fse.txt;
started :
Monday, January 17, 2000
2:50 PM

updated :
Monday, January 17, 2000
3:54 PM


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Documentation for the first spawn of C99.NP.L1, 
"f.exe" and "fx.exe".

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What is the FSE concept?

FSE stand for Full Screen Editor. When the C64 was released, Commodore was legendary for having a FSE rather than archaic line-based editing (and example of line-base dediting is found in EDLIN, the old DOS utility).

The purpose of this subproject is to immulate the C64's FSE, not exactly but to at least the same degree of functionality. 

They are some thing that I will likely not immulate in a hurry, for example, the logo graphics (if you held the Commodore Logo key and another,non-modifier key at the same time, you'd get some graphical characters), which approach being useless, even on a C64 (I only did them by POKEs). 

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How is this implemented?

In two ways, the first is "f.exe", which uses technology from C99.M7.DMX, replacing the IDE driver program with a very short driver whose source is included in the distro (just to annoy, if not to educate).

The second way is "fx.exe", which uses some alternative technology developed specifically for this project, so far I've made the code a bit more efficient, and removed a lot of stuff, like the infamous "wiggle" extentions which were a bad idea when I did them and are even a worse idea now. 

The main reason for the existance of "f.exe" is to show that the newer supporting technology is API compatible with the older technology. So you could take an M7 codebase and use it to compile the FSE driver. 

Eventually the new IDELIB equivalent, IDEX (which is API compatible with the latest IDELIB) will provide a much more wholesome FSE and thus M7's approach will be outdated and banal.. but for now they're pretty much the same.

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How do I use the .exe files?

The easiest thing to do is to type 

	fx.exe -nogui
	
At a DOS prompt in the same directory. Please not that "char.rom" needs to be in that directory, this is a CHAREN image which you can get from a friendly C64 emulator. 

This will ivolke the immulator in it's default non-gui mode, which is 320x200 using an auto-detected graphics driver. I think. 

You'll have a blue on blue screen and a blinking cursor (yes, I know it blinks too fast...). 

From hence you can type whatever you want.

Whenever you press enter the current physical line is processed, if you entered "exit" then the program will exit. Sort of. Follow the onscreen instructions. 

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Muhahahaha

Okay, this isn't all that menacial and impressive, especially considering that I've been working on this for over a year and don't have that much to show for it. 

However, I don't care about that. I developed personally over the last year and attained new levels of stability and clarity. And now I have focus, and ability to focus, and I got a chance to rest and spend time with myself. 

I also got to spend a ton of time with my friends and family (and friends who are family) and that's important. Life is about living, not about stuff. For me, anyhow. C99 is "just" stuff. It's not my life, it's one of the things I do.

The hardest thing about C99 to me is remaining excited about it. It is intrinsically exciting to me.. the end result as well as the process of development, to a degree. However, I've had little motivation to kode to a high standard in the past. It seems that whenever I learn something new, I realise that the old code is built on shit and thus I need to start over. 

After m1, I made the M-en more modular to attmept to escape this, but it's only while doing M7 that I realised exactly what I needed the individual modules to be. 

I could sit down and design the entire project and work out all the detail beforehand. 

If I was a robot with not emotion, no sense of tedium, and no need to get feedback on my work (not necessarily from external sources, but seeing the project compile without warnings is much more satisfying than having a neatly written document full of specifications but no executable to bring them [specs] to life). 

Indeed, up to now I have tons of info on various variations of pen and paper RPGs, and they're fairly useless to me. Why? Because I don't play them, and even if I did I'd be constantly annoyed at the tedium of the math involved. I do not enjoy being a human calculator. To me that is like peddaling a car [a la a bicycle] instead of putting and engine into it. In fact, that's a good analogy... as game systems get more complex, the "weight" of the calculations is best "pushed" by machines rather than humans. The humans can still retain control but let the machine do the brute force, tedius, dice roll and add 1 type of things. 

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What happened to M7?

Well, here's how it goes:

There's C99.M7.DMX , which consists of dmx.exe, beta.exe, vex.exe [vex.exe was never publically released]. 

DMX has too much baggage (like these notorious "wiggle" routines which were supposed to handle sprites but instead slowly move bitmaps about the screen. very slowly. very, very slowly), and thus I spawned C99.NP.

C99.NP.L1:FSE is what this is. Aren't you glad you asked?

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Fyre, I'm out.
~K31;
