On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 7:12 PM Brian K. White <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Then there is the bootstrap, you'd need to come up with some other way
> to trigger the bootstrap, or just not have that. There's no other io
> lines available to use as dsr/dtr.
>
>
My policy on bootstrap for LaddieAlpha was... buy a REX. Since there's
always a way. Just use a TELCOM  or TEXT/F2 and a PC terminal program to
inject a .DO formatted TEENY.

Actually, DLPilot which came before my variant of DLPlus and LaddieAlpha
had a generic text file injector. But that was special because it ran on a
Palm Pilot, so I was able to select the text file, and the user could
trigger transfer from the UI when they were ready.

Another way you could go is the NADSBox way... a general purpose CLI. As
in, you open TELCOM at 19200, you hit ENTER a couple of times at human
speeds and the TPDD server state machine puts you into "interactive mode"
and you get a prompt. It stays in that mode until a ZZ command comes. So
you could do the NADSBox style copy command. Maybe with a time-delay.

I have a start on something like that for LaddieAlpha but it's more of 2D
shell. As in, it presents you a full screen curses type UI from within
Telcom, showing the files on the host PC current directory. Then you move
the widebar cursor over to a file and you can transmit it. Throwing the
file is easy. The tricky bit is catching it.

I am thinking the way to do that is after the Transmit operation is
invoked, you give the user instructions to exit Telcom, enter TEXT and Hit
F2, COM:98N1E, etc.

The host side watches for DSR going deasserted (because TELCOM is exited),
and then asserted again once the user follows the TEXT/F2 steps. So DSR
going asserted again is the trigger for sending the Ctrl-Z terminated text
file.

That's for injecting a file. Alternatively to using TEXT/F2, the user could
enter BASIC and RUN"COM:98N1E<ENTER> to do an active bootstrap.

-- John.

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