I took a detour for a minute and decided to make what I thought was an easy change and add cases to the switch statement in the input loop. Now I've got problems. Backing out vdp copy code changes for now.

To start with, there were a lot of errors like "(.text+0x15dc): undefined reference to `.L388'". That was fixed by changing the case label format in the compiler. The common unnamned label looks like ".L192", but the "." symbol is not supported in the TI assembler. Earlier, I changed to the "L192" format, but I missed this usage. The mismatch resulted in all the link errors.

That done, all key checks in the switch no longer work. I need to analyse the jump table to see what the heck is going on here.

switch labels:
data L386 - default
data L387 - 'S', 8,83, 0x08,0x53
data L388 - 'D', 9,68, 0x09,0x44
data L389 - 'X',10,88, 0x0A,0x58
data L390 - 'E',11,69, 0x0B,0x45
data L391 - ' ',13,32, 0x0D,0x20

jump calculation:
movb r9, r1
ai r1, >F800 <-- R1-=8, (min case=8)
ci r1, >50FF <-- check for max case (0x58-8=0x50)
jle JMP_13
b @L386 <-- beyond case extent, use default
JMP_13
srl r1, 8 <-- convert to int, 0<=R1<=0x50
a r1, r1 <-- convert to byte offset
b @L392(r1) <-- jump to case

Jump table:
index 0,75 -> L387 -> S
index 1,60 -> L388 -> D
index 2,80 -> L389 -> X
index 3,61 -> L390 -> E
index 5,24 -> L391 -> space
all else -> L386

After looking at this code for a long time, I think I know what's going on.

It's the instruction "b @L392(r1)". I looked through the E/A manual and the 9900 data sheets, and as far as I can tell, the next instruction exectued wil be the one at L392+r1. This seems obvious, but I'm used to working with machines which would instead load the value at this address, then jump to the loaded address. I need to change that to:

mov @L392(r1), r1
b *r1

That means more digging into GCC. I'd also like to find the code which decides when to use a jump table. This example seems like it would be smaller with nested if's

Well, the switch vs. if code was not found, but the correct branch code has been implemented, and works just fine.