A85: New Shell: Tiny MISh

To: assembly-85@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: A85: New Shell: Tiny MISh
From: richardlewis@cedarcity.net (Richardlewis)
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 00:47:04 GMT
Organization: netmark
Reply-To: assembly-85@lists.ticalc.org

Is anyone out there interested in a 390 byte shell, that is ZShell 4.0
compatible?  OS/7, the shell that WAS the smallest is 497 bytes.
My new shell, Tiny MISh, is about 391 bytes! (can you believe that?)  It
is the smallest ZShell 4.0 compatible shell in existence, unless someone 
wrote one even small and never announced it. It doesn't have very many
features, except a few extra ROM calls (which were instrumental in
shrinking the shell), and should be compatible with most ZSHell programs,
unlike OS/7, which had a bug where it didn't zero the text memory like
ZShell does.


It lacks checksum recalculation though, because I don't know which byte in
the header is the checksum, and I don't know exactly know how to
calculate it.  It is still smaller though!  (If someone could help, I
could improve the shell a little)

It loads the name of programs just like OS/7, with one small change.  You
have to give it the length of the name too.

I am going to release the shell with full source code, as a freeware shell.

Any comments/suggestions would be helpful.  Please no flames.

Just in case anybody wants to know, MISh stands for Menu Independent SHell.

Note to Mike Baker: I did not use your source code as a base, but I did get
some good ideas from it.  I think I even made my ROM_CALL routine a
little faster, but I'm not sure.

Follow-Ups:

Re: A85: New Shell: Tiny MISh

From: Mic Mullins <micmullins@geocities.com>