Commit Graph
70 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Anachronaut e1273337c4 Two mechanical fixes SplitLint found: MVQA, and RSTA for zero
Twenty four places moved Q into A or B by pushing it and popping it back.
That is four bus cycles and two bytes to do what MVQA does in one of each,
and several of them are inside loops - Life, the calculator, int8. Nineteen
more loaded zero with INIA 0d0 where RSTA says the same thing in one byte.

Both are equivalent at the CPU rather than by assertion: RSTA and INIA both
leave Status alone, and PSHQ followed by POPA nets to A = Q with the Stack
Pointer where it started. The one difference is that the pair leaves a copy
of Q in memory just below the Stack Pointer and MVQA does not, which
nothing here reads.

Five recorded outputs moved and every one of them says the change worked:

- 16x16Life fits five more generations into the same cycle budget, the
  first 457 lines identical, because the loop got cheaper.
- Life.sbx is 1409 bytes rather than 1411, in three tests that list it.
- Edit.sbx is 1995 rather than 1996.

That last one broke a check I added this morning, and the hole is worth
recording: the CosmOS README's claim about Edit's size did not have the
word "Edit" on the same line as the number, because the subject was in the
sentence before, so the check that measures quoted sizes skipped it
silently. The sentence now names what it is talking about, which makes it
both checkable and clearer, and the check fails on a wrong number there.

Comments on either half of a replaced pair are carried onto the
instruction that replaces them, so nothing anybody wrote was lost.
2026-08-26 17:53:10 -04:00
Anachronaut c3188ed657 Seventy becomes seventy one: a machine that can wait
HALT is terminal - stepCPU returns at once when the Halt Flag is up, so a
halted machine does not execute, service devices, or take an interrupt -
and that has to stay true, because every test ends with a halt and "halted"
is how a program says it has finished. The consequence was that SplitBit
had no way to wait at all. Every wait was a spin, and a spin is bus
traffic: 11.5% of Type over a 14K file on a disk of ten thousand cycles,
after read-ahead had already hidden three quarters of the latency.

WAIT is 0xFE, one byte, no operands, sitting under HALT where the
instruction that almost stops the machine belongs. Three decisions in it:

- A line already standing means there is nothing to wait for, so WAIT does
  nothing. That is what makes test-then-wait race-free.
- Any line ends the wait, masked or not, so a program can sleep on a device
  it has no handler for and read its status afterwards. Masking says who
  answers a request, not whether it happened.
- A line that wakes the CPU without being dispatched is taken down by the
  WAIT. Left standing it would be found by the next WAIT, which would
  return at once - the program would spin exactly as before while looking
  as though it slept.

Waiting is NOT a Status bit, and that is the trap avoided rather than a
gap: Status rides into the interrupt frame and comes back out, so a machine
interrupted mid-wait would return from its handler still waiting, and wait
again for what it had already been given. An internal field instead.

Idle cycles are counted apart from bus cycles and the halt line says so
when there are any, which is what makes the difference observable at all -
with the line-clearing removed the total moves by ONE cycle, 20,100 against
20,099, and only the idle half changes, halving to 9,976. A test on
totals could never have seen it. Tests/terminal.sh asks that question,
being the file for things a recorded output cannot see, and fails with the
clear removed while "both reads finished" still passes.

Three collisions, all found by building it:

- 0xFE was the assembler's "not an instruction" sentinel. getOpcode now
  answers a negative NOT_AN_OPCODE, which is outside the range of every
  possible answer instead of inside the unused part of it.
- 0xFE was also what faultTest and faultResumeTest executed to provoke a
  fault. They now use 0xFD and say why, because they did not fail when it
  became an instruction - they HUNG, having started sleeping instead.
- Keys.asm has had a label called "wait" for a year, and mnemonics are
  matched uppercased. What that reported was "Branch without label" at the
  BRQ thirty lines away. The assembler now refuses a label that is already
  an instruction, at the label, by name; every instruction added takes a
  word out of the space of label names, so this will happen again.
2026-08-26 11:11:25 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 54f5cfe8a4 Add Copy and Compare, which stream in both directions at once
Copy joins the read and write streaming services: source and destination are
both larger than Data Memory while the program owns one block. Compare reads
two files through separate blocks and ignores the bytes past a short final
block, which belong to neither file. Between them they exercise empty,
exact-block, part-block and 84,000 byte files, and the host extracts the copy
afterwards so that two native programs agreeing with each other is not the only
oracle.

Written by ChatGPT, as their headers record, along with the agree.sh section
and the manifest entry that drive them.

THIS SHOULD HAVE COME FIRST. The commit before it staged whole files rather
than the hunks it meant, so its manifest already names these two programs while
their source was still untracked - that commit will not build on its own. Left
in place rather than rewritten, since the pair is right and only their order is
wrong.

NOTES.md is their review of the streaming work. The first item in it is fixed
by the commit before this one; the rest are still open.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 20:21:43 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 a7d3e09d94 Refuse a streamed file that commits more than it reserved
osFileStart sets an extent aside and osFileWrite refuses a block index outside
it, so writing off the end was already barred. Committing a larger size was
not, and reaches the same neighbour by simply claiming it: a directory entry is
the only record of what a file owns, so an entry claiming a block it was never
given owns it, and so does whatever owned it before. Both files then look
perfectly well formed. The free count went backwards past zero on the same
path.

Found by ChatGPT's review of the streaming work, in NOTES.md. I had bounded the
index because writing off the end was the obvious way to reach a neighbour, and
had not noticed that the other end of the same reservation was open.

THE SIZE IS COMPARED, NOT THE ROOM IT TAKES UP. One block and a tail occupies
exactly what two whole blocks occupy, so bounding the blocks alone would let a
file reserve the first, commit the second, claim no block it was not given, and
still report two hundred and forty six bytes that were never written to it -
whatever the disk had there before.

Checked before anything is touched, which is why the temporary is found twice.
The old file is deleted a few lines down and a refusal after that point would
have destroyed the thing it was protecting.

AND IT CAUGHT A REAL ONE IMMEDIATELY. The assembler reserves the file plus room
for its vectors, and asked for four bytes per vector DECLARED - which looks like
a safe bound and is not, because a device is declared during the SECOND pass, in
the line that implements it. A program with a device installs a vector that was
not counted when the room was measured. CosmOS reserved 14,163 bytes and
committed 14,167, writing four bytes past what it had been given on every build
since S2. It landed inside the last block it owned, and would not have if the
boundary had fallen four bytes earlier.

It reserves against the vector table's LIMIT now, which cannot go stale whenever
things are counted.

Claim.asm is the program that tries it: reserve one block and a tail of ten,
write them, then tell osFileDone the file came to two whole blocks. The refusal
and the honest commit that follows are both recorded.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 20:20:39 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 00d896e3e7 Break shows registers it chose, not ones it inherited
Break left DP1 and DP2 alone, so what a stop printed for them was whatever the
shell happened to have left there - which is a CosmOS address, which moves
whenever CosmOS is touched at all. The recorded output had to be taken again
four times in one day's work, every time for a value that is not this program's
and that nothing should ever depend on.

It sets all three of the pointers it owns now, rotated between the two stops so
that every one of them visibly changes, the way A and B already did. DP3 stays
as the system left it: it is where the program was entered, which is the one
thing worth seeing here that this program did not choose, and it is steady
because it is this program's own base.

A demonstration of what the registers were should show registers somebody
chose. Then every line of the record is being asserted rather than merely
observed, and a reader can tell which is which.

Checked both ways: sixty four bytes added to CosmOS's data no longer moves it,
and reading the frame at the wrong offset still fails it.

cosmosRun and cosmosMonitor move because Break is sixteen bytes longer and both
of them list the disk it sits on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 17:13:49 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 fb7b224bbb S2: the assembler writes the file as it makes it
The output image is gone. It was eighteen kilobytes and it is now one block of
window, because the file was always produced in order and only ever needed to
be written that way.

Everything works in FILE OFFSETS now. A cursor is a two byte number counting
from the front of the file, and since a block is two hundred and fifty six
bytes, the block it lands in is the offset's high byte and the place within that
block is its low one - so there is no division anywhere, and ImgWalk, ProgPut
and DataPut needed no change but where they start.

ONE WINDOW RATHER THAN THREE. The plan said three: one per segment, and a third
for the block where the program ends and the data begins, which belongs to both.
Fetching a block back instead makes all of that one case. The header is patched
after every byte is out, the boundary block is written by both cursors, and both
are simply revisits - a revisit is what fetching handles. osFileFetch is the
service that allows it, and is the read side of the write.

A run of bytes in one segment costs nothing extra; a switch between segments
costs two block operations, and a source file has a few dozen switches and
several thousand bytes.

Two bugs, both a pointer meaning two things:

putAt took the cursor to advance in DP2 and then wanted DP2 for the window's
address. A call puts DP2 back the way it was AT THE CALL, so the step at the end
moved whatever the last call had left there - the window walked off across
memory while the cursor stood still. It goes in memory now, like the block did
in S1, and for the same reason.

The size the file is created at could not be right. How many vectors are
actually installed is not known until the second pass has resolved their
handlers, and by then the file must already exist to be written into - so Keys,
which brings one vector, came out four bytes short. Teaching the first pass to
count them meant teaching it about devices, and about a Boot line in a loadable
program not being installed at all, which is two ways to disagree with the
second pass about what a file contains.

So osFileDone is told the size instead. A writer asks for as much as the file
could possibly come to - the whole of it plus four bytes for every vector
DECLARED, which no file can exceed - and says what it really came to at the end.
The blocks it did not use go back to the free count. Asking for too much costs a
moment; asking for too little writes off the end of a file.

That is a better service for it, not a workaround. A writer that cannot know its
size until the last byte is the ordinary case, and it is exactly the case this
whole rung exists for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 16:58:17 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 9f7dffdeca S1: the write side learns to stream
osFileStart, osFileWrite and osFileDone are the mirror of osFileInfo and
osFileBlock. A program can now write a file it never holds: Pour writes twelve
blocks and a tail while keeping 256 bytes of it at a time, and the host tool
reads all 3,112 bytes back with every block where it was put.

ONE WRITE IS OPEN AT A TIME AND COSMOS HOLDS IT. Reading needs no state - a name
and an index are the whole question - but writing safely does, because the new
file has to exist before the old one is thrown away and something has to
remember which temporary belongs to which name. Keeping that here means the
careful order is written once instead of in every program that streams.

Nothing already on the disk is touched until osFileDone, so a disk without room
says so while the old file is still there. That is stronger than osFileSave can
manage, where the size is only known once the caller has every byte in hand.
osFileSave stays: Edit and Files hand over whole documents and have no reason to
learn any of this.

osFileWrite refuses an index past the end of the file, and that refusal is not
politeness. Files are contiguous, so block nine of a three block file is a real
block belonging to something else, and writing it would put one file's bytes
inside another with nothing anywhere saying so. Checked both ways: the tail
block is allowed and the one past it is not.

Three bugs, all of them the same shape - a register or pointer used for two
things at once:

DP3 carried the block count in and was popped high byte first, which is the
wrong way round from every reader in the system and made the count two hundred
and fifty six times too big.

sbfsStreamStart took the name in DP0 and then wanted DP0 for something else
before it had read it, so it walked whatever it last pointed at and reported
that it could find no room.

sbfsStreamWrite kept the caller's block in DP3 across a find - DP3 being the
pointer a return does not put back, which is exactly why the find uses it too.
What went to the disk was whatever the scan last looked at. It goes in memory
now, and the file is correct because every block says which block it is; a
check on the length alone would have passed all three of these.

Writing no longer finds the file for each block either. Nothing moves a file
once it is made, so where it starts is settled when the temporary is created.
That was not even slow - a scan stops the moment it matches - but it was a walk
of the directory per block for an answer that cannot change, and it is 28 per
cent of the cost of writing forty blocks.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 14:53:37 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 36ce9f6ccf D3: the machine knows where it is
cd moves it, dir lists the directory it is in, and the prompt says which one -
but only when that is not the root, so a machine nobody has moved about on
looks exactly as it always did and every recorded test that never says "cd"
keeps its recorded prompt.

A path beginning with a separator is measured from the root and anything else
from where the machine is, so a bare name means a file in the current
directory. NO PROGRAM HAD TO BE TOLD: the working directory lives in sbfs.asm
beside the thing that resolves paths, because it is what a relative path MEANS.
Keeping it in the shell would have meant either handing it down on every call
or pasting it onto the front of every name, and the second of those is how a
name that is already absolute gets ruined.

Nothing stores the path. The working directory is an entry index and two bytes,
and the text on the prompt is built each time by walking the chain of parents
upward, writing names from the end of a buffer towards the front - which is the
order they arrive in, and saves reversing them afterwards.

sbfsFind splits into a walk and a check. "cd /" and "cd .." both end at the
root quite legitimately, and had no way to say so through a routine whose only
word for the root was "missing".

Typing a program's name now tries two places in order: where you are, then
/Apps. The first makes a program you are working on the one that runs; the
second lets Snake work from anywhere. A word already beginning with a separator
has said where to look, so only that place is tried.

osChangeDir exists so that "a program may move about, and the shell puts the
working directory back" is a thing that can happen rather than a promise about
nothing. Both halves of that were unfalsifiable without it: with no way for a
program to move, removing the restore changed no test. Wander is the program
that moves - it goes where it is told and reads a file there by a bare name -
and with it on the disk, removing the restore fails.

The remembered file is dropped whenever what a relative path means changes: a
cd, a program calling osChangeDir, a program exiting. Removing all of them
fails the test and removing any one of them does not, because today every path
into that cache belongs to a program that exits. It is kept in all three
because the cost is a call and the failure is a file's blocks being handed out
under another file's name.

The cwd fixture holds two files called notes.txt saying different things, and a
Say.sbx in /A that is really hello. Two copies of one program, or two copies of
one file, would have passed with the whole of this deleted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 22:22:45 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 588e02aff5 Double CosmOS's half of the machine, and check that it fits
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
2026-08-24 22:21:02 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 dbe58db660 Add Type and More, and the file stream they are built on
Two applications that read a file too big for Data Memory: Type prints one,
More pages it. Both sit on fileStream.asm, which wraps osFileInfo and
osFileBlock into open-and-next so an application walks a file's blocks without
repeating the service calls.

The disk fixture is deliberately awkward: readable.txt crosses several blocks
and carries no zero byte to be mistaken for an end marker, and empty.txt says
that zero blocks is a valid file rather than an error.

These three files were written by ChatGPT, as their headers record.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 17:15:53 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 4fd8bf7b3f Step a Data Pointer with INCD and DECD, not DPUP and DPDN by one
DPUP takes an immediate, so an offset of one is legal and does exactly the
right thing. It is also three bytes where INCD is two, and reads as "offset
the pointer up by one" where INCD reads as "step the pointer".

56 of them across 15 files: the system, the assembler, the editor, and eight
test programs. CosmOS is 9,564 bytes to 9,537, the native assembler 11,648
to 11,635, and every program in the repository together 49 bytes lighter.

The worst offender was numbers.asm, written this week, where every sixteen
bit helper reaches the low byte and comes back the long way round. It is the
file every other part of the assembler includes, so it is the first thing
anybody reads when they go looking - and it was teaching them the long way.
Pattern matched off sbfs.asm rather than off the instruction table I had
just embedded in two programs.

THIS IS NOT TWO WAYS TO DO ONE THING. DPUP takes an arbitrary number, so one
is inevitably among them; INCD earns its place by making the common case a
byte cheaper. The overlap is structural and the choice is a usage question,
which is a linter's job rather than an ISA's - "DPUP.n 0d01: INCD.n does
this in a byte less" is a mechanical rule with no judgement in it.

Nothing needed re-recording, which was not a foregone conclusion: cosmosBreak
prints the system addresses the registers happened to hold, and they did not
move. Both assemblers still produce identical bytes and CosmOS still builds
itself to a fixed point.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-21 18:16:27 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3d2ab34229 Streaming: read a file bigger than the machine's memory
osFileRead hands over a whole file, which settles anything under 64K and
settles nothing above it. CosmOS's own source is above it - the sources
together are 104K against 64K of Data Memory - so a machine that is going
to assemble itself needs another way to ask.

osFileInfo (0d26) says how many blocks a file occupies. osFileBlock (0d27)
hands over one of them and says how many of its bytes belong to the file.
Between them a program reads a file of any size through a buffer of 256.

Blocks rather than bytes from osFileInfo is forced, not chosen: a file on a
sixteen megabyte disk is up to twenty four bits long and a pointer holds
sixteen. osFileBlock's count answers in DP3 for the same kind of reason -
a whole block is 256 bytes, which does not fit in a register, and a count
that reported it as zero would make every reader special-case the end.

Nothing is kept open. Every call names the file, so there is no handle to
leak and nothing left behind by a program that stops halfway. Taken at its
word that means searching the directory once per block, so the system
remembers where the last file it was asked about lives; every path that can
change what a name means calls fileForget, including the shell's own delete
and rename, which do not go through the services. Correctness never depends
on the cache - a cache thrown away is indistinguishable from one never
filled. Measured on a 329 block file: 7% of the run saved when the file is
the first directory entry, 11% when it is the sixteenth.

These two say WHY when the answer is no, which the others do not. Elsewhere
the only useful response to a failure is to give up, so one value suffices.
These are asked questions, and running off the end is how a reader learns it
has finished, so it gets an answer of its own: 1 no disk, 2 no such file,
3 past the end, 4 the disk refused.

Apps/Stream.asm reads an 84,000 byte file through 256 bytes. The check that
matters is the second one: a small file read BOTH ways - whole with
osFileRead and streamed - with the two checksums compared, so streaming is
measured against the path already known to work rather than against a number
someone wrote down. The checksum is Fletcher's rather than a sum, because a
sum is the same whatever order the bytes arrived in and the order is exactly
what streaming has to get right. Both checksums were also confirmed against
the same arithmetic run on the host.

The rest of the test is the cache: two files read alternately catch a memory
that missed the name changing, and a rename catches one that missed the file
moving - and that one would otherwise pass, since the blocks are still there
holding the same bytes.

The test file is generated rather than taken from the repository. The CosmOS
sources would be a truer picture and would move the recorded checksum every
time a line of CosmOS was edited, putting a real difference in a crowd of
meaningless ones - the same trap the cycle counts used to set.

cosmosBreak's recorded output moves by two bytes in two pointers: SbfsIndex
added two bytes to the filesystem's data and Break prints the system
addresses the registers happened to hold.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-20 21:19:36 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 c23adb2836 Break: name the status register properly and show the Stack Pointer
The dump labelled the status register "S", which reads as Stack to anybody
sensible - and the Stack Pointer was the one register it did not show, so
there was nothing to contradict the guess. It is written "status" now, and
followed by the bits that are up, because a dump that makes you look the
number up is only half a dump.

The Stack Pointer is not in the frame, since the frame is where the Stack
Pointer is. What the program had is fourteen bytes above it, that being what
entering an interrupt puts down, so it is worked out and shown.

Apps/Break.asm takes its second stop inside a subroutine, so the recorded
output shows the Stack Pointer at FFFF and then at FFF5: a difference of ten,
which is the size of a CALL frame. That checks the value is derived rather
than constant, which the previous version could not have told you.

Reported by Anachronaut, who read the output and asked why a pointer was two
digits long.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 22:19:15 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 5fd995aa62 Breakpoints: SWI osBreak, and s refuses a read only bank
A breakpoint that shows every register as the program had them, waits for a
key, and carries on.

NOTHING IS OVERWRITTEN, and that is the design rather than a shortcut. A
breakpoint poked into a running program has to replace an instruction, and
putting that instruction back in order to continue is the same act as
disarming the breakpoint; firing a second time would mean stepping over the
restored instruction and putting the breakpoint back behind it, and this
machine cannot step a single instruction. SWI is two bytes, dispatches
through a vector, and its frame already holds the address after it, so RETI
resumes at the next instruction with nothing to restore and nothing to
re-arm. It fires every time it is reached.

The price is that a breakpoint is part of the program: a build with them in
has different addresses from a build without. That is the bargain every
machine with a break instruction makes.

Every value shown comes out of the frame rather than the registers, because
by the time the handler runs the registers are the handler's. Apps/Break.asm
stops twice so that the second stop is checked as well as the first.

Also here, found by the test that came with it: the monitor's s wrote into
whichever bank was selected, and bank 2 is the controller's own table,
published read only. Writing to it was refused, and a refusal nobody catches
stops the machine - so selecting the bank table to look at it and then typing
s killed the session. bankPresent now keeps the whole flags byte and s
declines. The recorded output of cosmosMonitor had contained that crash,
having been blessed without being read.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 22:09:21 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3e87a67809 Edit: use the system's services instead of carrying the filesystem
The editor included sbfs.asm and console.asm, which was 3235 of its 4941
bytes. Both come out: reading and writing a file, printing and reading a
line are services now, and sbfsMount goes entirely because the system has
already mounted the disk. Only text.asm remains, at 357 bytes, because
textSame and textNumber own nothing and touch no device - sharing those is
a linker's job rather than an operating system's.

4941 bytes to 1983, a little better than predicted because dropping the
mount and the blocks-and-tail arithmetic went with the library rather than
being translated.

ConsoleEndOfInput went with console.asm, so the end of input is now read
from the console status port. That is better than what it replaced: the
port is there whether or not the system is.

Nothing it does changed, and that is checked rather than asserted. The
recorded output of the cosmosEdit test does not move by a single byte
across this commit - a test written days before the rewrite, checking a
property rather than an output, and therefore able to verify a change it
knew nothing about.

One thing is lost and worth naming: there is no way to ask whether a disk
is present, so the editor's "there is no disk" message is gone. On a
diskless machine it now opens an empty document and fails at w instead. The
shell already refuses to load without a disk, so the editor cannot normally
be reached that way.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 18:19:51 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 0b6d2be43f CosmOS: a service interface for the disk and console, and the monitor in the shell
Two changes that arrived together because both live in cosmos.asm.

THE SERVICES. A loaded program that wanted a file had to include the whole
filesystem, carrying two and a half kilobytes of a private copy of code the
system already had running, and then mount a disk that was already mounted.
Five services are added at pinned numbers 20 to 24: osFileRead, osFileSave,
osFileDelete, osFileRename and osPrintNumber.

The sizes fit the registers exactly in both directions. A file that can be
read into Data Memory is under 64K by definition, so its length is sixteen
bits: coming back it is DP3, going out it is A and B together, and neither
direction needs a record in memory whose shape both sides must agree on.

There is deliberately no service to mount a disk. The system mounts one
before its first prompt, and a program mounting it again was only ever a
consequence of owning a second copy of the library, so that call disappears
rather than moving. Apps/Files.asm writes, reads, renames and deletes a file
in 645 bytes and includes nothing but the service names.

THE MONITOR. Previously an application, now part of the shell, because an
application occupies the one region a loaded application is given: a monitor
that was an application could never examine another one, since loading the
thing to be inspected would replace the thing doing the inspecting.

"monitor" turns it on and the prompt becomes "*". It is a mode rather than a
sub-prompt, and it persists: because the mode is a variable the prompt reads
rather than a second loop, and every path back to the prompt goes through one
place including osExit, a program started with "g" that gives the machine back
arrives at the monitor prompt it was started from. Examining a program and
running it therefore do not interrupt each other. "exit" leaves whatever you
are in.

It supersedes dump, and adds disassembly, writing bytes, and jumping to an
address. Its instruction table is generated from the assembler's own list by
Tests/instructiontable.py rather than typed again, and Tests/docs.sh checks
both that the system's copy matches the generator and that the lengths that
table implies are the ones the manual's Bytes column prints. A disassembler
that disagreed about a length would not print one line wrong, it would lose
its place and print everything after it wrong.

Also here: b refuses a bank that is not registered, since asking the
controller for one is refused and a refusal nobody catches stops the machine;
g records the Stack the way run does, without which a program returning
through osExit restored whatever the last run had left; and make cosmos-disk
now depends on the system as well as the image.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 18:19:15 -04:00
Anachronaut e3100b4718 Fixed assembler bug that caused crash on IR array resize. Added line editor app. 2026-08-17 23:26:21 -04:00
Anachronaut 1d1a14318c Programs can now list and share vectors. 2026-08-17 21:39:27 -04:00
Anachronaut 9e3425d34b Programs can now pin specific routines to specific vectors in SplitBit assembly. Added snake game. 2026-08-17 19:12:42 -04:00
Anachronaut 91c9d49d1b CosmOS pre-alpha and launchable application versions of old programs. 2026-08-17 15:31:49 -04:00