agon-utilities

MOS utilities for Agon: copy, view, editor...

These are small utilities that everybody has taken for granted on UNIX, but even on MS-DOS for a long time. But Agon did not have them until now. The project will include an editor some day. All are MOS commands, all are written in Assembly language and all run in 24-bit ADL mode. Parts of the code are based on the repository https://github.com/breakintoprogram/agon-projects

The projects are built with ez80asm (https://github.com/envenomator/agon-ez80asm) and AgDev (https://github.com/pcawte/AgDev). Under Linux, make sure to have a driectory containing ez80asm and the binary directory of AgDev in your path and you can just run make to build the utilities.

All pre-assembled and precompiled binaries are also provided. The loadfont and recode programs, as well as everything belonging to mc, must be in the bin directory and the other binaries in the mos directory. Assumed is Agon Console8 MOS-2.23 and VDP-2.8.0.

Note: the copy utility has been removed because it is now an internal command in MOS.

comp

Once you copied a file, you want to check whether the copied file is an exact copy. The comp utility compares two files. It tells whether they are the same, at which offset the first difference occurs or whether one file is larger than the other but they are the same up to the length of the smaller file.

Example command line: comp file1.bin file2.bin

more

The well-known utility from early Unix and also MS-DOS. MOS does not support pipelines, so you cannot pipe the output of the CAT command to it. It can just show a single file and pauses after a screenful has been shown. It reads the screen width and height, so it works well in all three screen modes.

Example command line: more file.txt

memfill

Can be useful to clean the contents of RAM, so you see immediately which memory areas have been touched by your program. memdump is already there in a different respository.

Example command line: memfill &80000 &10000 &ff

font

The command can load the character definitions from a file. The file is a 2048-byte binary file that contains the bitmaps for all characters from 0 to 255, although only chars 32..126 and 128..255 can be used.

Example command: font /fonts/bbcasc-8.bin

Example command that shows the font just loaded:

font /fonts/latin1-8.bin show

Three fonts are included:

• bbcasc-8.bin is the binary version of the font loaded on bootup by the vdp-1.02. It was derived from the file agon_font.h in the VDP project. It contains only ASCII characters with the pounds sign at position 0x60.
• bbclat-8.bin is the binary version of the font loaded on bootup by the vdp-1.04 or 2.x. It was derived from the file agon_font.h in the VDP project. It contains a complete CP-1252 character set.
• latin1-8.bin is an ISO 8859-1 font (Latin1) that I derived from the following github project. The font provided had the bytes bit-reversed compared to what we need, so I changed it to the right format. It does not look pretty, but it's a start. https://github.com/dhepper/font8x8

You can check out https://github.com/epto/epto-fonts The *.font files included in the project contain meta-information, but they start with the bitmap data in a form that the font utility can use. The 8x8 fonts from this set, you can just load with the font utility. It ignores the meta data. Some of them are only ASCII, some of them have code page 437 fonts. This program is superseded by the loadfont and fontctl programs.

loadfont

This program uses the new font commands of VDP-2.8.0. It can load raw binary fonts (like the font program does) and PSF fonts as used by the Linux console.

Example:

loadfont 10 Lat15-Fixed16.psf

The first parameter is a buffer ID, a number in the range 0..65534. Instead we can use the word sys to select the system font. The system font can only be loaded with 8x8 characters, while many font sizes are supported with PSF files. An optional third parameter on the command line specifies a code page. Currently supported code pages include windows code pages CP1250 (Middle and Eastern Europe), CP1251 (Cyrillic), CP1252 (Western Europe), CP1253 (Greek), CP1254 (Turkish), CP1257 (Baltic), all Latin, Greek and Cyrillic character stes from the ISO-8859 series, DOS CP437, Cyillic KOI-8R and KOI8-U and macroman (Old Macintosh).

If a PSF font has a Unicode table, it will be used to place the glyphs of the font at the appropriate code points in the code page. Instead of a code page we can specify none for no translation and upper to load the upper 256 characters of a 512-character PSF font. Note that most PSF fonts with Latin-1 or Windows-1252 support have many of the non-ASCII characters at different positions, therefore the Unicode table will be needed.

Example: loadfont 11 Lat15-terminus20x10.psf cp437

Usable psf fonts can be found here https://www.zap.org.au/projects/console-fonts-zap/ and in the /usr/share/consolefonts directory of a Linux system (gunzip compressed psf files first). Also the terminus-fonts package can be used.

fontctl

This program selects a font, previously loaded by the loadfont command.

Example:

fontctl 11

The parameter is a buffer ID, the same as used with loadfont. The word sys can be used instead to select the system font.

A second parameter show can be used to show all 256 characters of the font. Instead, clear can be used to remove the font and its buffer.

Example:

fontctl 11 show

selects font 11 and shows it.

fontctl 11 clear

clears font 11.

recode

This program converts text files between Unicode and various code pages. Code pages include the same code pages as available for loadfont, plus utf8 and utf16. Apart from the text encoding we can change the end-of-line encoding to CR only (old MAC), LF only (Linux) or CR-LF (DOS, Windows). Files are updated in-place and the old file is saved with a .bak suffix.

Example commands:

recode crlf myfile.txt

This changes the end-of-line characters to CR-LF without changing the character encodings.

recode lf cp1252 utf8 foo.txt

This converts from Windows 1252 to UTF8 and changes the end-of-line characters to LF only.

recode cp1252 latin9 bar.txt

This converts a text file from CP1252 to Latin9 (ISO8859-15) without changing the end-of-line characters.

nano

This is an editor with nano-style key bindings.

Example command: nano myfile.txt

The command can take a second parameter to specify the buffer, so larger files can be loaded. Example command when specifying a buffer. This works the same way as for the copy command.

Example command using a buffer: nano myfile.txt &90000

It can take a third parameter to specify the line number on which the cursor must start. Example: nano myfile.txt &90000 231

The edditor runs in MODE 0 (it selects this mode when started) and tries to return to the mode from which it was called. Key bindings are nano-style, but not all are implemented (far from).

Implemented key bindings: Control-A, Control-E to go to the start or end of a line, Control-Y and Control-V for page-up and page-down, COntrol-L to redraw the screen with the current line in the centre, Control-G to see a help screen, Control-X to exit, Control-O to save the file, Control-D for forward delete. Control-K to cut current line (repeat to cut block of lines), Control-U to paste And of course the cursor keys, TAB, Backspace and Enter.

Different from nano (as nano uses impossible control and alt combinations for these functions): Control-C to copy current line, Control-H to go to a specific line (enter a number).

Planned: Control-R for reading and inserting a file, Control-W and Control-Q for search forward and backward. Also Control-T to insert special characters.

Possibly planned: Control-J for justifying paragraph, Control-\ for search+replace, Control-W for wordwrap functionality (non-nano).

mc

This is the 12AM Commander, a Midnight-commander look-alike. It can only work on MOS 2.2.3 and up. To install it, you must have mc.bin, 12amc.ovl, 12amc.hlp and 12amc.cfg all in the /bin directory. The file 12amc.cfg is a configuration file that can be edited. You can specify viewer and editor commands and specify programs to be run for certain file extensions.

To start the program, just type mc. To exit, simply press F10 or ESC. You will see two directories side by side and you can switch between them with the TAB key. For more information type F1.

Note: the main code of mc resides in 12amc.ovl and this must be loaded and run through mc.bin (not directly via load & run commands for example). The program mc.bin stores a launcher in internal RAM, which can load and execute external programs at address &40000 and later reload and rerun the 12amc.ovl program. This launcher is an important part of the functionality.