I have explored state machines and they just seem like they belong more in VHDL than C or ASM my own prejudice. This may very well be the best way to accomplish a menu system and that’s why I decided to ask on here to get others opinions.

As an answer to the other two posts I have tried state machines, a recursive menu tree (exhausted the stack pretty quick), a character array based setup, and a setup using pointers to a character arrays that setup the screen for each menu.

Each of these seem to produce code at least twice the size I would expect. I admit I have not done it in ASM yet which probably would help a lot. The one i currently like was posted a while back it seems simple enough in c but the code size generated adds 1k of code to the file.



I like this as it is easy to follow and it looked like it would be nice and tight. This still seems to get a bit large and since I am limited to 16K internal ROM on the 89c420 if it gets to large I'm dead in the water. When I get something I feel like I can implement I have about 20 menu items as 5-9 characters a piece. That gives about 200 bytes of text. In any event I'm interested in other methodologies that are used. If anyone is willing to share let me know.