WIP: 16C firmware hack for more memory

[Garry Lancaster]

(01-31-2023 03:02 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  Aside from writing and debugging the code for that prompting, one thing I don't like about it is that none of the other key sequences that take a numeric argument (STO, RCL, WINDOW, GTO ., SF, CF, F?) do that kind of prompting, so then I'd want to add those, but I'm not sure how to show or abbreviate WINDOW on the seven-segment display.

I would be tempted to treat WINDOW as a special case if possible, because I think it would be pretty distracting to have a prompt replace the contents of the current window. Much nicer for the display to switch directly between the contents of each window as they are selected.

What definitely would be useful is, after pressing f-WINDOW, the base indicator at the right of the display changed to show the current window number (with the left/right dots left in place), as it's currently easy to lose your place when viewing a binary number. This would also act as a prompt that a new window number is expected.

Not sure what you would show for the current window number if it wasn't exact because you'd been using g-< and g-> to scroll around. Perhaps a _ in this case.

Quote:How useful would it be to have direct access to more than 32 registers (0 to F, .0 through .F)? I could do that with STO CHS nn and RCL CHS nn, and if I did that, then I'd probably want the CHS thing for the labels also, for consistency.

I currently don't tend to use storage registers (except for I) as my memory is filled with programs. So I'm sure 32 directly-addressable registers would be more than enough for me personally when memory becomes less of an issue. I could only imagine using large numbers of registers as tables of some kind, in which case I'd be accessing them indirectly anyway.