Forum discussion about XINFO HERE
XINFO is a utility to help display the same text-mode content at various text-mode resolutions on the X16 system. In addition, XINFO supports color-highlighting, row centering, and content-links (links to other tags within the same document or links to whole other documents).
XINFO is sort of a combination of the Linux man (manual) pages and the Lynx text-mode web-browser. However, XINFO is not associated with parsing HTML or any kind of XML. There was thought of having XINFO support the “mark-down” format, similar to what is used by both Discord and github. As a compromise to the challenging issues of parsing HTML (in reasonable performance) and the simplicity of mark-down, XINFO uses its own bespoke conventions.
Those conventions still rely on the “plain text” ASCII, so that XINFO documents can be modified using any regular editor (including EDIT on the X16 itself). There is no WYSIWYG-style real-time editor for XINFO, you have to “mentally imagine” what the resulting parsed content will look like (similar to early word processors, like WordPerfect). Here is an example of what a XINFO page looks like (where each page has a status row at the bottom):
The XINFO program and source is maintained here: (github XINFO)
voidstar78/XINFO: Commander X16 INFO markup and text mode hyperlink utility (github.com)
On the Launch SD media content, XINFO content is split into two areas. The XINFO program itself is in the APPS folder (@CD:/APPs/XINFO), along with a set of .NFO samples in that same folder. Here is the example in that folder rendered at several different SCREEN mode resolutions on the X16 (from 80-col to a more CRT friendly 32-col mode): The same .NFO content is used, but just presented in a way suitable to the active text-mode resolution. XINFO will use the same resolution active when the program is started, or you can switch resolutions using the 1-9 and 0,-,= keys while XINFO is running.
An actual usage of XINFO is in the @CD:/XINFO folder with a few categories of content in sub-folders. This is easiest accessed using the LAUNCHER, which will look like this:
INTRO is some overview context and historical information related to the X16 system. TECHNICAL contains some common technical aspects associated with the X16, like CMDR-DOS commands, memory map, color-code table, FAQ has some frequently asked questions about the system (such as how it differs from a C64). FILEMANAGER has notes on using the FM.PRG program to navigate the CMDR-DOS file system.
Here is what one of the typical .NFO files looks like, as presented in the on-system X16 editor, followed by what the corresponding document looks like in XINFO:
The main feature is that XINFO will manage word-wrapping for you, using the full width available in the current text mode resolution. Then XINFO will also manage using the keyboard or mouse to navigate across TAG links or XLINKs (external links), as well as format commands like centering and color changes. As another example, here is a page that makes more use of colors, links, and a divider line (users can use arrow keys to cycle through the link options, or click on them with a mouse):
The supported control codes and tag-conventions are documented at the github page (here). For example “<CON:0D>” is like a paragraph break used in HTML, while “<CON:FE>” is similar to a row-wide divider line also in HTML. Titles can be centered using the “<CON:FC>” control-code (that is, centered relative to the current screen-text mode). Sometimes, such as when listing source code, you don’t want word-wrap – so there is a control code to temporarily disable that.
As mentioned, XLINK (external links) are links to other whole files (path-relative to the current NFO file being viewed). TLINK are “tag links” to other portions of the same document, as marked by a TAG. The link that will be taken (on mouse click or pressing ENTER) is displayed on the status bar at the bottom of XINFO.
When there is more content in the current .NFO file than can fit on the current screen, the status bar will show the word “[MORE]” and that means pressing SPACEBAR (or any non-action key) will show additional content. The number after “[MORE]” is the current page number, which can help keep track of where you are in a long document. You can return to the top of a document by pressing HOME, but there is currently no PGUP feature to scroll back a page.
When the last page of the document is reached, the status menu will show “[STOP]” (and continuing at this point will return back to the beginning of the document).
Command Line Arguments
Another feature of XINFO is various ways to express runtime settings. One main way is the use of command line arguments passed to the RUN command, but other ways involving POKING the settings into the Golden RAM region starting at $0400. XINFOCFG.PRG is included as an example of how to do this, which can be incorporated into a startup program like AUTOBOOT.X16
The main runtime setting is the size of the margines across the top/bottom and left/right sides of the displayed screens. Some documents may prefer no-margin, to show the most amount of content. While other documents might use PETSCII graphics tailored to a specific document size.
Limitations
XINFO does serve its purpose, as a way to create document content on the X16 and have a way to present it without worrying about creating multiple versions of that document for various display modes (and also as a way to navigate in between documents for quick reference).
But there is a learning curve in creating .NFO documents, and there was a desire to formalize the system into a ROM component so that the command could be available anywhere (to act as an on-system HELP). There was also a plan to improve the performance of XINFO, by caching bytes in from the file system rather than parsing one character at a time. As a cc65-based project, we haven’t yet crossed the bridge of making this into a ROM-able program (and probably won’t do so until there is “buy in” on the control-code concept).
Another idea proposed was to have a system like this, but use a graphical mode (for more varied font options) and allow more extensive features like embedding BMX images. Someday the “ultimate on-system X16 help” software may be developed. Meanwhile, XINFO is what was available at the time of the SD Launch content being prepared.
The Planet X16 manual also has an XINFO format. This revealed that another useful feature would be a utility to explore an NFO document into a “normal” ASCII or PETSCII document (with the control codes removed), to support that goal of being able to maintain the text content in just one place.