How to write (properly behaving) terminal apps for Fuzix ??

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7alken

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Sep 21, 2025, 7:09:46 PMSep 21
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hi all, and obvioulsly mostly Alan, if you can review what we did here with Lyra about learning of basics (and "ubasic" diff to support VISUAL, termios etc) ... I always asked myslef if there is some version of basic for fuzix - is this only one?? 

btw, some years ago, I played with source of TBA - tinybasicarduino, this one (after similar playing with primitive TBP - tiny basic plus - to understand and split things into "prefixed_libs_for_fuctions" (it is chatty, but clear for me) for more understanding - but author later enhanced this similar way and even more probably, so I was considering (still I am) to use it to test pico9918 or any other VDP with it

but back to Fuzix and "ubasic" ... I was curios how generally are unix/posix/linux terminal apps properly written, and almost randomly, I peeked into "diff" Alan and others did to suport Adam Dunkels ubasic for Fuzix ... and it was all interesting what all is done there, so here, I went totally naked in front of Lyra about posix termios, ncurses etc ...

hope there is interesting info (and I cant obviously confirm its all well written by machine, but it seems at least  little-bit usefull ... how it all works)

https://chatgpt.com/share/68d0833a-40ac-8000-8795-b148459a6a46

if you can comment and add/correct things Alan, I will be glad to try to write some app for Fuzix too, or maybe try to learn to fix more things in "ubasic" (is this missing NOT some dangerous cave or quite primitive thing??)

Petr

7alken

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Sep 21, 2025, 8:44:42 PMSep 21
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context switch not so easy (as usual), so here few links from the chat to read, termios/termcap/ncurses related moved first, although, deep history read was interesting:
(I myself will be returning to this list far more, so noting it all here)

termios(3) - Linux manual page

and some historic links, browsed briefly too, as they were opened:


Petr

7alken

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Sep 21, 2025, 8:56:28 PMSep 21
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btw, Alan, pls, exists some simplest example program for Fuzix and termios/ncurses in fact? I can treat that ubasic as quite simple example now though, probably.
Can imagine something like MC-clone or so ... (zeal8bit has some tiny mc-clone, but this is of course something like "windows approach", accessing VDP directly,
or rather using conio library - its question if in small systems isn't good to have such direct way/drivers at least for TUI or is the terminal way something you prefer?
thanks, P.

7alken

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Sep 21, 2025, 9:14:31 PMSep 21
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umm, OT slightly... as GUI were in fact side-effect of VLSI graphics projects, I would be quite ok with returning TUI into mobile devices (and ITU-T keypad, extended little-bit),
against all the wide-spread of "TLDR; guys"... just to "make reading doable again", in the world where (not only) children have lot of problems to understand written text ... ))
(some basic research around extending ITU-T keypad done here too ... on dozens of chinese calculators layouts, repurposable for many usefull things ...))
P.

7alken

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Sep 21, 2025, 10:43:01 PMSep 21
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some more funny reading around superminicomputers ...
Superminicomputer - Wikipedia

particulary funny line was this: ))))
"The permanently resident kernel of Multics, a system derided in its day as being too large and complex, was 135 KB of code."
Multics - Wikipedia

uff, interesting, P.

7alken

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Sep 22, 2025, 12:27:29 AMSep 22
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also very nice ... including entire PC World list of biggest project fails ... ))
Watson Jr. memo about CDC 6600 - CHM Revolution

Mark T

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Sep 22, 2025, 12:46:45 AMSep 22
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Did IBM have a similar memo when the Cray was launched or had they given up and started concentrating on layoffs and stock buy backs by then?

Alan Cox

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Sep 22, 2025, 5:36:56 AMSep 22
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On Mon, 22 Sept 2025 at 01:56, 7alken <antos...@gmail.com> wrote:
btw, Alan, pls, exists some simplest example program for Fuzix and termios/ncurses in fact? I can treat that ubasic as quite simple example now though, probably.

 curses and termios are really different things. curses is an abstraction layer above the tty control layers and termcap (and later terminfo) that was originally written for the game rogue so you don't generally mix them.

For curses a good example would be Applications/cursesgames/invaders.c

For more general cases if you look at Applications/games/adv01.c (or any of the adventures) and scroll down to CONFIG_IO_CURSES you'll see they implement curses and termcap based helpers.

Applications/util/less.c is a good example of using the termcap stuff directly.

Driving the vdp directly on a multi-tasking system gets a bit interesting especially as Fuzix shares it across four consoles. There are hooks in the OS for driving the VDP safely and portably as well as interfaces to set user defined graphic symbols which combined with termcap is probably all you need. It's not something I've done more than play with as a concept (too many other things to sort first)


7alken

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Sep 22, 2025, 8:46:25 PMSep 22
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thanks for all tips Alan; 
Mark - ya, its funny, but sadly fact is that all these (also overheating) beasts were funded by quite ugly things;
P.
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