Two things, one certain and one likely.
THE CERTAIN ONE IS NOT THE WINDOW'S FAULT. Snake's pause loop said "at the emulated rate
this is about an eighth of a second", and it was, when a cycle was one instruction. A cycle
became one memory access, every loop in the machine got dearer, and this one silently
doubled: the game has been running at half the speed it documents ever since, in a terminal
as much as in a window. Measured rather than guessed - the inner loop is a DECA and a BNA,
one byte and three, so four cycles a turn, and a whole run went from 3,848,610 cycles to
1,920,504 when the outer count came down from 256 to 122. Almost exactly half, which is what
the arithmetic said it would be.
That is the cost model change reaching a program nobody thought to re-measure. Worth looking
for others: any loop tuned by eye before that change is running at half its intended speed.
THE LIKELY ONE is the frame limiter. Without the vsync hint, Raylib sleeps towards sixty
frames a second on its own clock, which beats against a display refreshing on its own -
frames shown twice or skipped, and the machine handed an uneven number of cycles each time,
since it takes its budget from the wall clock. The hint puts presentation in step with the
screen. SetTargetFPS stays for a driver that ignores it.
Snake is one byte bigger, because RSTB became INIB.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
The console had grown an ANSI parser, and that was the wrong shape. ANSI exists because a
screen used to be on the other end of a serial line and a byte stream was the only channel
there was. This screen is memory the program can already address, so reaching it by sending
characters for a state machine to take apart is a middleman for something the machine does
better - and it meant accepting an open protocol somebody else defines, in hardware, with no
natural end to it. Everything else on this machine is registers.
So the console gets three: cursor row at 0x03, cursor column at 0x04, and a command port at
0x05 where 1 clears the screen. Both cursor registers are READ as well as written, which is
the thing an escape cannot do without sending a query and parsing a reply - a routine that
wants to put the cursor back where it found it can now ask.
Clearing is one command against a thousand cells walked one at a time. Snake and Life are
smaller for it: 2,168 bytes to 2,163 and 1,410 to 1,396.
A HOST TERMINAL STILL SPEAKS ANSI, and bridging to the host is the emulator's job, the same
job it does reading standard input. So the escapes are now GENERATED, outbound, for the set
this device chooses, rather than parsed inbound as though the machine were a terminal. The
set cannot grow behind our backs because we are the ones saying it. The cursor is announced
lazily, at the next character rather than at the register write, so setting a row and a
column costs one sequence rather than two.
The console's block widens from three ports to six, which registryTest noticed: it had been
asking about port 0x05 precisely BECAUSE nothing was there, and the console had just moved
in. Re-blessing it would have left it checking nothing, so it asks about 0x80 instead -
clear of the console, the disk, the screen, the controller, and the sound device coming to
0x40.
Six checks in Tests/video.sh swapped from the sequences to the registers, including that the
cursor reads back and that one sent past the edge is clamped rather than refusing. Those
checks also stopped counting bytes from the ends of a file, which had quietly started
measuring an escape the moment the console began announcing the cursor.
SplitLint caught the one thing worth catching in the port: the clear command leaves A at 1
and key mode is also 1, so the second load looks redundant. Acting on it would tie a console
command to a console mode by coincidence, and break silently if either ever moved, so it is
suppressed with that reason rather than removed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
SWI osExit takes a status in A, and the shell keeps it. Fifty eight exits
across twenty three programs now say deliberately whether they worked: 25
did what they were asked, 24 did not, 9 were asked wrongly. Compare is the
exception and says so - one there means the files differ, which is a result
rather than a failure, the way diff has always had it.
IN A RATHER THAN Q, which is not a departure from the rule that a service
answers in Q. This one takes an ARGUMENT, the way osPrintNumber takes A and
B, and it never returns to answer anything. A is free precisely because a
return would have put it back - and Q is the ALU's output, so a small
number costs four instructions there against one in A.
The shell does not print it. A program that failed has already said so in
words and a number beside that is noise, so osLastStatus hands it back and
Status is the program that shows it. That indirection is the point: the
number exists for the thing that cannot read words.
MARKING THE EXITS FOUND A DEFECT ON THE FIRST RUN. Type and More printed
why they had failed and then fell through into the success exit, reporting
that all was well. Nobody had noticed, because while the only reader was a
person, the person could see both the complaint and the claim.
Two smaller things. Snake sets the console to line mode and then exits with
zero, and the linter flagged the second RSTA as redundant - an exit status
and a console mode, equal by accident, which is the class that must never
be collapsed. And the README still taught answering by writing into the
frame, three months of habit that SRET replaced yesterday; that section is
gone and the one describing SRET stands in its place.
Twenty four more sites, and the interesting part is which ones were left
alone. A rule emerged while reading them and it held all the way through:
apply where the repetition is INSIDE one operation, skip where the author's
own structure says it is a new thought, and never where two equal values
mean different things.
Taken:
- Five registers reassigned to a value they already held, where both are
the same quantity: two masks in one expression in Snake, two spaces
printed by the monitor, both halves of block zero in waitTest, and a RSTA
in Pour that the very next instruction overwrote.
- Eighteen SETDs that reload a pointer inside one operation - a store back
into the variable just read, or an INCD stepping to the second byte of a
two byte value. Those read correctly without the reload.
- sbfsNext, which branched to the label on the line below it.
Left, with reasons that are the useful part of this:
- Eight registers where the same number means two different things. CosmOS
and the loader set A to 1 for a blit command and then to 1 again for a
bank number; Asm compares a type against 3 and then a status against 3.
Removing those couples one quantity to another that is equal by accident
and would part company silently.
- Ten RSTAs that open the RSTA/RSTB/CCF/ADD "return zero" block. The
redundancy is what makes that idiom self contained; taking it out makes
the return value depend on the line above.
- Eleven SETDs that begin an arm of a comparison chain. Each arm loads,
compares and branches, and they get reordered - the repetition is the
reason a new arm can be dropped in anywhere.
- Twenty five SETDs separated from their pointer by a blank line or a
comment, which is the author saying a new thought starts here.
- Two CCFs before arithmetic, which this codebase writes unconditionally.
- Three redundant branches in test programs whose recorded output includes
addresses, where three fewer bytes moves what the test demonstrates.
Nine recorded outputs moved and every one is a size in a listing or, for
Life, five more generations inside the same cycle budget. Behaviour is
unchanged everywhere: cosmosSnake and cosmosEdit pass byte for byte while
Snake loses eight bytes and Edit twelve.
CosmOS is 10,902 bytes of program against 10,937, and the native assembler
12,173 against 12,183. The CosmOS README's size for Edit moved twice in one
sitting, and this morning's check caught it both times - which it could not
have done before that claim was reworded to name what it was about.
The memory map gave CosmOS 0x0000 through 0x1FFF of Program Memory and
applications 0x2000 and above. CosmOS is 8141 bytes at the previous commit,
which is fifty one bytes short of the line, and the next thing added to it
went over.
GOING OVER DOES NOT FAIL WHERE IT HAPPENS. Nothing enforces the division: an
application says where it goes with #Base and the loader puts it there, so a
CosmOS that has grown past 0x1FFF simply has the next program loaded written
over the end of it. What breaks is whichever part of the shell that program
happened to cover, at whatever later moment somebody uses it. It turned up here
as the monitor's assemble command answering "I do not know" to valid
instructions, several commands into a session, on a machine that had booted
perfectly well.
Both halves are doubled: applications now start at 0x4000 in Program Memory and
0x2000 in Data Memory. That is 16K of code and 8K of data for the system,
against the 8775 and 2948 it uses today. Both were on the same trajectory, and
moving them together means the twenty files that say #Base are edited once
rather than twice.
The standalone loader's loadable.asm keeps its old base: it belongs to the
loader CosmOS grew out of, not to CosmOS, and its addresses answer to a
different program. The unbased-segment diagnostic keeps its old base too - it
exists to produce an error message that names the address, and the message is
what is recorded.
Tests/docs.sh now reads the two limits out of the table in the README and
measures both segments against them. It reads them rather than being told them
because the table is the specification, and this is the second time in this
project that the thing nobody checked is the thing that rotted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5