There's no target with more than one serial driver (and I don't see that change anytime soon) so it's a no-brainer to apply the standard driver concept to serial drivers.
The implementation is a bit tricky as it requires to take different code paths for the //e, the //c and the IIgs. Additionally the //c only provides a VBL IRQ flag supposed to be used by an IRQ handler to determine what triggered the IRQ. However, masking IRQs on the CPU, activating the VBL IRQ, clearing any pending VBL IRQs and then polling for the IRQ flag does the trick.
Originally the Apple II had a 64 char set and used the upper two bits to control inverse and blinking. The Apple //e brought then an alternate char set without blinking but more individual chars. However, it does _not_ contain 128 chars and use the upper bit to control inverse as one would assume. Rather it contains more than 128 chars - the MouseText chars. And because Apple wanted to provide as much backward compatibility as possible with the original char set, the alternate char set has a rather weird layout for chars > 128 with the inverse lowercase chars _not_ at (normal lowercase char + 128).
So far the Apple II CONIO implementation mapped chars 128-255 to chars 0-127 (with the exception of \r and \n). It made use of alternate chars > 128 transparently for the user via reverse(1). The user didn't have direct access to the MouseText chars, they were only used interally for things like chline() and cvline().
Now the mapping of chars 128-255 to 0-127 is removed. Using chars > 128 gives the user direct access to the "raw" alternate chars > 128. This especially give the use direct access to the MouseText chars. But this clashes with the exsisting (and still desirable) revers(1) logic. Combining reverse(1) with chars > 128 just doesn't result in anything usable!
What motivated this change? When I worked on the VT100 line drawing support for Telnet65 on the Apple //e (not using CONIO at all) I finally understood how MouseText is intended to be used to draw arbitrary grids with just three chars: A special "L" type char, the underscore and a vertical bar at the left side of the char box. I notice that with those chars it is possible to follow the CONIO approach to boxes and grids: Combining chline()/cvline() with special CH_... char constants for edges and intersections.
But in order to actually do so I needed to be able to define CH_... constants that when fed into the ordinary cputc() pipeline end up as MouseText chars. The obvious approach was to allow chars > 128 to directly access MouseText chars :-)
Now that the native CONIO box/grid approach works I deleted the Apple //e proprietary textframe() function that I added as replacement quite some years ago.
Again: Please note that chline()/cvline() and the CH... constants don't work with reverse(1)!
