MMTTY has a type-ahead buffer of its own: characters go into it, a backspace
takes back one it has not transmitted, and TxBufLen says how many are left. Used
that way it paces itself, so there is no gap between characters to tune and no
baud rate to keep in step with the engine.
EngineTypeAhead does that, and Config > Digital picks between it and the pump
that is there now. Off is still the default: three things it rests on have never
been seen with a real engine.
tools/Nonemm.EngineProbe asks the engine those three questions and writes the
answers to a file. It starts MMTTY through the bridge, pushes a message, polls
TxBufLen while it goes out, backspaces over text that has and has not been
transmitted, and logs what came back on the receive side and when.
The bridge learns one verb for it: `buffer` reads TxBufLen and answers with the
count, or -1 when the control will not say. A property the control does not know
is a log line rather than an error, since it stops nothing.
TypeAhead and EngineTypeAhead share the TransmitBuffer interface, which is what
the digital window now works through, so the window does not know which one it
has.
docs/unfinished.md states what each buffer assumes and how to run the probe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RtspmWmS7f8kUvcyaHpRWZ
The pump handed the engine one character and then waited a character time
before the next, on purpose, so it stayed behind the engine rather than ahead.
That leaves the engine with an empty buffer between every two characters of a
message, and an engine with an empty buffer transmits idle rather than waiting.
The idle is added to how long the message takes, which in a contest is time
paid for nothing.
The pump now keeps two characters in the engine: one being transmitted and one
behind it, so the engine never runs dry. The clock at the baud rate says when
the engine has room for the next one, and the engine reporting that it has
stopped transmitting sets the estimate back to an empty buffer.
The last two characters are now beyond reach rather than the last one. Everything
before them can still be rewritten, which is what the pane is for.
A message is finished when the buffer is empty and the engine is estimated to
have transmitted what it holds, so {END} and {RX} no longer run while the engine
still has the last characters of the message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RtspmWmS7f8kUvcyaHpRWZ
A digital engine takes a whole message and transmits it at 45.45 baud, which
takes several seconds. Once it has the message nothing can be changed, so an
operator who sees the wrong call going out has to stop the transmission and
start again.
TypeAhead keeps the message instead and feeds the engine one character at a
time. What has not gone out yet can be rewritten, added to or deleted. Cursor
is how much of it may go: the pump stops there and the engine idles on the air,
which is the diddle a RTTY engine sends between characters anyway.
The pump counts character times off the clock at the baud rate rather than
asking the engine what it has left, so it runs a little behind: a gap between
two characters is idle on the air and costs nothing, while feeding faster than
the engine transmits would put text out of reach again.
Every digital message goes through it — the function keys, ESM, the QTC window
and the digital window's own buttons — because they all send through
DigitalEngineSender. Finished is now raised when the buffer runs dry, which is
when the message has really gone, so what stands after {END} runs then and {RX}
drops the transmitter at the right moment. The transmitter dropping only counts
as the end when nothing is left to send: an engine that keys itself off what it
is given drops between two characters as well.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RoGtneMQaz4M9w7Kk49AVD
