds; escape sequences like the insert-line/delete-line pair supported by the H19 and the VT100 were really important. Contemporary machines like the Apple with its memory-mapped screen buffer avoided the whole terminal catastrophe. I did see your notes on the site on Kaypro emulation with MESS. Thanks!

kragen 7y ago

Thank you! Yeah, 45K is pretty huge, and redraw logic was pretty commonly the most complex part of editors of that time period. The version you linked compiles for me to 2316 bytes of amd64 machine code (in .text) with cc -Dindex=index_ptr -DBUF=4096 -DMODE=0666 -Os ae.c -o ae -lncurses, but of course then it's linked with ncurses. Ah, and it looks like Howe did dedicate it to the public domain! That's nice. I didn't remember that it refreshed the screen on each keypress. The terminals we used on actual CP/M machines were usually pretty snappy, faster than terminal emulators are, at least if you don't count the slow phosphors. But typically they were only 9600 baud, so redrawing the whole screen would take two seconds; escape sequences like the insert-line/delete-line pair supported by the H19 and the VT100 were really important. Contemporary machines like the Apple with its memory-mapped screen buffer avoided the whole terminal catastrophe. I did see your notes on the site on Kaypro emulation with MESS. Thanks!