#FujiNet News Reader for #VIC20.

[tschak909]

the #FujiNet News Reader for #Commodore #VIC20, being developed in cartridge for 5K, and as a program for 8K systems. The reader pulls news from a variety of sources and paginates the output for the 22 column screen. #retrocomputing

[tschak909]

Debugging the #commodore #vic20 version of the #FujiNet news reader (in glorious 22 cols!). The #FujiNet is merely using the user port for power, and is doing all its network I/O over the IEC. This runs on an unexpanded VIC due to using KERNAL routines to talk to the network.

[akator]

Awesome work!

[tschak909]

Code posted here: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet- ... news/vic20
Compiles with CC65. Nothing special to it, the network functions are just kernal I/O.

[Mike]

the #FujiNet News Reader for #Commodore #VIC20 [...]

You might want to take a look at the soft 40 column routines that come with MG Browse. These routines also include word wrap, which evidently works better in 40 columns than with 22 columns.

The 7-bit ASCII character set is included, thus no code page conversion is necessary for 99%+ of text body around.

You would need to require a +8K RAM expansion at least, but that is the case for any application that uses a fully bitmapped display on the VIC-20.

Compiles with CC65. Nothing special to it, the network functions are just kernal I/O.

Nothing against C, but if you'd go and write implementations of the clients in CBM BASIC (perhaps with a bit of ML support being strewn in as in my example above) those examples would probably encourage more people to take a look into them.

If the news feed is provided as single ASCII text file, MG Browse might even be able to access this Fujinet resource out-of-the-box. However you probably need to specify the URL hard-coded in line 12, with N$="..." instead of inputting N$ with INPUT, as certain characters (notably, ":") from the INPUT prompt show unexpected behaviour for the problem at hand.

[tschak909]

we're working on BASIC examples, still trying to get the IEC firmware into shape (it currently does not like the start and stop ATN that BASIC does), I just wanted to get SOMETHING out.

-Thom