Articles tagged “Latenite”
Documentation
This is a standalone application I've been sporadically working on which will be bundled with Latenite, but is perfectly usable away from it. It's a plugin-extendable document browser. You can use it to manage a library of documents and display them in the tabbed browser on the right. It comes with plugins supporting text files, Rich Text documents, and anything IE supports (so in this case it's HTML and PDF). I've also wrapped the XP Picture and Fax viewer as another plugin, but am having a few problems with that so I'm not sure if I'll end up writing my own image viewer.
Latenite and Brass 2
Both Latenite and Brass are getting a significant upgrade - and both are being written from scratch. Both will sport a plugin-based architecture. This is most obvious with Brass - where pretty much everything - be it an assembler plugin or output plugin - can be extended by writing your own custom plugins. All Brass does is parse the basic syntax and pass it to the various plugins to work out what to do with it! Latenite will load Brass and use it to provide feedback - such as error reporting and syntax highlighting - directly to the user.
Latenite 1.0.6.0
There's a new Latenite beta - 1.0.6.0 - available from my site. I hope this is the last Latenite 1 release; I'm moving away from the current IDE towards a revised Latenite 2, the focus more on interactivity with the assembler and the debugger (better 'Intellisense', breakpoints, variable watching and so on). This mainly revolves around a much improved text editor, currently in the works. Not a very exciting thing to look at, but handling text selection, editing, copying, pasting, and highlighting - and keeping it fast - is being a bit of a pain.
Text Editing Woes
I've had enough of my syntax-highlighting text editor in Latenite (it's a hack on top of the RichTextBox control, using all sorts of ugly Win32 hacks to beat it into submission). I'd much rather have a control I had some... 'control' over, so have taken to writing my own custom control. One useful thing is that it supports Unicode characters nicely, unlike the RichTextBox
It doesn't currently support text selections (which is a bit of a problem) but once that's added it should be simple enough to start adding goodies to it that weren't easily possible via the RichTextBox control (reliable line highlighting, tab width manipulation, whitespace glyphs, collapsing code blocks and so on).
Debugging fun
One part of the Latenite 'suite' that's needed some dire attention is the PindurTI interface. This talks to the excellent TI emulator via a non-interactive mode, and can therefore sit between Latenite (and your source code) and the emulated calculator (which is running your binary). The current incarnation of this tool is very primitive - you have a calculator that you can run/pause and send files to. That's it. A picture should illustrate what the new one's like and what the old one was missing:
There's a memory viewer, register viewer, and breakpoint window.
Next Latenite Beta
Seeing as the MaxCoderz fora have died (I can't read or post on them at the temporary hosting), and I know at least kv reads this... Latest beta: /bin/latenite/ (full install). General
No more hanging or locking up when running the PTI debugger (huzzah!) PindurTI debugger is still horribly, horribly incomplete :( (Boo!)
Reworked icon extraction code works for all files (no more incorrect icons!)
File tree plugins (bundled with .emr plugin) to expand certain files into a tree. Copy/Paste doesn't accidentally copy/paste if the text editor isn't selected (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V doesn't work anywhere else, though).
Microhertz
They say that pictures are what make a journal interesting... but I don't really want to show the pretty pictures I have, as they'd spoil the surprise. Of what, you might ask? Well, I've been developing a TI-83/83+ scene demo, entitled "Microhertz" (for no particular reason). You can download it (and some screenshots, if you really must!) here. Things have been very busy - a new Latenite beta, riddled with all new exciting "features" (*cough*), has been released... I'm slowly fixing them as and when I can
It's a bit rubbish for debugging - you can start, pause, and stop a debugging session, but that's about it.
YM2413 (OPLL) Emulation
As (yet another) side project to all this Z80 work, I've also decided to have a stab at the Japanese Master System's FM chip. It's a YM2413, and the
TI Z80 Development Gets Cool
This excites me greatly - integrating a debugging emulator into Latenite is very, very awesome. CoBB's emulator is incredibly good as a standalone, being able to step through your code instruction-by-instruction with breakpoints and a watch window or two is just amazing! I spent most of the last few days working on Brass - adding for loops to assemble blocks of code multiple times and a few file operations for people not happy with the behaviour of .incbin. I also remembered to release an XML help file for Latenite.
Intelligent macro-matching, VS icon nicking
Brass has got a new macro preprocessor, that hopefully makes the work of people writing things like the macro-driven TI ASM API easier, and will generate less redundant code. TASM only supports simple find-and-replace macros; so, for example:#define draw_sprite(x,y,sprite) ld a,x\ ld b,y\ ld hl,sprite\ call put_sprite draw_sprite(10,43,my_sprite) ; Generates the following: ld a,10 ld b,43 ld hl,my_sprite call put_sprite draw_sprite(a,43,hl) ; Generates the following: ld a,a ; Rubbish!
Business with the Z80
I have been pretty busy with Brass and Latenite over the last few days - Latenite has had a few little adjustments/improvements/fixes, but also has a few new holes in it which means that it is unsuitable for release. I'm adding the ability to hook help files to projects rather than each project being loaded with every help file - this has the extra bonus that Brass will be able to compile help files straight from the source, which will then be reloaded on each build by Latenite. I did something unheard of over the weekend as well - I read the SDK manual for the TI-83 Plus.
I hate syntax highlighting.
I spent this weekend completely rewriting the syntax highlighting control - this time, from scratch. It seems that all the free ones are rubbish. Mine is rubbish, but at least I can maintain it. Now all I have to do is wait for the people using the beta to start complaining that it's eating their source code... My test project for it was a Lotus-like 3D racing engine. I think I need to research the way it works a little better... still, not too bad for a little over 400 bytes.
XML Overload
Everything in the new version of Latenite is XML-based - the project files, the help files, the error logs... Never mind, it seems to work well. Click for massive. So far, the only thing that's useful (complete and working) is the 8XP Linker - linker is a bit of a fancy name for it, as all it really does is wrap a number of .bin COM files up into a single .8x? or 83? file for the TI-83(+). It's a Win32 app, which should help some people stuck with the old DOS apps who can't get them to run under WinNT.
Latenite, VS 2005 and two screens.
Long time no update... I haven't done any more work on FireTrack, that is now officially a dead project. Rearranged PC
I spent some part of this weekend rearranging my PC so I could take advantage of my DVI port. With a DVI→VGA adapter I could connect up the other 17" monitor that was currently going unused on my PS2. I also had a new second-hand (new to me, that is) VCR to throw into the mix - here are the results! (Hover for notes). Once again, I'm astounded as to how expensive cables are on the high street (last time it was a USB cable that threw me - £14 in Dixons, I ended up getting it for 99p on eBay).
Bloop-bleep, it's the 80s!
Sound! I am still musicless, but never fear, for sound effects will fill the gap. Screenshots are pretty poor for sound , so here's the MP3. Simple as it sounds, that takes a mere 163 lines of ASM code to work, and even then it's a fairly crap effect! Each sound is stored as a series of "fades". Each fade contains the following data:
Starting period of the wave.Starting amplitude of the wave.Length of the wave in frames.Amount to add to volume each frame.Amount to add to period each frame. Using these simple fades and joining them together you can very easily produce a fairly complex sound.
Old projects and ugly XP icons
This is going to be a very boring update, I'm afraid. I wasn't feeling too good so haven't got much done. First of all, Latenite updates. With the project thingummy, I thought it would be nicest if it displayed the proper Windows icons for file types rather than the ones I had hardcoded in. Here is a function I wrote to take a filename and return an icon (in the form of a .NET Bitmap) based on it and whether you requested a large or small icon. It works by going into the registry and looking up the ".ext" key.
On the merits of Excel and running out of space
Latest video. [2.29MB AVI]
You chaps probably don't know what a major headache it is trying to get clear, non-wobbly video... I gave up in the end and went for the "propped-up against a wall with camera on stack of books" approach. The reason I cannot, therefore, appear to play the game very well is because I cannot see the screen. All I can see is a faint, inverted glow and have to guess where I am. Not fun. Here are the major updates since last time:
Removed Blackadder theme Altered colour contrast on title screen, added wipe to clear it in imitation of original, restructured code for better fades, changed timing, added sound.
Z80 ASM and PICAXE
I've been doing all sorts of odds and ends recently. I've acquired a Sega Game Gear, and so have started taking a look at programming on that - it has a Z80 CPU in there, so the languge isn't an issue, more so the hardware. Ah well, I can display a screen of text and cycle the colours around so far - nothing impressive, but the setup works. I've also been playing with PICAXE microcontrollers again. Here is a pair of routines that can be used to get/send bytes using the TI hardware link protocol, for example.