On 10/13/26 10:12, Gary Weber wrote:
This is fascinating Brian. At this point you'd be able to embed your
refactored Teeny into the 773 bytes that are free (in one block, even!)
inside the Olivetti M-10 no-modem (EU) ROM. Heck, even the one with
error messages would fit at this point, including the glue code to set
up the "Teeny+" launcher in the main menu.
Georg Käter just did exactly that a few days after I made the M-10 EU port.
Look back to Oct 9 for his post.
Super cool. It does make me jealous.
I don't really want to rip out the cassette or bcr code, regardless how
often they get used. They are part of the machine as it was. When I play
with old machines, I want the machine to be the best possible old
machine it could have been, not the worst possible new machine you could
imagine. I would rather think up some actual use for the bcr & cassette
than break them.
But man built-in tpdd would sure be nice.
Then again, as handy as tpdd is for this specific platform, it's kind of
only good for that. What I'd really like would be xmodem in telcom. Even
though it's less convenient, it's more universal. It might be the
*lowest* common denominator, but it's also the *most* common
denominator, if you see what I mean.
With xmodem you could use a 100 to upload a new firmware onto a
serial-only PDU.
But I have no idea how reasonable that is. idk how big an implimentation
of xmodem would be, and no idea how complicated it would be to add ui
for it into telcom. And in the end of course you would never actually
use it because we have better options now. But I just mean that,
academically, I think the machine just should have that in order to be a
complete and useful machine. Like it always should have had it as part
of some minimum baseline feature set that it shouldn't be allowed to go
below.
--
bkw
On Tue, Oct 13, 2026 at 6:45 AM Brian K. White <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/10/26 19:53, Brian K. White wrote:
> On 10/10/26 01:14, Brian K. White wrote:
>> On 10/9/26 23:02, Brian K. White wrote:
>>
>> "It's all the way down to 653 bytes"
>>
>> 650!
>>
>
> down to 640, 634 w/o co header
>
ok that was a bit too far and broke something,
so it was back up to 644 / 638 for a while
But now down to 632 / 626
So so far
legacy = 753 bytes
new = 632 bytes
121 bytes less than legacy teeny and still exactly the same
functionality & behavior other than the error messages.
Even with the error codes enabled it's still only 712 bytes,
and with both error codes and dsr check enabled it's 726 bytes,
full co file with header.
For something that already started out so small, and was then worked
over by Ron Weisen, I'm surprised how much I'm finding that can be
rearranged and refactored out.
Besides the error message code there was plain dead or noop code
too, ie
code that ran but didn't matter.
One example is the LOAD routine, while loading a file from disk to ram,
it was maintaining a copy of the chunk_progress loop counter
register in
ram, (ab)using the packet_type field in the packet buffer to hold this
totally unrelated value, and updating it on every byte, for no reason.
It was also initializing some stuff twice.
It's really only possible (for me anyway) after massively fluffing out
the asm with lots of notes and register state tracing to track the
state
of most of the registers before & after every call/ret/etc. But only by
doing that I was able to clear up and correct most of my earlier tatal
bafflement comments.
https://github.com/bkw777/dl2/tree/master/clients/teeny/src
<https://github.com/bkw777/dl2/tree/master/clients/teeny/src>
--
bkw
--
bkw
