Terminal I/O

The Apple II has always been lacking in standardized methods for reading keyboard input and controlling the text screen. This problem was compounded when Apple stopped supporting the TextTools in favor of the GS/OS console driver. The console driver has a number of problems that prevent it from being a good solution under GNO/ME. There is high overhead involved in using it. It is generally accessed like a regular file, which means any I/O on it must filter through several layers before being handled. Even though in System 6.0.1 there is a provision for patching the low-level routines the special high-level user input features of the driver cannot be used over a modem or in a desktop program. And GS/OS must be called to access it, which means that while a console driver access is occurring, no other processes can execute. See Chapter 3 Mutual Exclusion in GS/OS and ToolBox calls.

GNO/ME ignores the GS/OS .CONSOLE driver and replaces the TextTools with a high performance, very flexible generic terminal control system. GNO/ME directly supports the console (keyboard and screen), as well as the serial ports, as terminals. In order for a user program to take advantage of these features and to be GNO/ME compliant, you must do terminal I/O only through the TextTools, or through stdin, stdout, and stderr (refNums 1,2, and 3 initially) via GS/OS. By its very nature TextTools is slow, so we recommend using them only for small and simple tasks. Calls to the GS/OS console driver will not crash the system, but they will make other processes stop until the call is completed.

You must not get input directly from the keyboard latch (memory location $E0/C000, nor may you write directly to the screen memory. GNO/ME's terminal I/O system has been designed so you don't have to do either of these things. If you need to check for keyboard input without stopping your application, you can make the appropriate ioctl(2) call to do what you need.

In the future, GNO/ME may provide a GNO/ME-friendly version of the GS/OS .CONSOLE driver.