80-Bus News

  

April–June 1982, Volume 1, Issue 2

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bit-slice processors, but I am still reading about them. It remains to be seen whether they too are ruled out by their cost, of course. All this extra hardware is still at the “thinking about it” stage, and should really wait until some minor speed problems on some of my other boards have been fixed. Recommended reading, if you are at all interested in either sixteen bit hardware or bit-slices, is “Modern Microprocessor System Design” by Daniel R. McGlynn, published by Wiley-Interscience and not cheap! Of course, in the event of boards with extra processors appearing, someone will need to write the software to coordinate the tasks they are each running…

Something useful (at last!) for CP/M hackers.

The subroutine below is one that I have found very useful in programs that send a lot of text to the screen. The usual output routine sends all text up to the delimiter, which is a dollar sign, direct to the screen, without any regard to what is happening to the words at the end of each line. It is, of course, possible to write your program in such a way that all the output fits the screen nicely. It also happens to be boring work to do this, and the program will be no good at all on a system with a different screen width. The routine that follows will output the contents of a text buffer of any length, which is terminated with a 00 byte, without breaking any words. The text must not contain new line characters, or the output will be somewhat bizarre, to say the least.


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