80-Bus News

In order to keep my extra code to a minimum, I used a number of inbuilt ‘SYS’ routines to carry out certain tasks. These are:

SETCUR        ;Set cursor on IVC from values in HL, adding any
              ;offsets needed. H holds ROW: L holds COLUMN
CRIX          ; Outputs Char. in ‘A’ to IVC card.
SAVCUR        ; Saves current cursor location in SYS workspace.
              ;( In a Store ‘Labelled’ – ‘CURSOR’ )

The first action needed in the lock top line routine, is to store the current position of the IVC cursor, which will be well down the screen on ‘COLD BOOT’, having just printed the sign-on messages. SETCUR is then called to set the cursor to the start of line two, and ESC “M” is sent to the IVC to lock the top line. (see IVC software manual ). The Cursor is then replaced at its’ original location down the screen. Note that CLOCK and LOCK must both be ‘TRUE’ for this code to be assembled.

At this point, I ought to mention the meaning of the ‘R’ that appears in the source code, for those not accustomed to SYS BIOS listings. SYS is designed to load from disk, where it is stored as a .COM file. It loads to low memory, and then a ‘Relocation’ section loads SYS over the origional CBIOS, and adjusts all references to memory locations that are position (address) sensitive. The only way that SYS knows which bytes to adjust is by being told by the person writing the code. The addition of the ‘R’ after ALL memory references that need to be adjusted will ensure that SYS will include them in a table of such addresses, and will carry out the necessary relocation.

The final section of SYS that has code added is the Low level I/O routines. (Module 5 of SYS 16.) The actual Clock routines are added into the IVC Keyboard routines in my SYS if CLOCK is set ‘TRUE’.

The first part of the code sets HL to point to UDSTOR which will be loaded with the ASCII value of Seconds, Tens of Secs. or Minutes (depending on OFFSET). This value is then read in from the clock, checked for validity, converted to ASCII, and then placed into UDSTOR. The corresponding data stored in REGS at the last clock update is then compared with UDSTOR. If the values are the same, then the clock has not changed, and no clock processing occurs, but the program goes on to scan the keyboard. If the values are different, the clock has changed and so it must be updated. By making the comparison on Data that alters either by the Second, ten Seconds, or Minute the clock can be made to update accordingly as the operator desires.

The keyboard is being scanned many times a second, and if the clock is allowed to update every time, the net effect is to greatly reduce the speed of many operations. Since the check just described only takes some twenty or thirty microseconds, it has no noticeable effect on normal operations, and prevents the clock from intruding into them. I have not calculated the time that the clock routine takes, but I would guess that it takes about one millisecond, and so there is no noticeable effect on operations when it updates.

If the clock has changed, a call is made to READIT, which is the actual clock read and display subroutine. This subroutine may be called from external programs via the extra jump that was added to the ‘jump table’. This module starts by reading the number of clock registers defined in NMRREG into the