I could post up the source code for the Atari Plato cartridge, Vincent
Wu was the coder and he worked directly with CDC on fully understanding
how the actual Plato Terminals worked and wrote a pretty impressed
compression system to take the 512x512 screens and get them down to
320X192 but also had a zoom feature to allow the Atari to scroll around
and view the full 512x512 screen. Also he implemented all of the
touchscreen routines to work with the Atari joysticks as well.
While this is all 6500 compiler code and specifically for the Atari
800,XL/XE platform, it may offer some insight.
Curt
Richard wrote:
In article <200705100007.l4A07FA5015950 at
floodgap.com>,
Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> writes:
The
plasma terminals were nice, but I also liked the bitmap graphics
terminals. For those, with PLATO, you could write code in "micro
tutor" or "ututor" which you would load into the terminal and it would
execute locally. Some of the best PLATO based games had all the
display stuff written in ututor and the networking and game logic
stuff was written in tutor and coordinated the different terminals.
What was that, a mini-programming language? Was it the internal machine
language of the terminal itself (being fairly ignorant of the architecture),
or a microcode, or ... ?
In the PLATO system, you wrote software in a language specifically
designed for the computer assisted instruction environment of PLATO.
The language was called "tutor". A very brief entry about it is on
wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_programming_language>.
A book that describes the tutor language in detail is here:
<http://www.group-s.net/TUTORLanguage.htm>.
What I remember about "micro tutor" was that it was the same as the
tutor language, with restrictions. IIRC, there was a size restriction
and the syntax was also restricted in the sense that not all of the
tutor commands were supported. I seem to remember that the terminal
housed a Z80 inside and somehow the tutor language was being
interpreted by the Z80 code or cross-compiled to native Z80
instructions. I never did know which, but I know you could load code
directly into the terminal by writing it in ututor and loading it
through the main PLATO system.