Re: [Amforth-devel] Video quod vadis

[Christian B. <cas...@ca...>]

Am Freitag 23 Mai 2008 21:12:04 schrieb Matthias Trute:
> Hi Christian,

> If you have any updates, you can send them to me (directly).

Well there is nothing new other what is on here. Yes, it now supports the 
@-key. I'm still not very happy about the keyboard routines.
http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/94193

> I'm happy to sit-and-wait and nitpick the cherries ;=)

Good :)

> (Standard-) blocks are somewhat difficult since they need a lot of RAM
> for the buffer(s). IMHO blocks can only be used with external RAM and/or
> a modified RAM - Fetch/Store to emulate a MMU with paging.

Hmm, maybe we could have block read and write commands. But for that we'd need 
memory allocation words.

With memory allocation, it would also be possible to have a more dynamic video 
display. For example we could have an empty image to need less memory than a 
full one. Just like the popular ZX80 homecomputer does.

> > Seriously if you can edit blocks, and send them to a printer
>
> I doubt that a windows el-cheapo GDI printer will ever work ;=)

I doubt GDI printers are still around. Most now have either PCL or Postscript 
or some Linux-only stuff.

> Postscript OTOH may work well, esp for a forth system ...

True, we could have parallel processing. :)

> > If you add some kind of networking via I2C you can send a kind of e-mail.
>
> There is even a ethernet connection possible (with IP etc). Hardware
> exists.

TCP/IP needs a _lot_ of memory (800 bytes) and ethernet is not only rather 
expensive, but it also takes quite a lot of power. My idea would be to have a 
tiny stripped down networking protocoll which can work with tiny buffers. I2C 
can already do quite a bit of what we want. For example it already forces the 
slave to acknownledge the bytes. A master could just send bytes until the 
slave doesn't acknownledge anymore.
As I2C is multi-master we can essentially use it like Ethernet.
We can still define a "gateway-protocoll" in which you can contact 
a "router-node" and tell it to forward your connection.

> Bye
> Matthias

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