SAM Coupe

Current SAM Projects...

  1. Termite
    Termite is going to be the SAM's first fully-fledged, customisable comms software. Already it runs at an amazing pace using a slightly modified comms interface, and is happy at speeds up to 38,400 baud -- no doubt by fiddling with the counter system you c ould probably get it going faster, but I doubt that the screen update would be fast enough to keep up. Currently, it supports ANSI terminal escape codes, and I've been working a lot on it recently in order to try and shave some execution time off it. I recently managed to get 400 t-states back from th e colour character print routine using some arcane trickery with XOR's, and I'm working on lots of other bits and bobs on the system at the moment. Since the project has stagnated somewhat, I'm thinking about writing a cut down version, and then building features into it, rather than doing it all in one go with everything in, the way I was planning to.

    By the way, if you are working on a terminal emulator yourself, you may find a brief sojourn to Richard S. Shufford's Video Terminal Information pages incredibly useful.

    Source code to Termite to date may be found here, in ASCII form. Feel free to take the source and create your own version; the VT100 emulation is slightly broken, but essentially useable. The Chat mode for dumb terminals works fine (even on serial printers - cripes!), and the user interface bits are getting there. You'll need to include your own fonts and a file called 1024ldis, which contains LDI, 1024 times for speed (rather than looping them... though I'm thinking of cutting it down to 128 LDIs, as there isn't that much of a speed bonus).
  2. Z80 Assembler
    I'm working on it, slowly but surely, whenever I get time. C source code to the very small bits I've done may be found here. The final version will run as a console-based App (recompilable for Linux, etc, as it'll only use the standard C api), and will have a DevStudio style editor/IDE.
  3. BOAI Issue 3
    This will appear online eventually. When I get time to put the site up. I promise!

[BACK][HOME]

�1998 Simon Cooke