nowlin@ihu1e.UUCP (Jerry Nowlin) (04/17/84)
I have a couple of questions and a comment on the AZTEC C compiler discussion
that's been going on.
1) I have an Apple //e with a MicroSoft Softcard CP/M card in it. I
thought I would just have to live with the frustration of having my screen
cleared every time CP/M did a warm boot. Then I found out that not all CP/M
systems clear their screen this way. Why does MicroSoft's? How would I go
about changing it so that I just got a message saying "warm boot" like some
systems I've heard of?
2) I use a terminal emulator called M.I.T.E. from Microft Labs. It works
under CP/M and functions well except that I have to set a carriage return
delay to keep from loosing characters from the beginning of lines at 300 or
1200 baud. I loose characters when a line has to wrap around (ie. > 80
characters) or whenever a Ctl-G is received in spite of the CR delay. The
termcap for a soroc terminal works (TERM=soroc) for everything else but you
can imagine what the screen looks like when I try to use vi. Microft says the
Apple 80 column card is too slow. Is this a classic case of finger pointing?
Does anybody have a suggestion to solve this problem? Is there a faster card
somewhere? If so does anyone want to buy a used Apple Extended 80 Column Card?
3) I've been using the AZTEC C compiler for over a year now. I've
transferred programs back and forth from home to work (work=VAX 11/780, 4.2bsd
or PDP 11/70, V7) and only found one problem with the AZTEC library. There is
no "isalpha" in it. Since both "islower" and "isupper" are present it's not
really a problem. I'm very impressed with it's degree of UNIX compatibility.
One thing the others didn't mention about the AZTEC compiler was the fact that
IO redirection (ie. '<' and '>') is built in to any programs compiled with it.
This is a mixed blessing as far as I can tell. A little bitty program that
just says "hello world" with a simple printf generates a relatively huge
.com file. There has to be a way to get around this redirection code but I
haven't figured it out. Does anyone else have a clue?
Sorry if I got a bit verbose. I'm hoping to get some helpful responses
from this posting and I wanted to make sure all you wizards out there had
enough information to help me.
--
Jerry Nowlin
(ihnp4!ihu1e!nowlin)neves@uwvax.ARPA (04/17/84)
This has been touched on before .. but the Apple //e 80 column scroll is too slow for 1200 baud operation. Some terminal programs (like Ascii Express 4.2) get around the problem by writing their own screen code. With CP/M you have to rely on the ROM code I guess. One rumor I've heard is that Apple will be coming out with a new set of ROMs to significantly speed up screen scroll on the //e. Another thing you may want to do is to buy an 80 column card with hardware scroll capabilities and put it in slot 3.