Hello!
I would like to keep MiNT behaving like it does now. The great advantage for now is, that MiNT makes no assumptions about any devices except the CPU.
You speak against yourself :-) You already complained in private e-mails about all the hazzle and ugly code we have in bios.c and biosfs.c that is necessary to use the TOS-BIOS devices. It's slow and inefficient too as the BIOS device are not interrupt driven and need to be polled.
E.g. all the reasons for implementing native drivers for the serial ports you can perfectly apply to the remaining console device too.
Btw. FreeMiNT already catch keyboard input by hacking into TOS, just to catch ctr-alt-del (I'm sure you aggree that this is a very good idea) and for scan code mapping (keyboard language mapping).
I aggree that it's useful to have some low-level BIOS that do all the hardware initialization stuff.
For a new hardware you always need to write new drivers. And things are much easier if you use and advanced interface to the kernel instead using a single-tasking designed API from TOS from the year 1985.
very small (ca. 600 lines of code). It supports character output and keyboard input (over a serial connection).
You do this over which interface? TOS-BIOS? Regards, Frank -- ATARI FALCON 060 // MILAN 060 ----------------------------------------- http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~fnaumann/ e-Mail: fnaumann@freemint.de