Commander X16

 

Question: Are there any plans to have maintenance releases of the emulator to adopt bugfixes and optimizations?

Totally unrelated to any pull requests I may have contributed to... ?

On 5/17/2020 at 8:55 PM, StephenHorn said:

Question: Are there any plans to have maintenance releases of the emulator to adopt bugfixes and optimizations?

Maintenance releases? How about more regular releases? ? I'll try that!

How can we make the emulator recognize lower case letters? I have run it on a couple different Win10 systems and the default seems to be uppercase and the shift just produces an alternate character, not lower or upper case letter. I'm sure this is something simple I just don't understand or are missing.

Thanks,

12 minutes ago, vhovar said:

How can we make the emulator recognize lower case letters? I have run it on a couple different Win10 systems and the default seems to be uppercase and the shift just produces an alternate character, not lower or upper case letter. I'm sure this is something simple I just don't understand or are missing.



Thanks,

Ctrl+N

45 minutes ago, vhovar said:

How can we make the emulator recognize lower case letters? I have run it on a couple different Win10 systems and the default seems to be uppercase and the shift just produces an alternate character, not lower or upper case letter. I'm sure this is something simple I just don't understand or are missing.



Thanks,

 

36 minutes ago, SlithyMatt said:

Ctrl+N

Part of the reason behind this is because the X16 defaults to Unshifted PETSCII, like the Commodore 64. Unshifted PETSCII doesn't contain lower-case letters, but the console can swap to Shifted PETSCII, which does contain lower-case letters. The alternate characters you saw are also part of the PETSCII character set.

Thanks for the info. Makes sense as I've looked a bit more at the Commodore 64 docs.

It would be handy if the emulator had some indicators (bottom/ top bar or in title) for the current text and charset mode.

Being able to copy and paste in text without worry would be good, too. I had run into examples that I wanted to paste in to test or play with and it definitely made a mess of things. Since Copy and Paste are the most powerful developer tools ever, copying and pasting should work as well and as clear as possible in the emulator (and in every editor - especially letting people use their modern keyboards.).

This could also be fixed with more care with every example code block in the guides and wiki.

Alternatively - caps lock all the time. ?

23 minutes ago, Starsickle said:

Being able to copy and paste in text without worry would be good, too.

Well, having an ASCII-based system would be good, too... but we don't. So, copy and paste mixed-case text is always going to be the opposite of what you want because PETSCII (my kingdom for CP437!). So, you can reverse your cases in your source file and copy and paste it in at any time. Just because you see graphical characters in place of uppercase doesn't mean the wrong codes are stored in your program. It will work as intended when switching to mixed-case mode, which should be part of your program to begin with.

xForth follows the ANS Standard, which specifies standard words will be understood when written in upper case ASCII characters. What happens when they are the ASCII codes for lower case is an exercise for the reader ... some Forths are case sensitive, some are case insensitive, some treat words in all the same case as case insensitive but words in Mixed Case as case sensitive.

So the compliant approach I've taken is to leave it case sensitive, as eForth, and convert it to all upper case ASCII. So if coding in Upper/Graphics mode, don't shift characters and leave them in UPPER CASE. If coding in Upper/Lower mode, don't shift the characters and leave them in LOWER CASE.

And ^ appears as Up Arrow and _ appears as left arrow and \ appears as the British Pound currency symbol, as in ASCII 1963, but it all works without problems, because what the system cares about is whether the character codes in the dictionary and the character codes of the words you type match. It is not bothered by how they appear on the screen.

Just, when the Block system gets up and running and line commented code starts showing up, don't be startled by all the Pound symbols. That's not a bug.