i have achieved cat-to-cat communication

the secret arcane was setvbuf() with the _IONBF flag

i don't intend to support the modem port since it's the exact same thing feature-wise but more annoying

only remaining thing to do now would be the floppy drive but since the serial thing is unix-only i'd like to see if i can add virtual tty support

forgor to implement the video blanking and invert

they had dark mode in 1987 i guess

found a way to enable the forth feature: you can replace the beep with a visual cue in the setup menu (also change the keyboard layout, but it's not ideal as the remapping is funky so my hack remains (may add a way to bypass it))

dunno anything about forth other than "it's the open firmware thing"

so, the keyboard, there's no pretty way of doing it i fear, with the added bonus of that i want the letters on my keyboard to match what i type (stares at mame and qwerty people)

i decided on separating it in two cases: whether the key is a letter or not, which is a terrible idea in general but in this case it works due to the production cat being us-only (so "letters" is A-Z and nothing else)

so here's all of those implemented (need to fix the timer to be time-based)

well that's the annoying part done, thanks to the umac emulator for the simple code templates

also admire the 1:1 pixel ratio that the mame emulator can't do

now to implement the keyboard so that i can type the world-famous* "Enable Forth Language"

*debatable

prettied up my video grabber debug and fixed the keyboard (also simulating one keypress)

next step would be to hook up sdl, which i'm still not motivated to do so that's a problem for tomorrow me

this is the first emulator i've written that actually is that far into working btw

after implementing the bare minimum of the duart (two registers) the thing stopped crashing and the video framebuffer is actually getting filled with the interface (raw framebuffer is inverted so it's dark mode here)

now i did implement part of the keyboard (it's needed else the thing enters test mode, which understandably freaks out) and it's supposed to simulate the key "f" being pressed but i don't see it so further messing is needed i guess