Posted By
MMS
on 2023-12-28
14:44:12
 |  Re: Plus4 mouse (driver) for BASIC
A working mouse on Plus/4 was a long term dream of mine.
It is great, that such a simple Max232 ciruit could be supported with a driver to have RS232 mouse, not to mention, we now we have that User Port for C16 too.
Within 1 year (as I calculate) we finally have a real use of SID card's Joystick port, New hardwares for the User port, and even User Port for C16.
What a year!
Thinking about bszggg's concept, next to the great use of mouse in eg. Arkanoid, the much easier editing and handling of GUI.
Don't take me wrong, GEOS is great, but simply still too slow, and only 1551 compatible. Cannot run from SD2IEC or SD/1541/II. What a missed opportunity.
How great would be mouse conbtrolled GUI to start from ROM?
It would be a great community effort to swap the integrated 3+1 package to something similar to the Commodore Magic Desk package, released for C64, but originally planned for Plus/4 too.
32KB is not so much, but still something. Should work with datasette too :-)
-Easyscript C64, one of the most complex and full featured text editor of it's time (with several thousand line long (even linked) documents), took on a floppy disk only 13KB.
-Herewith I also mention Litwr's great Notepad+, made fully in BASIC, after compilation it became a competent fast editor with a lot of formatting possibilities., took less than 10KB
-With the Plus/4 advanced windowing features it is easy to just move the editing area (freeze the top), but a further improvement could be the floating GUI on the top of 40x25 full editing area with the help of Extended Vertical Border, (40x36c) eg. to add +5 lines for the GUI on top (not possible to make on C64).
Without mouse and sprite, it would be cluncky to use a Magic Desk on Plus/4, but without that huge "hand" sprite, the full surface could be reshaped to someting modernish (less childish and less colorful) and simplier form, it could be easily handled with bszggg's mouse and a single character white cursor pointer, doing the automatic saving and recover of the hidden character.
BTW C= Magic Desk used a heavily modified charset, while the mockup below is fully based on legit original PETSCII charset (though for text editor we need small letter/Cap fontset to look professional, like the Berkelium 64 fontset)
http://toastytech.com/guis/magdesk.html
So I created a Magic Desk 2023 Mockup, inspired by PalmOS's Magic Cap utility, and few years ago I created a GeoWrite like PETSCII mockup how such a GUI imitating surface text editor could look like. I call it a mockup, but it could be a skeleton of a working GUI too.
Certainly it is not as great as a pixel exact nicely drawn real GUI, but hey, it is just a PETSCII :-)
You can see the main functions, the Calendar, Date and Time (can be set), link to a more serious Text editor (PC), a simple Notepad (sheet with a Pen) and the Calculator, also File Manager with the disc drives (directory, file, copy, etc).
-Two quick lauch app could be the drawers F1 and F2 buttons, like Calculator and Notepad
-At the bottom you can see 6 Application Launch icons (TBD), at the end the Exit.
-Door is also the Exit. Or it should be a Window? 
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