SideKick for MSX

Ronivon Candido Costa sent us SideKick for MSX, an interesting text editor for MSX that he developed in 1993. The key figure of the text editor is that it works as a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) so that you can switch to and from text editor to your working environment quickly and easily. It does this even on MSX1, which taking into account that only little memory is available. First, it will try to use High Memory. If there is no High Memory available, it will use the sound buffer to store the assembly code for the program, along with the graphic VRAM. You can switch tasks with CTRL-SHIFT and end SideKick with ESC. Although you can't play music or switch to graphical modes due to the TSR's memory usage, the TSR can still be quite useful -- and is a great proof of concept.

Relevant link: SideKick for MSX

Comments (6)

By Haohmaru

Paladin (774)

30-12-2006, 23:06

Really nice!

From what I can tell it seems to run fine in both MSX-DOS as in MSX-DOS 2.xx, however it does not like the width set greater than 40 columns though (set to 40 or less before running).

(PS: you are not going insane - earlier on I reacted at the download page as well )

By Yukio

Paragon (1540)

30-12-2006, 23:29

Cool . I want more text editors for the MSX .

By cax

Prophet (3740)

31-12-2006, 13:22

IIRC the TSR idea is not that new. I remember using some kind of "splitter" that divided MSX into 2, and I could run different programs in each "half", and switch between them everytime I wanted to.

By Latok

msx guru (3927)

31-12-2006, 22:31

cax, I don't think the 'proof of concept'-remark refers to the TSR-idea itself. In the Dutch MSX scene, there have been many TSR's programmed, many of them using memory management utility MemMan.....

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6033)