bit-slice processors, but I am still reading about them. It remains to be seen
whether they too are ruled out by their cost, of course. All this extra hardware is
still at the “thinking about it” stage, and should really wait until some minor
speed problems on some of my other boards have been fixed. Recommended reading, if
you are at all interested in either sixteen bit hardware or bit-slices, is “Modern
Microprocessor System Design” by Daniel R. McGlynn, published by Wiley-Interscience
and not cheap! Of course, in the event of boards with extra processors appearing,
someone will need to write the software to coordinate the tasks they are each
running…
Something useful (at last!) for CP/M hackers.
The subroutine below is one that I have found very useful in programs that
send a lot of text to the screen. The usual output routine sends all text up to the
delimiter, which is a dollar sign, direct to the screen, without any regard to what
is happening to the words at the end of each line. It is, of course, possible to
write your program in such a way that all the output fits the screen nicely. It also
happens to be boring work to do this, and the program will be no good at all on a
system with a different screen width. The routine that follows will output the
contents of a text buffer of any length, which is terminated with a 00 byte, without
breaking any words. The text must not contain new line characters, or the output
will be somewhat bizarre, to say the least.
