The configuration file and runtime (crt0.s) provided for the default NES
ROM layout (2x16k PRG, 8k CHR) incorrectly added interrupts (IRQ1, IRQ2,
TIMERIRQ) which are not supported by the NES hardware. For example, see
the NESdev wiki, which makes no reference to these interrupts.
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/CPU_memory_map
The VECTORS region was also incorrectly set to 0xFFF6, which would have
left the 0xFFF4 normally unspecified. This did not result in any error,
however, since cc65 simply placed ROMV directly after ROM0 regardless of
start address.
(This layout may be due to a copy-and-paste from the PC-Engine
configuration, whose interrupt registers start at 0xFFF6, begins with
the three interrupts listed above, followed by NMI and START, and does
not end with a final IRQ interrupt.)
Despite the absence of any actual error, since START is still placed at
0xFFFC, this patch removes the nonexistent interrupts and also correctly
aligns the ROM0 and ROMV regions. It also has the (admittedly very
minor) benefit of freeing up 6 additional bytes for ROM0.
Stefan Dorndorf, author of XDOS, pointed out that retrieving the
default device by looking at an undocumented memory location won't
work in future XDOS versions.
He also showed a way to get the default device in a compatible
manner.
This change implements his method and adds a version check (XDOS
versions below 2.4 don't support this -- for them the behaviour
will be the same as, for example, AtariDOS: no notion of a default
drive).
For quite some time I deliberately didn't add cursor support to the Apple II CONIO imöplementation. I consider it inappropriate to increase the size of cgetc() unduly for a rather seldom used feature.
There's no hardware cursor on the Apple II so displaying a cursor during keyboard input means reading the character stored at the cursor location, writing the cursor character, reading the keyboard and finally writing back the character read initially.
The naive approach is to reuse the part of cputc() that determines the memory location of the character at the cursor position in order to read the character stored there. However that means to add at least one additional JSR / RTS pair to cputc() adding 4 bytes and 12 cycles :-( Apart from that this approach means still a "too" large cgetc().
The approach implemented instead is to include all functionality required by cgetc() into cputc() - which is to read the current character before writing a new one. This may seem surprising at first glance but an LDA(),Y / TAX sequence adds only 3 bytes and 7 cycles so it cheaper than the JSR / RTS pair and allows to brings down the code increase in cgetc() down to a reasonable value.
However so far the internal cputc() code in question saved the X register. Now it uses the X register to return the old character present before writing the new character for cgetc(). This requires some rather small adjustments in other functions using that internal cputc() code.