Re: [cc65] OT: Where to get some help?

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 07:40:52PM -0500, Payton Byrd wrote:
> Approach 1: Copy the entire screen to another page in memory and move the
> start memory for the current screen to the copy, then draw the menu.  When
> I'm done with the menu, set the screen pointer back to the original screen
> and keep going.  What concerns me is the amount of time it would take to
> copy the screen using C, so I'm thinking this might be a job for some inline
> assembler, unless there's already a function out there to do this.

memcpy is a standard C function.

> Approach 2: Copy the contents of the screen where the menu is to be
> displayed into an array where the size of the array is height * width, then
> write the contents of the array back to the screen one line at a time.  I
> see two problems with this approach: first, the array might get quite big
> and I don't know the maximum size of an array in CC65; second, how do I
> obtain the contents of the screen?

It is usuallay a memory area at a fixed address.

> Should I use the screen codes from
> memory and write the screen codes back to memory?  If I'm going to be
> writing screens directly to memory then what's the point of using CONIO?

These are problems no one can solve for you. It depends on the type and
requirements of your application. There are cases where it does make sense to
work around conio and others where this is not true.

> Approach 3: Simply invalidate the screen and force a full refresh.  This may
> be the simplest, but it could be expensive as the screen may be very
> complex.  Plus, if there's some text that was generated organically and
> can't be repeated then such text would be lost.  I'm not fond of this
> approach, but if all else fails....

This is often the most memory saving solution.

> Maybe I'm going about this all wrong!  Does anyone know of a publicly
> available windowing library for text mode on CBM machines?  A port of curses
> for CC65 would rule the world, if there's enough resources on our machines
> to handle such a library.

There are a two window libraries I do currently remember: Fields by Joseph
Rose and simplemenu by Magervalp. The first one is available from the contrib
directory, the second one was available from paradroid.net, but the link on
the page doesn't work, so you may have to contact Magervalp directly.

Regards


        Uz


-- 
Ullrich von Bassewitz                                  uz@musoftware.de
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