Entries tagged windows

Recently I said that my perl-based sysadmin tool, Slaughter, was at the cross-roads. I wasn't sure if I should leave it alone, or update it somehow.

As I'm generally lazy and busy (yes it is possible to be both simultaneously!) I didn't do anything.

But happily earlier in the week I received a bunch of updates from Jean Baptiste which implemented support for managing Windows clients, via Strawberry Perl.

So I guess the conclusion is: Do nothing. Change nothing. Just fix any issues which are reported to me, and leave it as-is. (I did a little more than that, refactoring to avoid duplication and improve "neatness".)

As I said at the time I've had some interesting feedback, suggestions and bugfixes from people over the past year or so - so I shouldn't be surprised to learn I'm not the only person using it.

ObQuote: "Oh, yes, a big cat! My salvation depends upon it! " - Dracula (1992)

Tags: slaughter, strawberry, windows | 1 comment

Today I made a new release of my CP/M emulator and I think that maybe now it will run on Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately I cannot test it!

A working CP/M implementation needs to provide facilities for reading input from the console, both reading a complete line of text and individual keystrokes. These input functions need to handle several different types of input:

• Blocking, waiting for input to become available.
• Non-blocking, returning any pending input if it is available otherwise nothing.
• With echo, so the user can see what they typed.
• Without echo, so the keys are returned by not displayed ot the user.

In the past we used a Unix-specific approach to handle the enabling and disabling of keyboard echoing (specifically we executed the stty binary to enable/disable echos), but this release adds a more portable solution, based around termbox-go which is the new default, and should allow our emulator to work on Microsoft Windows systems.

We always had the ability to select between a number of different output drivers, and as of this release we can now select between multiple input drivers too - with the new portable option being the default. This has been tested on MacOS X systems, as well as GNU/Linux, but sadly I don't have access to Windows to test that.

Fingers crossed it's all good now though, happy new year!

Tags: cpm, cpmulator, emulation, windows, z80 | No comments