80-Bus News

invoke Wordstar wait until Wordstar has loaded and has started on its first screen display. (It seems to ‘swallow’ the odd character if you start too soon.) You can than type (without any pauses) a command like DARTICLE.DOC​<RETURN>​^QFKeyboards​<RETURN>​2​<RETURN>. This magic invocation (for those unfamiliar with Wordstar) would open a document file ARTICLE.DOC, start to load it into the memory buffer, search through the file and put the cursor at the second occurrence of the word “Keyboards”. Wordstar would do this without all the normal in-built delays, and also without bothering to display the first page of the document.

One very useful feature came in with release 2.0 of IVC-MON. At this time Gemini introduced a new keyboard, GM827, which included a row of extra function keys along the top, together with a numeric pad on the right-hand side. IVC-MON 2.0 catered for this keyboard, and while providing default settings for these extra keys, it allowed users to define alternative character strings for them (including the numeric pad). Note the use of the word “strings”. If required, pressing one of these keys can result in an entire sentence (or paragraph!) being returned by the IVC . I find them useful in a variety of contexts: During program development they can be used as an instantaneous SUBMIT feature (e.g. define a key as <M80 =PROG^M L80 PROG,​PROGLIB,​PROG​/N/E^M> – which runs the assembler followed by the linking loader). For standard programs they can be set up to suit the program’s command codes. (e.g. Keys for INSERT, DELETE etc in editors). Oft used words or phrases can be put a single key (e.g. Please send the money).

The keyboard port on the IVC is an 8-bit port that is sub-divided into 7 data bits and a strobe pulse. This meant that some way had to be found for the IVC to distinguish the special function keys from the 128 standard ASCII characters that are generated by the other keys on the keyboard. This was done by having the GM827 keyboard return double-byte codes for the special keys, and, as the ESCAPE code (0Bh) was chosen as the lead-in code, the ESCAPE key is in fact one of the special keys. (The IVC-MON software however does not allow it to be reprogrammed to an alternative code or character string.)

Every time one of these special double-byte codes is received, the IVC converts it to a single byte code in the range 80H-BDH and stores the byte in the keyboard buffer. (Note that the normal keys can only produce codes in the range 00-7FH.) When the IVC passes bytes from the keyboard buffer to the host system it checks the msb of each byte. If the msb is found to be set it then looks for that keycode in an internal table it has its workspace RAM. The code in the table marks the start of the string that is to be sent in place of the function key. IVC-MON then sets a flag to say “get characters from this string rather than the keyboard buffer”, which remains set until the string is exhausted. One point to notice from this is that a function key only uses up one byte of the ‘type ahead’ buffer. So, if you’re somebody who often goes charging ahead of PIP or your assembler, and occasionally “bust” the buffer, the answer is to put some of your typing under function keys (if this is possible). The programmable function keys I find a powerful feature, and this the IVC provides at zero overhead to the Host system thanks to it having its own processor on-board.

IVC-MON Release history.