> if there's any way to pitch in, just name it!
getting the Pascal Workshop tools running standalone under Linux would be nice, as has been done for MPW but it isn't a trivial undertaking.
Here's another thing I've been thinking of, I want to build a Lisa interface app, not a full tool with stationary, but something more akin to the clock or the settings panel that can sit in the background and wait for commands from the host side of LisaEm. (Think Virtual Box Guest Additions, or VMWare tools)
Al, and Tom, if you'd like to help this to move forward, here's what I propose:
What I'd need it to do is to sit in a loop and accept commands that do the following things:
1. fetch the current directory listing with full attributes for all files and details and send it over to the host side of LisaEm. (i.e. directory at a specific location)
2. open a file handle and either read the whole file over to LisaEm or write a new entire file sent by LisaEm to the file system. (It can be a block level protocol where it does one block at a time and has some handshaking to say block sent, ok, get next block, etc. now close the file handle and go back to the idle loop)
3. enumerate devices such as inserted floppies or change directories. (i.e. one floppy inserted, what's it's volume name, 3 profiles, what are their paths)
4. optional - send the Lisa Clipboard over to LisaEm, or the other way.
5. optional - launch some other process/app
I can use the F-Line HLE (High Level Emulation) interface that I already have for ROMless mode to do this, so basically if this were ran on a real Lisa it would cause it crash with an F-Line exception, but on LisaEm it would work, but perhaps we can do something else with the NOP opcode in some weird pattern, like maybe:
NOP
NOP
NOP
JMP (PC+2)
JMP (PC+2)
NOP
NOP
NOP
which would do nothing on a real Lisa, but I could detect that stream of opcodes in LisaEm and use it as an interface.
It would need to use some embedded assembly so I can put values directly in either A or D registers to pass back and forward. I'd need it to send me a pointer to a block for some operations, and then I could read/write the data in the block on the LisaEm side. I pinged David T. Craig about this a few years ago and he shared how to write embedded assembly in pascal, so it's pretty doable, but I just didn't spend cycles on this.
Might be a bit more complicated for LPW, but if that could run in the background in LPW it could be used to allow us to control the compiler/linker and use an external IDE like VSCode/codium, etc. with some scripting. I've wanted to make LisaEm scriptable for a very long time now, so this would be a great excuse for that. (So I can easily add stuff like send a set of keystrokes or move the mouse to a specific location, or detect a button and click it, etc. sort of like QuickKeys.)
So if both of these things are done we can then add some git hooks or just have a make file that initiates a bunch of actions in LisaEm to press certain keys or move some files around which could invoke the compiler or linker, etc. as the end result, but you'd be editing in a comfy modern editor which LisaEm running in the background.
If I can get some help on this, I can finish off 1.2.7 in parallel and start implementing some of these features (which I was planning for 2.0 anyway) now which can help Al.
License wise it would need to be compatible with the GPL so I can include it.
