Put CosmOS on the screen without changing a line of it

The console is now a display controller as well as a port: it owns a font, keeps a cursor,
handles newline, carriage return, backspace and wrapping, and scrolls. That is an ordinary
kind of chip - it is what a video terminal's character generator did - and it is the reason
this rung needed no changes to CosmOS at all. CosmOS already writes bytes to port 0x00.

It writes to BOTH the screen and standard output, which is deliberate. A machine with a
screen and a serial line is an ordinary machine, the emulator's standard output is that
serial line, and one console drives both. It is also what keeps all 165 recorded results
passing under Voyager, and what makes --screen work on the plain SplitBit: there is one
console and it drives everything it has.

Scrolling moves the video device's origin and no memory. The row arriving at the bottom is
cleared because the map is a ring and it holds what was there 128 rows ago; the rows going
off the top are not, and that is a hundred rows of scrollback nothing had to keep. The test
reads the register back rather than looking at the screen, because a console blitting rows
instead would look identical and cost twelve percent of a frame for every line printed.

The font is vendored from Hatchet-GPU with a note saying where it came from, since that
repository is not part of this one. 135 glyphs in ASCII order, which is the thing that makes
it worth keeping - PETSCII's whole inconvenience was that its order was not ASCII's, so a
machine using it needed a translation table in front of every string. Here the machine
subtracts 32. It is stored one bit a pixel and expanded into tile memory at reset: 1,088
bytes against 16 kilobytes.

Voyager gets a keyboard. A window has no standard input, and a machine blocking on it inside
a frame would stop drawing and stop answering, so a front end with a window installs a hook
that the console calls while it has nothing: it keeps the window alive and hands back a key.
The hook has to tell "nobody has typed yet", which happens sixty times a second, apart from
"the window has gone", which is the end of input - one value for both would have made the
first keystroke look like a closed machine. In line mode the console echoes what it is
given, because there is no terminal behind a window to do it and that was always the
terminal's job.

Tests/video.sh grew from 14 checks to 26, half of them about the console rather than the
device: those programs ask the video device for nothing and write bytes to port 0x00 like
every SplitBit program always has. Verified by breaking two things - removing the scroll
failed exactly the two checks about scrolling, and removing the cursor advance failed
exactly the three that depend on it.

Two video checks had quietly depended on palette entry 0 being black, which stopped being
true the moment a machine woke up able to show text. They now set what they are about to
look at, and a new check pins the waking state itself.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-08-28 22:26:27 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 83623a3df3
commit 773b0f8add
13 changed files with 600 additions and 36 deletions
+3 -1
View File
@@ -50,7 +50,9 @@ every recorded result byte for byte.
**The screen belongs to the machine, not to the window.** The video device is a tile engine
on ports 0x30 to 0x3F that brings its own bank of video memory, and it renders into a buffer
that is a pure function of that memory - so the same program draws the same picture whether
or not anybody is watching. Voyager puts that buffer on the glass and decides nothing about
or not anybody is watching. The console draws on it: it is a display controller as well as a
port, with a font, a cursor and scrollback, which is why CosmOS runs in a window without a
line of it being changed. Voyager puts that buffer on the glass and decides nothing about
it. Either binary will save a picture of the screen with `--screen`, which is how a test
suite on a host with no display checks what was drawn. See **The Screen** in the Programming
Manual.