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kerravon · 21 November 2021, 17:24

I was thinking of how to add ANSI support to PDOS/386 and I decided to do some investigation of another interesting environment - UEFI shell. I looked up the specs to see if UEFI supported ANSI escape sequences and it seems it does not. It instead supports functions like SetCursorPosition(). Which is not much different from a traditional BIOS.

I think it would be good to have my application suite (gcc, including gccami) written using UEFI as the OS, as it is effectively a new OS. And the way I do that is to add support to the C library, PDPCLIB, not PDOS. So I was thinking that it is in PDPCLIB that I should be interpreting ANSI escape sequences and doing UEFI calls. And if I do that for UEFI I could also do it for BIOS, rather than putting it in PDOS/386. But I guess that is a fundamental problem - PDOS-generic is proper design, PDOS/386 is not.

The traditional BIOS is fundamentally an OS that allows me to open just 4 files - "0x80", "0x81", "0x82", "0x83". And it is an OS that gives me a memory map that I am required to suballocate myself.

UEFI instead allows me to open files by name on a FAT disk (I believe). I'm not sure if it supports long filenames. And I don't know what the memory allocation routines are like.

PDOS-generic would open flat files for its own FAT support on a UEFI system the same as it does on the Amiga. But it would open raw disks on a BIOS system.

21 November 2021, 17:24	#324
kerravon Registered User Join Date: Mar 2021 Location: Ligao, Free World North Posts: 228	I was thinking of how to add ANSI support to PDOS/386 and I decided to do some investigation of another interesting environment - UEFI shell. I looked up the specs to see if UEFI supported ANSI escape sequences and it seems it does not. It instead supports functions like SetCursorPosition(). Which is not much different from a traditional BIOS. I think it would be good to have my application suite (gcc, including gccami) written using UEFI as the OS, as it is effectively a new OS. And the way I do that is to add support to the C library, PDPCLIB, not PDOS. So I was thinking that it is in PDPCLIB that I should be interpreting ANSI escape sequences and doing UEFI calls. And if I do that for UEFI I could also do it for BIOS, rather than putting it in PDOS/386. But I guess that is a fundamental problem - PDOS-generic is proper design, PDOS/386 is not. The traditional BIOS is fundamentally an OS that allows me to open just 4 files - "0x80", "0x81", "0x82", "0x83". And it is an OS that gives me a memory map that I am required to suballocate myself. UEFI instead allows me to open files by name on a FAT disk (I believe). I'm not sure if it supports long filenames. And I don't know what the memory allocation routines are like. PDOS-generic would open flat files for its own FAT support on a UEFI system the same as it does on the Amiga. But it would open raw disks on a BIOS system.