[COMMENTS.DOC]
[Harold V. McIntosh, 28 January 1984]

Submission of the volume containing the listings of REC80 and of REC86
provoked the immediate reaction from the Disk Editor that there seemed
to be a module missing from REC80, and that REC86 would not be accessible
to many people who had the Digital Research ASM86.CMD which is a part of
the CP/M86 package rather than Sorcim's ACT86 which is something of a
necessity for people who have bought Godbout's 8085/8088 board and its
accompanying software.

-

The "missing module" in REC80 is a package of control subroutines for one
of the video boards with graphics capabilities which were more common a
few years ago than they are now. With an external terminal and programs
which push the limits of memory capacity, the memory mapped 16x64 boards
of other days seem to have been taken out of their chassis and put away
on a shelf somewhere.

As it happens REC80 will assemble and run as distributed, although the
message that there are so many missing subroutines can be disconcerting.
If RECLIB is omitted from L80's load list, only one single undefined
symbol will remain, which is easier to ignore; or if the subroutines are
in one's FORLIB and one's L80 searches FORLIB automatically, all will go
well. It might have been prudent to suppress the undefined symbol before
publishing REC, and indeed it was an oversight not to have mentioned it.
RECLIB was included for the benefit of those students of REC who want to
include their own package of subroutines defined in some other language
such as FORTRAN, BASIC, or PL/M. Typical linkages form the substance of
RECLIB.

Even though memory mapped video boards may be uncommon, there are many
applications for graphics, and for control and interface programs which
allow their usage. Using the denser memory chips now available, and some
PROM's to replace a bit of the discrete circuitry, we have redone Vector
Graphic's VGR dense graphics board on the STD bus. Thus the programs from
the "missing module" can still be used, albeit with some attention to the
equipment available for their use. Consequently, programs are included in
this volume for four controller boards:

		VGR	Vector Graphics dense graphics board
		VB1	Solid State Music VB1-B
		VTI	Polymorphic Video Terminal Interface
		VTI88	Polymorphic with reversed graphics bit

The difference between these boards is in the mapping of bits into pixels,
and in the case of VGR, the existence of a grey mode option. The programs
will drive any other board with the same mapping; however that the line
length is a power of two is an inalterable assumption that pervades all the
programs. Two of the programs are written for M80, so that one of them can
be loaded with RECLIB. The others are stand-alone, as long as they have
memory mapped video available. All are capable of executing LIFE, which of
course is more interesting with the greater memory available for VGR.

The commands are indicated as subroutine headings in each card, but they
are generally the same for all four versions. The screen as a whole can be
moved, and a cursor can be imagined as moving across the screen. Thus there
are commands to illuminate or extinguish the cursor, the same for the screen
as a whole, and to move either screen or cursor in the compass directions.
In the gray mode, intensity variations are also available. These are the
primitive operations, advanced operations draw lines or fill polygons with
intensity values. Finally, the LIFE cycles are quite complex subroutines.

Additionally, we have included the program CARD.REC to show how REC may be
used to generate output for video boards. We have used several variants of
CARD - using the library associated with RECLIB, generating direct output
to a port to which a CalComp or Houston Instruments plotter is connected,
or generating an ASCII character string for plotters which use an RS232-C
interface.

We make these programs available for the sake of completeness; someone who
plans to use them will have to have the equipment to run them, and the
knowledge of how to use the equipment and to adapt the programs which are
offered; they do not form a ready-to-run package. Finally, note that RECLIB
and any library functions occupy memory space which is wasted if they are
not going to be used.

-

The selection of an assembler for the Intel 8086 and its affiliates is not
the clear cut choice that it was for the Intel 8080 and derivatives, and
for the good reason that the 8086 not only offers a greater diversity of
instructions, but that the management of segmentation to go beyond the most
trivial expansion of 64K of memory is a formidable task in itself. This in
turn is made no easier by the opacity of our proprietary operating systems.

The first reaction to the request to submit an assembly listing for ASM86
was that it would be an excellent demonstration of the merits of CNVRT.REC
to write a transformation program to do the job. This was accomplished in
an evening and checked out over the weekend. Since each REC listing fills
half a disk, it is tempting to release SORCIM.CNV, which does the job, and
let each interested person make the transformation or not as desired. But,
although much smaller than a complete REC listing, this is hardly a general
purpose program. It incorporates just enough vital information to get about
the job at hand. Even so it seemed to be preferable to make some changes in
the source program to facilitate the transformation. For example, there were
still a few upper case operation codes in a listing that was supposedly lower
case. If these made the transformation program ugly, the difference in the
usage of <jmps> between the assemblers made it impossible. ACT86 will put a
jmps in place of a jmp if such is possible on a backward reference. There
is no way that the programmer can force a long (middle, that is) jump on
the assembler. Since it is possible to force ASM86 (as well as ACT86) to
use a short jump, and the change was needed only in certain places, the
source code just had to be changed.

But now we have complicated things too much - distribute some minor changes,
then explain how to run a program to make major changes, and do it all over
again the next time. Thus it is time to place the problem in a general frame
and look for a general solution, especially since changes will always be with
us.

Three CNVRT programs, together with a version of CNVRT.REC which has some
handier interactive properties, are included in this volume:

		SORCIM.CNV
		FILCOM.CNV
		UPDATE.CNV

As indicated, SORCIM is a very particular program, which can be expanded
or modified as circumstances require, to transform a Sorcim ACT86 assembly
program to one acceptable to Digital Research's ASM86. Once the transformed
program exists, we can ask for the differences that actually occurred. For
this, and to compare ASCII programs for other reasons, a file comparison
program is useful. In general it must account for insertions and deletions
as well as simple alterations within a line. For example, ASM86 will not
accept a repeat prefix on a separate line so that SORCIM must occasionally
combine two lines.

Programs such as FILCOM are not especially easy to write, particularly in 
a language like CNVRT which does not deal with large buffers and indexed
arrays. The reason is that the history of a change is by no means unique,
and some criterion is necessary to decide when to reestablish synchronism
after encountering a region in which the two files are quite distinct. Our
program is quite large, using all of memory without looking ahead more than
four lines to reestablish synchronism with a single line. Longer insertions,
deletions, or changes must be marked off explicitly in the "new" file. As
it is written, FILCOM will accomodate an arbitrarily long series of changes
as long as they do not unbalance the line count by more than four. To run
FILCOM on a machine with less memory, this number would have to be reduced.

Nevertheless, if a difference file is available, a program like UPDATE can
delete and insert the necessary lines for an arbitrarily large file, giving
its new version. Sometimes a file is short enough that the changes can be
incorporated more rapidly with an editor working manually. Automatic update
has the advantage of being less error prone. If human inspection of the
difference file were not contemplated, it could be cut in half, because it
is only necessary to know the line at which a deletion is to be made but not
the actual text to be deleted. It is our present intention to support only
the ACT86 version of REC, so that further updates to the ASM86 version will
need to be generated using SORCIM.

With the joint use of FILCOM and UPDATE, it will be possible to circulate
corrections or revisions to programs without having to distribute a com-
plete new listing, for which the process will furthermore be completely
automatic if the necessary editorial marks are included as the programs
are revised.

In this spirit, a series of .DIF files is included

		PDL80.DIF
		MKV80.DIF
		FXT80.DIF
		REC86.DIF
		PDL86.DIF
		FXT86.DIF
		
which will bring the REC listings up to date. A few errors were detected,
and the changes which allow SORCIM to operate are included. The assignment
of a default of .REC to REC files is the result of popular demand. Some
of these files are quite small, and waste a lot of their record group.
Even so, they should not be combined; UPDATE will use them individually.
Modifying UPDATE to update a chain of files on the basis of a composite
difference file would not be a difficult exercise.

If REC86 is updated, SORCIM can be applied to the resultant file to get the
xxx86.A86 version of REC, which is nevertheless included on this disk for
convenience (and checking). Those concerned with individualizing REC86 with
their own memory distribution should start by taking note that ASM86 has
generated far too many segment override prefixes - about 1/2K too many - 
which can be reduced by declaring the segments explicitly and not relying
on CP/M86's 8080 mode too completely.

SORCIM has default extensions with which to work, while FILCOM and UPDATE
make use of the generic extensions .ONE and .TWO. These can be changed by
editing the source listings for an application in which the extansions are
fixed and known, otherwise the files must be renamed to comply with these
choices.

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