Atari ST series Technical Reference Manual page 27

ASCII
Control Code
07 Bell
08 Backspace
09 Tab
10-12 Line feed
13 Carriage Return
Though the console device will not print the nonprinting
ASCII characters (those whose values are below 32), it will
print the ST's extended ASCII set (characters whose value is
above 128). These include a number of Greek and Hebrew
characters as well as some math symbols. For a complete ta­
ble of the system characters, see Appendix G. For more de­
tailed information on the VT-52 Escape sequences, see Ap­
pendix E.
The ST buffers character device I/O. This means that in­
coming information from a character device and outgoing in­
formation to a character device is first stored in a reserved
memory area before being read by your program or sent to
the external device. This is done so that if the device is send­
ing information faster than your program is reading it, or if
your program is sending information faster than the device
can read it, none of the information will be lost. Though the
default buffers are sufficient for most purposes, they may not
be large enough to prevent data loss when transferring a lot
of information at very high speeds through the MIDI or se­
rial ports. In those cases, you may need to substitute your
own, larger buffer areas by using the XBIOS Iorec() routine
(see Chapter 3).
The following C language sample program BCHAR-
DEV.C demonstrates the use of some of the BIOS character
device routines. It uses the Bconstat call to monitor the con­
sole device (keyboard) input status and prints a dot every so
often if no key is struck, using Bconout. When a key is
pressed, the program reads it with Bconin and Kbshift and
prints the ASCII character, the ASCII code, and the shift and
key scan codes. The program ends when the unshifted q is
struck.
BIOS
Action
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