ResiDOS Programming: Packages

As well as writing application programs which access facilities provided by ResiDOS and other packages, it is also possible to write your own package which can be installed and uninstalled using the standard %INSTALL and %UNINSTALL commands. Such packages can provide any or all of the following:

package calls that can be accessed by machine-code applications, or by other packages
additional BASIC commands (eg like the %TAPEIN command in the TapeIO package)
hook code support (useful for emulating hardware such as Interface 1)
extended channels, that can be OPEN #ed or CLOSE #ed like standard channels
filesystems that can provide access to another type of filesystem (such as FAT, ext2 etc) through the normal ResiDOS commands and interfaces such as LOAD %
an NMI handler (to replace the existing TaskMan package)
an IM1 handler (on every interrupt, ResiDOS will call each package that has registered a handler)

Packages can use all the facilities available to application programs (ie making calls to other packages etc), although the calling conventions differ slightly.

Not much online documentation for writing packages is available. However, you can download the following example package, TestPkg which has extensive comments and documentation within it, showing how to provide most of the facilities. You will also need the resitools.zip archive, which contains definitions used in the example package. The main feature not considered by the example package is providing a filesystem; an example of this can instead be found in the source of the FATfs package, also available below. For information on anything unclear or not discussed, and to obtain an official ID for your package, please contact me.

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