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1. C 1 pCL 7 3 E 47 TYPE 1 R 1 p CELL 1 1 p2 3 4 C 18 CHARS JAV OI0 LINECTYPE 11 OPOKE PK9 START 0 80 1R 0 C VFASTGRID OIV e FASTGRID iE A NOBLANK C 2 OTCC5 1 1tpPK9 p3 SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 177 August September 1985 3 CHAR9 POKE PK9 If you wish the program to fill the grid with information or to let a user enter information in the grid you can write a function which calls up SETCURS which will set the cursor to any screen row and colum not grid row and column VSETCURSLOIV C o0 R SETCURS C PUE ASETS POS OF CURSOR ON SCREEN TO ROW R COL C C 2 0 Op 256 1 F COOSYS 45191 Ed The Fibonacci series interests mathematicians and programmers Writing a pro gram to generate Fibonacci numbers is a good exercise If you re not familiar with this series The first and second Fibonacci numbers are both 1 Each subsequent Fibonacci number is the sum of the two immediately preceding it in the series Thus the first 10 numbers in the series are 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 We can easily write a recursive function in direct definition which will return a specific Fibonacci number try it yourself before reading on FIB 10 returns 55 the 10th Fibonacci number FIB FIB w 1 FIB w 2 w 1 Vw 2 1 Recursive functions can be SLOW in SuperPET APL Try generating some larger Fibonacci numbers and see for yourself how the system slows down to a crawl In the last column we discussed APL idioms Sinc
2. 130 140 150 160 170 180 190 200 210 220 230 240 machine language loader from SuperPET Gazette Vol I issue 13 p 220 if loaded 0 Program by P J Rovero loaded 1 April 4 85 poke hex 22 hex 7f hex ff Set memend_ to 7fff chain icom9 mod prg names load ML routine else poke hex 22 hex 7e 254 MemEnd_ to 7EFE to protect ML routine open 40 keyboard output print 40 delete 100 200 chr 13 edit chr 13 run chr 13 endif stop Make one call to set up the VIA properly call set_via s remainder of program displays on screen the various modes available and asks for the frequency setting desired When this data is input SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 164 August September 1985 250 it is poked to the command buffer in the ML routine which is then 260 SYS d as shown below The command buffer starts at 7F62 270 280 for jj 1 to 9 290 poke hex 7f61 jj ord icom_freq jj 3j 300 next jj 310 poke hex 7f 61 10 0 End the string with a 00 320 print icom freq 330 call send_it 340 350 proc set_via SYS the address of set via 360 sys hex 7f01 370 endproc 380 390 proc send it SYS the address of send it in the 400 sys hex 7f23 ML routine 410 endproc The technique is easy to extend A simple filter which passes a disk file through the simulated Centronics port will be printed in the next issue of the Gazette it may be used to send a
3. for that governs what characters are substituted for those in our original message xref getrec_ putrec_ islower_ printf_ System routines to be used buf1 equ 1500 Buffer 1 will hold the original message buf2 equ 1600 Buffer 2 will hold the encrypted message msize equ 80 Maximum size of the message will be one screen line Get the message from the screen and store in buffer 1 ldd msize Get one line or less This is P2 for GETREC pshs d ldd buf1 The address of buffer 1 is P1 for GETREC jsr getrec_ Get record from terminal Number of chars read returns in B leas 2 s End the string with a null and print it for verification ldx buf1 pshs x This address is the substitution address P2 of printf_ abx Add the number of characters read to address of buffer clr x This ends our original message with a null ldd msg1 Message 1 prints Your text message was jsr printf_ and prints the original message leas 2 s Check message for illegal characters abort if any found ldx buf1 loop ldb x quif eq cmpb Check for spaces if ne gt If not a space jsr islower_ if eq 0000 returns for FALSE we found a character NOT in ldd msg2 3 lower case alphabetics jsr printf swi Error so abort program endif endif endloop Well if there was no error 3 We begin translating the message into code using the TABLE at end program ldu buf 1 Load address of original m
4. j 9220 next j 9230 next i 9240 for i 1 to 8 9250 for j 71 to 75 9260 poke location j 9270 next j 9280 next i 9290 poke 59467 O 9300 endproc Those of you with 8250 drives may not be interested in a new 1001 drive even so read the section on REL files at the end of the the article following Ed AN INEXPENSIVE ONE MEGABYTE DRIVE Most of you probably have seen ads for DEVICE SWITCHING MEMORY WRITES the Commodore SFD 1001 single drive it AND RUNNING PROGRAMS IN BEDIT seems to be in performance one half of an 8250 drive double sided with a for matted capacity of about one megabyte We ve seen it priced from 199 to 399 It s an IEEE device We learned that Associate Editor Reg Beck had bought one his SuperPET and he are happy with it in event you re thinking about supplemen ting that old drive It is sold by Progressive Peripherals amp Software 2186 South Holly Suite 200 Denver CO 80222 303 759 5713 and is being advertised and discounted pretty heavily See your favorite computer magazine Reg Beck sent us a short article describing his struggles to get up and running with the 1001 drive because you face these problems with any second drive and we suspect a lot of you may get one we expand on Reg s material below Once you buy a second drive you gotta problem Any 8x50 or 4040 and the new 1001 will default to device 8 you can t talk to either drive until you software reset one of them to a ne
5. 18 seconds in the GOTO version in HALGOL an 18 increase in speed It seems that good structure speeds up execution because it represents a minimal path through code in any language we suspect Whilst trying to reduce the run time in the Sieve we inadvertently discovered that you may next i as often as you wish in a FOR NEXT loop in microBASIC without a syntax error We show such a loop below to illustrate At each NEXT i execution jumps back to the FOR NEXT line for i zero to size if flags i then NEXT i Why not prime i i three k prime i count count one if k gt size then NEXT i Why not for j k to size step prime flags j one next j NEXT i SCHEMATICS AVAILABLE Thanks to the labors of a couple of ISPUGgers we have in hand a 55 page set of schematics which they say define the circuits and chips for both 2 and 3 board SuperPETs they also define sources and types for chips including EPROMs to replace any bad ROMS If you want a set ORDER NOW We ll hire somebody to slave over that hot Xerox machine and make enough copies to fill the orders We will not stock this item Order from ISPUG PO Box 411 Hat teras N C 27943 Price is reproduction cost plus postage 11 U S We ll have to delay until all orders are in before we can print and ship MAN VERSUS PERSON We aren t unsympathetic to the feminists for we do think that women have had a raw deal for a couple of millennia
6. Expanded Relative File ERF capability of the 8250 or the 1001 or the files will not copy Reg Enable ERF says the commands at left do the trick You may PRINT M W lt 164 gt lt 67 gt lt 1 gt lt 0 gt them directly from BEDIT or BEDCALC or stuff them into a batch file which uses EXEC Be sure to reset the 8250 or 1001 to expanded ERF when you are through copying You must disable ERF if you want to read 8050 formatted REL files on an 8250 or 1001 Last a warning You must initialize the 8250 or the 1001 with p ieeeX 15 i lt RETURN gt before you send the ERF enable disable The lower case i initalizes both drives of an 8250 or the single drive of a 1001 You can send it in upper case if you want or you can PRINT it instead of PUTting it Doesn t matter thanks to Joe Bostic The early disk drive user manuals we received from Commodore held no material at all on changing device numbers on drives for those in the same boat we sum marize the information below SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 168 August September 1985 HARDWARE DEVICE NUMBERS We always work with two drives the second is hard wired as device 9 for good and obvious reasons Unless you know your way around electronic gear you should have the modifications we discuss done by someone who does Lift the lid on any 8x50 or 4040 drive look at the top board the one inside the lid itself Near the bottom Device No Pin 22 Pin 25 Pin 24 of the board you ll see a large
7. TPUG will convert any 0S 9 Level I software that is purchased from any vendor provided SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 179 August September 1985 that the software is distributed on an 8 SS SD disk There is a 25 charge per package for this conversion which includes the mailing media and testing Mail to TPUG at the address below include your own disk format name and address PUBLIC DOMAIN SOFTWARE Our Major Interest XLISP avail July 1985 A subset of LISP and SMALL TALK 80 artificial intel ligence language Includes object code 20K ready to run full source in C and manual XCOM9 avail August 1985 A Freeware terminal program includes executable object full assembler source manual Utilities Package to be available in September 1985 RatAsm OS 9 filter that converts Waterloo structured assembler to 0S 9 format COP copy and replace a file TREE Display hierarchical directories WC A word count facility GREP String search and display facility AT Submit jobs at specified times STRIP Remove add file control characters DATES Personal secretary and reminder service Many OS 9 programs are available on the OS 9 SIG on Compuserve if you are a member of the OS 9 National Users Group 25 to P O Box 7586 Des Moines Iowa 50322 Before you spend time and money downloading this software remember that TPUG already has much of this library and is converting it to run on SuperPET The user s group is st
8. acknowledge CA1 and pin M is strobe CB2 an output Always connect to the User Port with the computer turned OFF Also note that negative logic means that the pulses occur when the lines are pulled low nominal zero volts and that the lines are high 5 volts in the absence of a pulse The 6522 VIA is a very flexible device It can also be a very confusing device A complete description of the VIA and its capabilities and quirks would take many pages You ll find good background material in the books at left The VIA configuration demonstrated 1 Programming the PET CBM Raeto West pp 386 390 here is only one of many 2 PET Interfacing Downey amp Roberts pp 33 50 that are possible In the 3 6502 Software Design Leo J Scanlon pp 192 218 first application I con trol a radio transceiver through a Centronics compatible interface on the transceiver itself and do it from microBASIC with the assembly language program shown in listing 1 SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 162 August September 1985 Next issue we ll see how to output any disk file from main menu to a Centronics printer hooked to the User Port which probably interests more people than my radio application Even so the listings below may be useful for those who want to know how to use the User Port as well as how to do it from language The program in listing 1 has only one purpose to control the transceiver It holds two subroutines 1 set_via which configure
9. as each line is entered you get error messages if the line is in any way wrong You can LIST a line with a followed by a line number if you wish rather than using LIST With Terry s Commodore version you may enter code in either upper or lower case the compil ler converts keywords to upper case Except for the use of labels instead of line numbers GOTO and GOSUB are used in the customary way I find it very convenient to be able to declare local variables in a subroutine thus avoiding name conflicts If only the language allowed parameters to be passed to subroutines as we can do in microBASIC or in COMAL HALGOL would be closer to being heavenly Concerning strings I can understand your aversion to declaring string lengths Early on I had no particular need for strings as a result of FORTRAN upbring ing Then with CBM machines I got accustomed to them But the garbage collection and contortions necessary to manipulate strings only prepared me for the change to dimensioned strings I think this is a small price to pay to avoid garbage collection Ed Maximum string length in HALGOL is 255 characters HALGOL defaults to a string length of 16 characters Since arrays must be dim ensioned in any case string arrays of other than default length require little additional effort DIM a n 100 instead of DIM a n Other strings require a DIM i e DIM a 56 HALGOL provides STR a 7 4 to refer to the substring starting at charact
10. chip Wanted ours is 6532 in socket UE1 Just left of the socket are three circular spots 8 0 0 0 in the traces on the board itself 9 0 0 1 10 0 1 0 Pin 22 11 0 1 1 Pin 23 6532 chip 12 1 0 0 Pin 24 in UE1 O means leave alone 1 means cut trace Cut the center trace on or bend this pin so that it doesn t en 24 to obtain device 9 ter the socket when chip is replaced Pins 22 23 and 24 of the chip in UE1 are normally grounded by the traces You have three choices 1 remove the chip bend the appropriate pin and re install the chip 2 scratch out cut the trace as shown in the table above for permanent change We ve marked the place to cut for device 9 in the sketch at the small center trace between the large circular spots shown see the carat for exact position last 3 if you feel this will reduce the resale value of a drive you can set in a switch but it is not a job for amateurs The switch cannot bounce make several contacts it cannot affect the circuit it s in and it should never get flipped accidentally It should only be switched when the drive is off unless you use the UJ command defined in the drive manual Pick the method which suits your needs THE ACIA AND HOW TO USE IT The 6551 ACIA in SuperPET is the chip resposible FOR INTERRUPT DRIVEN TC for running SuperPET s serial port ACIA means by Loch Rose Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter Associate Editor we ll lat
11. compete against Apple in software As if that weren t enough the new Amiga from Commodore is far superior to the ST and no more expensive than a Mac BYTE magazine has long disdained Commodore products noting them if at all with quiet condescension The August issue features the Amiga a rave product review and an editorial praising it as a machine to rekindle the enthusiasm which drives personal computing The September issue of COMPUTE had an orgasm Why the enthusiasm It s a home computer a graphics computer a music computer a sound computer a business computer a game computer a hacker s computer all rolled into one One reviewer said it s a general purpose machine which excels at special applications It may cool you off to know that the operating system library occupies 192K bytes compared to 24K for SuperPET and that the techni cal data to explain it is in like proportion The numbers following do not tell the story read the reviews if you can locate them Amiga unlike Macintosh has freed the 68000 from handling either graphics or sound by employing custom chips the graphics are reported dazzling At 1295 the basic machine has 256K bytes of RAM and one cutesy wee drive 880K bytes double sided plus some bundled software on which the reviews disagree You ll have to shell out about 2300 total for two drives add on RAM 512K bytes total in the system enclosure and a color monitor The architecture is open the bu
12. from 8 to 9 and 1001 drives Put the screen cursor on the M W M W lt 12 gt lt 0 gt lt 2 gt lt 41 gt lt 73 gt command line and issue the PRINT commands shown e print ieee8 15 preceded by a dot which sends only the M W line to the disk command channel Change device from 9 to 8 M W lt 12 gt lt 0 gt lt 2 gt lt 40 gt lt 72 gt File PUT these commands to disk and GET them as e print ieee9 15 you need them Don t try to EXECute them from disk SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 167 August September 1985 in BEDIT because the device number is changed in the midst of a file operation SuperPET tries to close a file on the old device not the new one and can t as Bodworth found out In sum PUT these commands to disk GET them into BEDIT as needed and then PRINT them to ieeeX 15 SECOND HURDLE DEPT You now decide to copy some old disks to the new big 1001 disk Sorry to tell you that there is no way to copy entire disks between devices in SuperPET in 6809 mode with the software which came with SPET But you do have four ways to solve the problem 1 You may rename all your files in capital letters and copy disks in 6502 mode it s both impractical and slow 2 You can buy MicroPIP and its manual from Waterloo a recommended buy if you have a lot of disk work to do but somewhat expensive at 75 See the review of that program in Vol I No 9 p 129 It copies whole disks flawlessly be tween devices but is both slow and complex i
13. has been stationed overseas where U S Naval Air Station FPO New York 09523 telephone calls must pass through telephone systems owned and oper ated by governments we refuse to use the words run by because the systems may crawl or refuse to run at all Add to this notorious unreliability the costs of transocean transmission and we aren t surprised by Josh s resorting to radio as a simpler and far more reliable way to communicate I have a special modem connected to my serial port which allows me to telecommu nicate by radio it works well But I needed a way to control the radio set it self from SuperPET that set was configured to accept commands using Centronics parallel protocol which isn t supported by our software I therefore wrote such software to output through the User Port on SuperPET With it you may continue to use both the IEEE and Serial Ports and send Centronics output through the User Port not only for my radio but for printers which use Centronics output This article introduces you to the problems of simulating a Centronics port The next article will provide a filter program which lets you couple any Centronics compatible printer to the SuperPET user port The location of the User Port on SPET is sketched at left it lies just to the right of the IEEE port most of us use looking at SPET IEEE User Port from the top or front You may connect to it with the Lf same type of push on connector used on the IEEE
14. or test the logic level of a line I knew was changing I therefore had to abandon any use of CB1 and used CA1 instead It works well The terminology on protocols may be a little confusing Both STROBE and ACK are negative logic often shown by an underline above the names as at left but we _ ___ s can t print them that way on a Commodore machine so we ll have to STB ACK make do with NSTB or NSTROBE and NACK BUSY is a positive logic sig nal 5 volts when true We wait for it to go low or false which shows unbusy That is the same as waiting for NACK to go low meaning true acknowledged When we get a negative transition no 5 volts on SPET s user port Pin B the protocols noted below are satisfied we can transmit Many printers and other devices utilize the Centronics parallel protocol which provides for 8 data bits in parallel with a two or three wire handshake Most devices use one of two different two wire handshakes as shown at left My pro grams use the strobe acknowledge method Strobe acknowledge They configure the 6522 VIA in SPET as an both signals with negative logic output port which can send a strobe pulse Strobe busy and can sense the acknowledge pulse sent strobe negative busy positive back by the printer or other device Port A of the 6522 VIA is already connected to the SPET user port Pins C thru L are the eight data pins for the eight data bits C 1 weight bit L 128 weight bit pin B is
15. over to them so that you may now equip SuperPET with up to two megabytes of RAM There are two ver Vanilla Beacoup Grande sions of the Grande one with 150 nanosecond RAM With One Wait State which is priced at left and a second with 120 nsec RAM with no wait state at all Included in the 0 5 Mbytes 725 prices are installation instructions HALGOL and its docu 1 0 Mbytes 815 mentation some 8032 replacement EPROMS and demonstration 1 5 Mbytes 905 software Terry Peterson says the EPROMs are not of great 2 0 Mbytes 995 interest to SPETters for they require soldering desolder ing if installed they louse up 6809 side operations Do Beaucoup Grande not use them No Wait State 0 5 Mbytes 741 Anybody who dives into this gear should subscribe to DTACK 1 0 Mbytes 847 GROUNDED Hal s newsletter and should get back issues It 1 5 Mbytes 953 costs 15 for ten issues Write DA at the address given in 2 0 Mbytes 1059 the first paragraph of this article 3 Power Supply and Case You must put the Grande in an enclosure and provide some power DA makes a stainless steel case and power supply which will hold any Grande plus an optional medium high resolution graphics board and a fast high density 1 megabyte disk drive controller board which is being worked on and is not yet available The Grande works without either optional board Case and power supply cost 195 Terry P recommends that all but inveterate hardware hackers buy this rig T
16. the BASIC editor you need the POWER chip or something similar and assemble it with a SYS call The disk holds versions for the PET CBM C64 and VIC 20 the book explains the assembler and holds the source code plus many examples Reg says the assembler is pretty fast THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF DICKY DUMBJOHN All our disk drives went bad on the very same day We assembled and linked a program named test in Development and tried to load it in the monitor with gt l test mod only 4 to have the disk drive report no such file At left is what emod PRG we saw on directory Bad disk we sighed and tried again Same problem Bad drive said we and tried another drive Oh God Same problem We shut down and cold started Same problem We tried John Toebes new linker Same problem For four hours we tried everything our mind could conceive Major bug said we Well the major bug resided between our ears As even Bodsworth knows the first line in a command file must contain the name to be given to a mod file the name must be in quotation marks We should have entered test on that first line instead it read test cmd The poor linker dumb beast test finding no title for the mod file obediently located a carriage vs return there and so named the file CR mod which in calmer re 3 test cmd rospect is splendidly logical When we told John Toebes what had happened he had hysterics but finally did promise to fix his new l
17. writes about dirt in computers seems he d never cleaned an old computer moved it and then suddenly found it wouldn t work He called in an expert who said the move had shifted the dirt and shorted out the board The expert removed all boards and cleaned with compressed air and some commercial solvents TV tuner cleaner some Instant FD Zero Residue Cleaner mostly trichlorotrifluoroethane and a can of DE OX IDE All cables and sockets were cleansed with the cleaners above and then treated with DE OX IDE which removes what else oxide corrosion Connec tors and cables were then re installed all chips pressed firmly into sockets and the computer ran Shortly after we saw the article Marlene Pratto wrote us that when her 3 board SPET turned flakey her husband took it apart and cleaned it with Blue Shower from a local electronics store When put back together SPET worked perfectly We ve never done this but pass the word Marlene Pratto also loves MacInker a gadget which re inks cloth ribbons without mess see ads in COMPUTE and BYTE she calls it a terrific machine From the SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 154 August September 1985 dim print on the letters we get about 80 of ISPUG members should buy one NEW SERVICE NUMBER AT COMMODORE In II 3 Tony Klinkert gave a phone number to be used for repair service at Commodore s main plant in West Chester PA Lee Seymour writes that it s wrong There s a toll free service number
18. 714 Routine prints char in B register to screen ACIAdata equ eff0 ACIAstat equ eff1 send pshs b Save a copy of outgoing byte on stack clra jsr bputscen Print byte on screen loop loop lda ACTAstat Load status bita 00001000 Is ACIAstat bit 3 byte received set quif eq 3NO byte not received quit sei YES received Mask off interrupt jsr input deal with received byte cli endloop anda 00010000 Is bit 4 byte transmitted set until ne YES go ahead and transmit new byte puls b Restore outgoing byte and transmit stb ACTAdata by storing outgoing byte in data register rts Note that it is essential to wait until the byte transmitted flag is set You otherwise might put a new byte into ACIAdata before its predecessor is sent Finally when you are through with TC you should disenable the receiver inter rupt and return interrupt handling to the usual routine 3 signoff asm Disconnects user interrupt handler disenables receiver interrupt xdef signoff regIRQ equ deOb ACIAcmd equ eff2 signoff sei Mask off interrupts lda ACIAcmd ora 00000010 Disenable receiver interrupt sta ACTAcmd ldd regIRQ Address of usual interrupt handler std 0108 Restore usual interrupt handler cli Reenable interrupts rts If you want to combine these routines for TC use main asm below It employs the subroutines to create a working telecommunications program smain asm Mainline routine which call
19. 800 247 9000 manned from 9 a m to 12 midnight E S T Monday through Friday We called and the people on duty are courteous and knowledgeable For repair you must call 215 431 9235 for a Repair Authorization RA number Depending on where you live you will be told where to ship your equipment there are several ser vice centers The rumor that SuperPET is no longer being repaired at the main plant is not true Commodore is directing the work to several sites We strongly advise you not to write Commodore you won t get an answer call OOPS AHEM and WHOA DEPT The EXEC file SCRCOPY EXE which is printed in the tutorial on batch files on ISPUG Utility disk II has a minor error in it all errors we make are minor after all we edit this rag We d ran and tested the file with an earlier BEDIT the final ver sion of BEDIT encloses all NOT searches and deletes in two backslashes see above The d on disk is wrong and fails to delete all lines which do NOT have a quotation mark in them Please change the file INEXPENSIVE 6502 ASSEMBLER We reviewed the excellent Waterloo 6502 Develop ment system in II 4 page 104 which runs in 6809 mode and lets you write code in the microFditor It costs 250 Reginald Wood of Hawaii writes that he uses the Label Assembler Development System LADS from COMPUTE books get The Sec ond Book of Machine Language by Mansfield 14 95 and the accompanying disk 12 95 You write source code in
20. 82 6 On SuperPET MicroBasic HALGOL 150 0 2 46 PC Basic 69 2 True Basic 19 7 The Dr Dobbs benchmark as modified by Terry Peterson and published in Vol II issue 1 compares as follows time in seconds HALGOL time is on an Apple it shouldn t make any difference except for math chip support SuperPET HALGOL Macintosh Basic Apple II mBasic BASIC 4 No math chip 32081 chip 586 488 780 552 16 8 Del We do wish that the language optionally allowed indented lines for those with weak eyeballs and a liking for structure we d love to see the option of IF ee BLSOE ELSEIF ENDIF and various loop and case structures having spent far too much of our life puzzling out and amending the code we wrote last month to ever go back to using unindented unstructured sphaghetti code We don t insist that everybody must use structure as Pascal does we simply want the option for we dislike a language whose programs aren t both easy to read and easy to maintain in our business you expend far more effort maintaining programs than ever you did to write them the doggone world keeps changing SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 157 August September 1985 We d like to see a single symbol or whatever to block off a comment line instead of that darn REM We miss the power of index to locate a substring within a string though Hal tells us he definitely will implement it We dislike the requirement that you must dimension every st
21. Barnes Editor PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 SuperPET is a trademark of Commodore Business Machines Inc WordPro that of Professional Software Inc Contents of this issue copyrighted by ISPUG 1985 except as otherwise shown excerpts may be reprinted for review or information if the source is quoted TPUG and members of ISPUG may copy any material Send appropriate postpaid reply envelopes with inquiries and submissions Canadians enclose Canadian dimes or quarters for postage The Gazette comes with member ship in ISPUG ASSOCIATE EDITORS Terry Peterson 8628 Edgehill Court El Cerrito California 94530 Gary L Ratliff Sr 215 Pemberton Drive Pearl Mississippi 39208 Stanley Brockman 11715 West 33rd Place Wheat Ridge Colorado 80033 Loch H Rose 102 Fresh Pond Parkway Cambridge Massachusetts 02138 Reginald Beck Box 16 Glen Drive Fox Mountain RR 2 B C Canada V2G 2P2 John D Frost 7722 Fauntleroy Way S W Seattle Washington 98136 Fred Foldvary 1920 Cedar Street Berkeley California 94709 Table of Contents Issue 6 Volume II The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga 151 Drive Folly Those teeny disks 153 Multiple NEXT I in mBASIC 2 153 SUPEFPET Schematics 2 ccccecsevovsevelIo High Resolution Graphics 154 Cleaning That Computer cccrceceree LIA Service at Commodore e ecccceee ee 01DD HALGOL and The Grande ceceseeeeee 00158 User Comments on HALGOL 2 159 A Centronics Port for SuperPET 161 Avy Au
22. I No 6 160 August September 1985 In conclusion however I am very satisfied with the 512K Grande board power supply and case Terry Peterson s ASSEMB68K cross assembler is very easy to use and quite fast I have great expectations for HALGOL as it becomes more com plete Then the need for more memory and speed will inevitably arise When it does I expect to add the math board which supports the National Semiconductor 32081 math chip and a memory expansion board Hal Hardenbergh in his newsletter indicates that several new features will be forthcoming 1 a DOS in 68000 to run the fast Mitsubishi 5 inch drives 1 2 Megabytes at very fast data transfer rates 2 a high resolution graphics board using a high resolution monitor Except for the expense and the fact that all this gear will be on an aging and discontinued SuperPET the result should be an excellent system Ed Just as we went to press we learned that DA hardware and software will be adaptable to any terminal not just to SuperPET as soon as DA issues its DOS for the potent Mitsubishi drives and the high res graphics board mentioned above Which means that the DA gear is not tied forever to an aging and discontinued SuperPET but may be moved en bloc to other terminals At the moment SuperPET is merely a host providing a screen keyboard disk drives and some I O routines A SIMULATED CENTRONICS PORT FOR SUPERPET Ed Josh Rovero for some months by P J Rovero
23. No 11 3 50 No 14 3 75 No 3 1 25 No 6 3 75 No 9 2 75 No 12 3 50 No 15 3 75 No 4 1 25 No 7 2 50 No 10 2 50 No 13 3 75 Set 36 00 wn e e e e m e e e e e m e e e e e e e a a Volume II Numbers 1 thru 6 3 75 each Send check to the Editor PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 Add 30 to prices above for additional postage if outside North America Make checks to ISPUG DUES IN U S DOLLARS U S U S DOLLARS U S U S DOLLARS APPLICATION FOR MEMBERSHIP INTERNATIONAL SUPERPET USERS GROUP A non profit organization of SuperPET Users Name Disk Drive Printer Address Street PO Box City or Town State Province Country Postal ID Check if you re renewing clip and mail this form with address label please If you send the address label or a copy you needn t fill in the form above For Canada and the U S Enclose Annual Dues of 15 00 U S by check payable to ISPUG in U S Dollars DUES ELSEWHERE 25 U S Mail to ISPUG PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 USA SCHOOLS send check with Purchase Order We do not voucher or send bills SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 181 August September 1985 This journal is published by the International SuperPET Users Group ISPUG a non profit association purpose interchange of useful data Offices at PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 Please mail all inquiries manuscripts and applica tions for membership to Dick
24. On the other hand the effort to change English so it isn t sexist may have taken the wrong path Now adays anyone who releases news to the press is called a spokesperson even though she may be a spokeswoman or he a spokesman Shall we carry person to SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 153 August September 1985 its logical penultimates horseperson garbageperson milkperson bogeyperson Gee what do we do with oneupsmanship Oneupspersonship Try personkind personikin personslaughter and personhole or consider an at tack by a person eating shark If you are still with us ask if the Russians would be unpersoned by a threat to settle a dispute with a couple divisions of of infantrypersons supported by some determined artillerypersons and a task force of tankpersons Would they back down or would they personhandle us with their own armed personpower Would both sides dispatch a fleet of well personed persons o war into the Persian Gulf Does this note constitute unpersonly fun and gamespersonship No we draw your attention to what can happen when you begin to personipulate the language on the behalf of wopersons with the wrong word Person is patent foolishness it ain t gonna fly COPYING REL FILES ON MICROPOLIS DRIVES Those of you who own Micropolis made 8050 drives may think you ve crashed when you try to copy a long RELative file the light on the copy from drive comes on the light on the copy to drive often fails to light u
25. September 1985 DRIVE FOLLY No reader of the Gazette can doubt that we dislike the wee 3 5 inch drives which the computer industry is trying to cram down our throats If you question our logic consider that Commodore recently demonstrated the Amiga in IBM PC compatible mode running Lotus 1 2 3 but with add on 5 inch drives Splendid Want PC compatibility Buy an extra set of drives The decision to use wee drives on a computer designed to sell in the business market where the IBM PC is standard with 5 inch drives strikes us as luminescent folly especi ially when IBM provides 1 2 megabyte 5 inchers on the AT As if that were not enough ask how you will back up any hard disk If you say by tape we can only quote Bill Gates of Microsoft The makers of tape backup systems will burn in hell If you say by disk we hope you re happy while you back up 20 megs on 23 or more wee disks The job is bad enough on 1 2 megabyte 5 inchers of which you ll need 17 Only the makers of the expensive Bernoulli box have come up with a simple and reliable backup for hard disks Until we see an inexpensive solution we want no wee disks on any computer we own ONCE OVER LIGHTLY Last issue we showed how a little structure substituted Miscellany for GOTO could halve the time in which the sieve of Era tosthenes would execute Later guru Terry Peterson sent a HALGOL timing of the structured version which executes in 1 79 seconds down from 2
26. The RMS root mean square error which was reported for Terry Peterson s version of the Dr Dobbs Benchmark in Vol II No 1 pe 4 more accurately reflects the quality of the transcendental math and FP arithmetic routines in HALGOL Errors Reported in Various Languages in Calculations Benchmark HALGOL microBASIC BASIC 4 0 True Basic BetterBasic Turbo Pascal O 0 0 4 583 E 13 0 1 3384 E 08 HALGOL is rapidly becoming more and more complete The current CBM version from Terry Peterson is an excellent job of transporting HALGOL to SuperPET I think his BIOS basic input output system for the host and the 68000 board will prove to be useful as a nucleus for the I O needed with languages or programs other than HALGOL SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 159 August September 1985 Though HALGOL does not now have an immediate mode in the same sense that other BASICs do you have operating commands including LOAD SAVE HPR aaaa aa that s hex for a memory dump HPOKE aaaa aa poke to memory LIST RUN SHIFT RUN a screen dump RENUM SELECT to redirect listings output or error messages to printer and maybe to other devices in the future as well as some others The combination is a very convenient operating environment Line numbers in increments of 10 are automatically provided after entry of the first line unless you insert new lines by using new line numbers which fall be ween existing line numbers Syntax is checked
27. The new 68000 machines are out Atari s ST and the Amiga from Commodore Three ISPUGgers have bought ST s with color monitors for 995 all report they are unable to penetrate below the Mac like GEM interface access the 68000 or use the underlying operating system As with the C64 the computer is in the keyboard enclosure with 512K bytes of RAM A separate power supply is required for the computer and for each disk drive With the two button mouse and two drives you must cable together eight separate units Have a large desk and a tolerance for a warren of cables Two users report they don t like the mouse at least you have an option with the ST unlike Macintosh it provides cursor con trols on the keyboard Atari short of money is trickling the machines out to dealers and supporting it with what little advertising it can afford The single cutesy wee 3 5 inch disk holds 360K bytes which in the day of 200K byte programs and megabytes of data is about as useful as a glass of spit ata four alarm fire Atari has repeated Apple s bitter mistake with the Mac but will we hear offer a double sided 720K byte wee drive for more money Apple of course is upstaged Its main act the 512K byte Fat Mac has no color and costs twice as much its aging ballerina the Apple II can compete neither on performance nor price Apple has a year perhaps two to arrange a new act and to reduce its always high prices until the ST attracts enough support to
28. The pin identification is shown below viewed from the rear Rear Top view of SPET 345 6 7 89 41071 CDE K 12 Top Connections FHJ N T2 911 AB L M Bottom Connections The G and I identifications or pins are missing the list is not in error The table following correlates the pins and signals for the SuperPET User Port and for the Centronics printer plug The dashed lines show connections between pins Use either the NACK or BUSY protocols not both for CA1 SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 161 August September 1985 User Port Centronics Plug The User Port signal names are those Signal Pin Pin Signal of SuperPET s 6522 VIA Versatile In terface Adapter which is already CA1 Use B 10 Use NACK connected to the user port When we CA1 One B 11 one BUSY discuss the VIA we must employ the CB2 M A NSTROBE names of the VIA signals likewise GND N 16 GROUND when we discuss printer connections PAO C 2 DATA 1 we must use the Centronics names for PA1 D 3 DATA 2 the signals even though they are PA2 E 4 DATA 3 wired together and comprise one line PA3 F 5 DATA 4 of the circuit PA4 H 6 DATA 5 PA5 J T DATA 6 CB1 of the VIA comes out on pin 8 of PA6 K 8 DATA 7 user port Despite the programming PA7 L 9 DATA 8 manuals I was never able to get CB1 to sense input read
29. arks before we draw our checkbook from its scabbard We didn t mention Amiga s ability to perform several functions at the same time concurrency and multi tasking are the buzzwords The machine is able to backup disks whilst processing words whilst printing hard copy whilst running a program or so in language We can appreciate being able to compute while the printer churns out hard copy and the DOS chuckles away at a copy job but are otherwise very skeptical of the virtues of schizophrenia Inevitably the microprocessor must slow down as it rotates between tasks the user hopping from job to job inevitably will become confused and make mistakes In time we suspect users will paint concurrency yellow for danger use with caution Having briefly looked at the option of a new computer we present this issue some other options a new inexpensive megabyte drive some add on hardware and software to give SuperPET a 68000 microprocessor and up to two megabytes of RAM options to use SuperPET s parallel port a clear explanation of how to use the ACIA for telecommunication and if it arrives in time a page on 0S9 REMARKS on REDMARKS If your address label is redmarked your membership in ISPUG has expired poor thing Clip the application on the last page check the RENEW block and favor us with a check made to ISPUG Leave the address label on the other side so we know which J Q Schmidt sent it SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 152 August
30. ave our cmd file for the org 1000 program above Note in particular the use include disk 1 watlib exp of the index registers to save the places trans1 b09 within the tables One is needed for the input text buffer another for the output buffer and a third is required for the place in the translation table itself This is a fairly simple but often used technique for table translation We could expand this idea to a game in which we try to identify the characters contained in a hidden message This idea is similar to that of the popular TV show Wheel of Fortune This exercise will greatly increase your understanding of the techniques of table handling so we ll have a contest Submit your solu tion to find a hidden message and to display it For example have a screen line which displays the alphabet and highlights the letters which have been used display a blank message line which fills in as you guess correctly The hidden message might be now is the time for all ispuggers to solve this problem If you guess an a then a is highlighted on the alphabet line and SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 175 August September 1985 the message line shows an a wherever one appears in the hidden message We ll award a small prize for the best solution if it isn t too long we ll print the best program in a future issue In any event we ll name the winners No I m not going to type in each entry Send the solution both as an asm
31. commercial software OS 9 programs on Commodore disks are being sold on a cost recovery basis All of this software is tested configured and trans ferred to CBM disk format before release The following programs are available or in work status is as shown Cost is in U S and in Canadian Quoted prices for asterisked items is subject to a minimum number of orders single quantity prices are higher If you wish to obtain your software at a lower cost you may have to wait until we fill enough orders typically 5 BASICO9 110 152 Three times faster than BASIC 4 0 with features of mBASIC FULL C COMPILER 120 166 Comes with a macro assembler linker supports 8 16 floating point digits precision PASCAL COMPILERS 175 242 Two packages are being tested FORTRAN 77 COMPILER 120 166 Under test by Microware release Oct 1st 85 KANSAS CITY BASIC 25 34 Approximate price TRS80 compatible BASIC Now being tested Other languages such as COBOL Introl C etc will be available on demand STYLOGRAPH III 149 189 Includes a full screen editor word processor spel ling checker and mail merge better than Wordstar amp Wordpro etc DYNASTAR 90 122 approximate price Full featured screen editor text format ter Two versions are being tested Spelling checker is optional DYNACALC 99 129 Full featured screen oriented spread sheet We have decided not to carry SCRED until a new version is available
32. dible Alarmne soe ei etesae 105 The 1001 Drive Changing Device 166 The ACIA and How to Use It 169 Bits and Bytes on Tablesis sc sess ee 173 The APL EXPP6SS sccccessdstcseeel LO A Window inte 08 9sws esove ws eveve wel 79 SuperPET Gazette PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 U S A First Class Mail in U S and Canada Air Mail Overseas
33. e then The APL Idiom List by Perlis and Rugaber arrived It is published by Yale University Department of Computer Science as its Research Report 87 1977 Perlis and Rugaber have extended the meaning of idiom from that given last column to refer to any ex pression which occurs repeatedly in various contexts The idioms which follow are from their list The FINNAPL Idiom Library from APL Press arrived today and is an excellent companion to Perlis and Rugaber A L OL ALEFT JUSTIFY A WORD LIST 1 L 11 02 ARIGHT JUSTIFY A WORD LIST v se S AELIMINATE LEADING BLANKS ov oSz S AELIMINATE TRAILING BLANKS V A A xB A x1 B A AA VECTOR OF INTEGERS FROM A TO B A ViV 1pV AARE ALL ELEMENTS OF V UNIQUE A 1 7MA QM AARE ANY ROWS OF MATRIX M DUPLICATED S A B LA 1pA pB pW APUT THE STRING B INTO THE STRING A AAT POSITION N I return to writing this column after a couple of weeks away from the keyboard School is almost over and summer holidays are near We have been informed that the Computing Science curriculum guide will be ready for next school year and that yes the language will be Pascal sigh Good APL books keep turning up but go on the shelf for later as all available time must be devoted to Pascal I received a letter from a happy owner of the direct function definition disk He wanted to know if it was possible to extend the compiler to handle multiple conditions without rewriting it This is
34. emester hours in stupidity ON HALGOL THE GRANDE In Issue 1 Vol II Oct Nov 1984 we directed your AND MEGABYTES for SPET attention to HALGOL a swift new language offered by Hal Hardenbergh the president of Digital Acoustics DA at 1415 E McFadden Suite F Santa Ana CA 92705 At the time of that re port Hal had just bought a SuperPET converted 8032 and was at work creating the hardware to attach a 68000 board a 12 5 MHz 68000 please note and the necessary auxiliary gear to SuperPET Terry Peterson and Nick Solimene of ISPUG are equipped with the hardware and with the latest release of HALGOL while the language is not yet finished DA provides versions which run Speed of execution is primary in the design of the language and its hardware Each line of the language is compiled as entered no wait for compilation it is as yet without an immediate mode but is interactive as BASIC is Hal has claimed for several months that HALGOL is the fastest Basic like interactive language in the world to date nobody has disputed that claim Hal insisted that we insert the phrase Basic like because somebody claimed FORTH was a lan guage we consider it a hallucinatory drug and somebody else said C was a language from study we conclude it is a form of shorthand used by gurus who can t type Of course we are kidding a little The accuracy and the speed of HALGOL emerge from hand written assembly language including a fast set of f
35. er position 7 in a and extending for length 4 and a similar arrangement for arrays STR may be used on either side of an assignment state ment and integer variables e g STR a i j may be substituted for literal values This rather nicely replaces left mid and right Of course the usual is used to concatenate strings on the right side of an assignment A nice feature of the current version of HALGOL is EDIT The program statements EDIT a or EDIT a i display the string and wait for you to insert delete or overtype the string On RETURN the program continues to execute with the modified string Because DATASAVE and DATALOAD let you store and retrieve string arrays from disk and because of the large memory EDIT should be very good for databases mail lists and such The length function LEN is not yet implemented but I expect it will be In summary I do think HALGOL will be easy to use for fast string handling if we get both the LEN and the INDEX functions Unfortunately at present it isn t possible to force indentation even using statement separators and spaces As for structure only IF THEN ELSE is now available I would like to have the sort of structure provided by either micro BASIC or COMAL At present the lack of structure the inability to pass param eters to subroutines and things like MVA are a great pain I know that some of these problems will disappear when HALGOL is finished SuperPET Gazette Vol I
36. er see that the title is appropriate This article outlines how to use the ACIA when you write interrupt driven telecommunications programs it owes a great deal to Terry Peterson s article in the April 1983 issue of MICRO to which you should refer if you need more detail Basic Information amp Terminology Dept a byte consists of eight bits numbered as a matter of convention 7 through O from left to right A bit is set if it contains 1 and is clear if it contains 0 On a terminological note RECEIVED data is that which comes into the computer through the serial port from a modem for example and TRANSMITTED data is that sent by the computer such as text to a serial printer I will now describe some of the functions of the ACIA registers There are four registers in all The data register ACIAdata for short at hexadecimal address EFFO is the register through which both received data and transmitted data pass To transmit a byte of data you need only store it in ACIAdata the ACIA then takes care of actually transmitting it But since the ACIA places received data bytes in ACIA SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 169 August September 1985 data you should check ACIAdata for a received byte before placing an outgoing byte in it ACIAstat below allows you to do so The status register ACIAstat at EFF1 gives you the status of various oper ations 1 Bit 3 is set when the ACIA receives a data byte and cleared when yo
37. essage ldx buf2 Set up to store the enciphered message in buffer 2 ldy table 1 Load address of TABLE and offset since a will be 1 b will be 2 etc we wo we we SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 174 August September 1985 pshs x We stack the address of the enciphered message loop so we can print it at the end of program ldb ut Get a character from buffer 1 quif eq 3 Stop if it s the endstring null ompb p bypass spaces if ne if not a space encipher andb 1f AND ASCII code for character with Decimal 31 ldb Dy Offset to desired position in TABLE endif see comments below on effect of AND stb x Store enciphered character in buffer 2 endloop stb x Store endstring null as last character Ed If you re confused by the ANDB 1f above it changes the ASCII code num ber for a character to its alphabetic place e g a ASCII 61 becomes 1 and z ASCII 7a becomes 26 You may find it clearer to subtract SUBB 60 print out the converted message ldd msg3 We have already stacked the address of the encipherment jse printf _ and now print the that converted message swi data area msg1 fcc Your text message was n s n feb O msg2 fcc text must contain only lower case letters ABORTED THE PROGRAM n feb 0 msg3 fcc your coded message is n s n feb 0 table fcc qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm TABLE which enciphers the message feb 0 end transi To the left we h
38. f you must copy selected files 3 Write a program which will read an edited directory list and copy the files between devices It s easy to make the original list with di disk to index or similar commands it s easy to edit the list writing the program is equally simple But you must first load an Editor to make and edit the list and then load a language and a program to copy the files That s slow and tedious 4 Use BEDIT s batch file capability This is the fastest and easiest way In the tutorial and instructions for BEDIT are two programs COPYFROM9 and COPYTO9 You make a list of the files to be copied by editing a directory list ing file it as list bed and then execute either of the EXEC files above The copying is swift accurate and simple Gee who would have thought that buying a new disk drive could get so involved Sorry it sounds that way we suspect it will take the average user about an hour to set up and try the M W commands and the COPY9 files After that handling files between devices is simple and easy you ll find yourself switching disks far less often with the added disk capacity aboard THIRD AND LAST HURDLE DEPT We repeat Reg Beck s sage words on how to copy or read REL files in 8250 or 1001 drives If 8050 formatted REL files are to be copied as from an ISPUG 8050 disk to an 8050 for Disable ERF matted disk which is in an 8250 or 1001 drive you must M W lt 164 gt lt 67 gt lt 1 gt lt 255 gt disable the
39. file and as an executable mod file to me at the address shown at the top of this column on 8050 disk If you have a 4040 send the disk to ISPUG to be converted to 8050 format ISPUG will return your disk and forward the copy to me Next issue we will continue our treatment of table handling by taking a closer look at the structure of a command table and its driver T H E A PL E X PRESS by REG BECK Box 16 Glen Drive Fox Mountain RR 2 Williams Lake B C Canada V2G 2P2 The absence of the diamond statement separator in SuperPET s APL can frustrate the user when implemented it allows several statements on one line It prob ably was left out because Waterloo ran out of banks for APL interpreter code and because our APL was designed for schools where beginning programmers are encou raged to write one statement per line I recently worked on a function which set the cursor sequentially to positions in a grid A loop was slow and resulted in a sluggish cursor I wound up with a 51 line function which could have been made quite compact using the diamond statement separator each statement was only a few characters long Readability would not have suffered because each pair of statements did the same thing but at a different place on the screen Unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to synthesize a statement separator for statements which do not return res ults Yet a simple function will work as a separator if each statement to
40. have now been covered the two part series on math processing routines printed last issue being the end Now we are ready to turn our attention to the development of larger programs using the ability of the Development system to create separate modules We first introduce the concept of table processing and then advance to the study of com mand tables and their drivers Table processing is the heart of any complex system A table may consist of simple one character commands as in the monitor where the commands are for example m for modify t for translate d for dump and so on In high level languages a command table again must be processed but the commands consist of full words such as print for next etc How do we set up and use the tables We will introduce the art of processing tables with an example which is familiar to all When you were a child you probably sent encrypted messages to a friend SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 173 August September 1985 To translate a message into code each of you had a table which consisted of the alphabet and the code symbol which replaced it in your code You converted the encrypted messages into English by looking up the coded letter and replacing it with its table value To keep the coding of this example simple we ll restrict our message to lower case characters of the alphabet The program follows Before you go through it please look at the label TABLE at the end of program
41. he MVA instruction at left is a quick 100 LET prime i i 3 temporary way to implement array assignment 110 LET k i prime and moves the variable specified to the O LET count count 1 5 IF k gt size GOTO skip stated array element we said that HALGOL is not quite finished 130 FOR j k TO size STEP prime 140 MVA zero TO flags j 150 NEXT j 160 skip NEXT i 170 READ TIMER TO t LET t t 500 180 PRINT Done count primes found in t seconds 190 SELECT PRINT O END Named subroutines are called by a GOSUB a GOTO goes to a name See skip at left not to line numbers which are meaningless except to the line editor The timer on the latest ver sion of the boards runs in increments of 1 250th of a second and may be STARTed and READ as shown Although you see LET statements and they are mandatory you needn t type them in When you enter an assignment such as a at 4 the compiler inserts a LET for you similarly it capitalizes all keywords which you may enter in lower case The Sieve is not the best way to compare number crunching capabilities we list below the results on BYTE s calculation benchmark with no math chip support no Commodore version of HALGOL yet handles the 32081 math chip though we an ticipate it will be supported later All times are in seconds programs were run on the machines shown BYTE Calculation Benchmark in Seconds On an IBM PC BetterBasic Turbo Pascal 91 3
42. he power supply is reported adequate for the Grande with up to i megabytes plus the two optional boards noted 5 volts 10 amps and line filter You should not expect to plug in the gear above and start using HALGOL and SPET as a 1 megabyte workaday computer Though board design is firm and reported very SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 158 August September 1985 reliable the only available software is HALGOL and Terry Peterson s ASSEM68K cross assembler see issue 2 Vol II This rig is for assembly language hack ers for those who want to use HALGOL for number crunching and those who see the 68000 as the microprocessor which will dominate the microcomputers of the next decade and who want a head start in writing programs for it USER COMMENTS ON HALGOL Nick Solimene of Woodhaven N Y has had a Grande AND THE GRANDE early version with 64K DRAM chips and one wait state for several months he s been using HALGOL quite a bit We got a long letter from him and summarize his comments below At first I thought the BYTE calculations benchmark was too crude for a test of HALGOL since within HALGOL it yields zero error and HALGOL does not use BCD Binary Coded Decimal as does BetterBasic Ed 100 t time The benchmark is at left In many computer languages 110 number 5000 numerous multiplications or divisions of decimal num 120 a 2 71828 bers cause serious errors because the result of a 130 b 3 14159 single operation is not preci
43. ile OS9 DRIVE A To format a new disk use the BASIC 4 0 program FORMAT OS 9 which is on your system disk When the disk is ready insert it in drive 1 and type the following commands OS9 dir d1 This will initialize the system pointers you have to do it ERROR 241 only once before you access a drive for the first time OS9 format di This will build an OS 9 file system inside the RELATIVE file At this point you are done The number of blocks sectors which are allocated by FORMAT OS 9 and the OS 9 FORMAT utility should be equal to the number of tracks requested x 16 The following values are recommended CBM Drive Model Sectors Tracks cylinders Capacity 2031 4040 8050 640 40 160 K 2031 4040 8050 624 39 system disk 156 K 8250 4000 250 1000 K 2 If the above procedure is too lengthy you may speed it up in two ways The first is to follow the above procedure only once then use the CBM DOS DUPLICATE command to create additional file systems The second is to wait until we pro duce second generation direct access disk driver software that will eliminate most of the difficulties Meanwhile as a temporary solution users may build two logical file systems on each 8050 drive extending the storage capacity of a single 8050 to about 350K We ll cover this matter in more detail next issue Prices back copies Vol I Postpaid U S Vol I No 1 not available No 2 1 25 No 5 1 25 No 8 2 50
44. ill worth belonging to if only for MOTD the newsletter As for our efforts please remember that the SuperPET portion of TPUG is small and that it sometimes takes a few weeks to process an order or to return a request for information The work is done by volunteers such as Avygdor Avy Moise Gerry Gold Bill Dutfield and others In other words please be patient and call if there is any problem To our knowledge no two board SuperPETs have had any problem with 0S 9 Almost all problems with 3 boarders have been solved we are still working on a few especially on the early 3 board machines with soldered memory chips As of September TPUG members will have also be members of DELPHI information service where TPUG will store public domain SuperPET and 0S 9 software There will be monthly workshops to bring SuperPET and Super O0S 9 users anywhere in the world in contact with persons who have the expertise to help and to advise If you do not receive your copy of V1 1 by mid September please call or write TPUG Observe TPUG s new address and telephone number listed below Toronto Pet Group Inc 101 Duncan Mill Rd Suit 7G Don Mills Ontario Canada M3B 1Z3 Tel 1 416 445 4524 Tips on Using 0S 9 Part I 1 Formatting a new floppy on your 2031 4040 8050 8250 etc The CBM Disk utility cannot format a disk since the OS 9 file system is contained in one CBM SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 180 August September 1985 RELATIVE f
45. inker to report and reject such follies John asked if the error message could be an audible giggle MAD ABOUT PASCAL Our APL Associate Editor Reg Beck is mad about Pascal B C school authorities now demand that he teach Pascal his summer was devoted SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 155 August September 1985 to learning the language Reg doesn t like it and comments Never use 20 words when 200 will do Worship the Great God Type Never define a primitive function power for what type would it be Somewhat bitterly Reg tells us M Montal bano in A Personal History of APL reports that he gave a seminar a few years ago on programming languages one of the people attending was Niklaus Wirth the developer of Pascal Montalbano says Unfortunately Klaus didn t get the prop er message from my talk He went his own way and developed Pascal Reg notes that while grade 12 students who will be going on to college might as well learn Pascal before the college forces them to most of his grade 11 stu dents won t go to college but rather are interested in learning BASIC word processing and graphics for their home computers Reg says that Pascal in this light is about as applicable as PL 1 We agree with him in spades worry about the high school drop out rate read that both ways remember the classmates who fled similar pedantic follies and wonder if curriculum directors are promoted to that post only if they have credits for four s
46. its right returns a result and each statement to its left requires an argument The separator shown below throws away each result returned to it as a right argument but permits any variables which are defined to be retained VALOIV L 0 R AAB 1 A Asa QIN DIRECT DEFINITION 6 A 55 A 22 VEX AMPLE OJV cL R EXAMPLE 3A3B C 1 Re A B C 2 A Cei4 A BO A AD EXAMPLE DO TBAB T Cs 2065 4 9 121 64 EXAMPLE is a simple demonstration of how statement separators can be employed to avoid several lines of code These statements obviously could be written as a one liner appropriate parts of long one liners are however often written as SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 176 August September 1985 separate statements for readability Del is a good choice for this function as it resembles the diamond and is the only non alphabetic symbol which can be used as a function name The following pair of functions will remove and replace the blanked lines which are normally found between text lines on screen to make the text easy to read Data for doing this in all Waterloo languages is found on page 69 of the Super PET System Overview manual VWOBLANKLOIV E 0 NOBLANK C 1 OD4v COro0 4 40 5 5 7 33 9 7 DPOKE 8p59520 0 1 VBLANKCO JV E w BLANK 1 OAVCOIO 4 32 5 3 7 29 9 9 DPOKE 8p59520 0 1 These functions are useful for graphics You can t draw a decent box or grid without first removing the blank lines Writing functio
47. loating point routines plus the 12 5 MHz microprocessor itself The equipment and software we describe below is available for SuperPET PET the C64 and for the Apple II The SuperPET gear runs from the 8032 side of the ma chine and works with 4040 or 8x50 drives Terry Peterson uses a 50 kit from Skyles Electric Works The 1541 Flash to get the 1541 disk drive to load as quickly as a 4040 on the C64 whilst using HALGOL Terry Peterson did the I O routines and other mods needed for the Commodore versions of HALGOL at no small expenditure of time and skill To give you a flavor of the language and some feel for its performance we ll use the Sieve of Eratosthenes Terry Peterson converted the best performing version printed last issue to HALGOL and comments that What ho Structure is advantageous even where it s hard to see 5 REM Structured Sieve Benchmark at least sometimes The previous best 10 START TIMER LET size 7000 time on HALGOL had been 2 1 seconds the 20 DIM flags 7001 version at left runs in 1 79 sec Compare SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 156 August September 1985 SELECT PRINT 1 PRINT Start one iteration LET count 0 LET one 1 FOR i 0 TO size STEP 1 MVA one TO flags i NEXT i FOR i 0 TO size STEP 1 True Basic Clee that to the times below on the IBM PC Turbo Pascal PC Basic 15 4 190 7 BetterBasic 31 4 In mBASIC in Superpet 168 seconds 90 IF flags i 0 GOTO skip T
48. lose the file on the old device it can t The old device isn t there any more Poor Bodsworth is still bewildered by that one 2 Write the program in BEDIT BEDCALC or DEVCALC ISPUG s superEditors and then PRINT it from any of them Poor Bodsworth is still unaware that you can do this as we show below by using some of Reg Beck s programs PRINTING MACHINE LANGUAGE FROM BEDIT Joe Bostic designed BEDIT in its var ious forms to send any possible decimal or hex value to any device a drive a plotter a printer with the PRINT command First let s define the difference between a character and a literal We all know that any editor sends the ASCII code for a character to any output device A being transmitted as decimal 65 for example You may send any literal value the actual value itself by enclosing the value in angle brackets lt gt e g lt 20 gt transmits hex 20 an lt 11 gt sends decimal 11 You must PRINT not PUT files containing lt value gt to transmit the literals You may intermix normal text and lt literals gt The PRINT command sends as normal text all values in an editor file except the lt literals gt which may be in either hex decimal or ASCII mnemonic a CR may be PRINTed as lt 0d gt lt 13 gt or lt CR gt Joe Bostic believes in being flexible Having this under our belts let s send some M W commands to change devices we believe these commands will work on all 4040 8x50 Change device
49. ns to draw grids can be a formidable task since a vector must be created which contains the code for each character to be POKEd to the screen This can run to several hundred numbers for a large grid The function GRID which follows does all this for you I received it some time ago from Jim Swift of Nanaimo BC GRID takes its time to draw a grid of the required size and sets up two global variables CHARQ and PK9 CHARQ is the vector of characters and PK9 is a matrix of POKE locations required by QUAD POKE Once these have been generated FASTGRID will create the grid in a flash and GRID is no longer necessary for that particular job The reverse field box graphics 128 supplements need not be poked they may be printed to screen freely The box graphics which must be poked are the low CONTROLS from ASCII 1 through 11 Ed VGRIDLOIV E oJ SIZE GRID CELL DIO LINE START R C 8S CL TYPE 1 DRAWS A GRID SIZE IS THE NUMBER OF CELLS E 2 emCELL IS THE SIZE OF A CELL 3 START IS THE POKE NUMBER OF TOP LEFT CORNER 4 THE SYNTAX IS 4 6 GRID 3 4 FOR 24 CELLS EACH 3 BY 4 5 NOTE A SQUARE CELL SHOULD BE 24 OR 3 6 OR 4 8 ETC 6 RECEIVED FROM JIM SWIFT C 7 Greet C 8 70 x V 24 80 lt S SIZExCELL CELL 1 E 9 NOBLANK i T0 START 32768 Eora DOTCC5 1 R S 1 p3 C 12 LINE 4 1 C S 2 p0 233 LINEL131 5 C 1 p CL CELL 2 1 p2 9 6 C 14 LINEL23 C 1 p1 CL 30 as LINEL33 8 C 1 pCZ 11 10 16 LINECT43 lt 4
50. nted at the left handler b09 sinit asm Initializes input buffer connects user interrupt handling routine xref IRQhndlr conbint_ nextread nextstore inbuffer xdef init ACIAcmd equ eff2 init sei 3 Mask off interrupts ldd inbuffer Initialize our own input buffer std nextread Set read pointer to start of the buffer std nextstore Set write pointer to the same address ldd 8 O0ffset of 8 bytes into IRQ handling table pshs d ldd IRQhndlr sAddress of our interrupt handling routine jsr conbint _ Connect user interrupt handling routine leas 2 8 lda ACIAcmd Command register anda 11111101 Clear bit 1 enabling receiver interrupt sta ACTAcmd eli Reenable interrupts rts SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 170 August September 1985 shandler asm A user interrupt handling routine xdef IRQhndlr input nextread nextstore inbuffer endbuffer regIRQ equ deOb sAddress of usual interrupt handling routine ACIAdata equ eff0 ACIAstat equ eff1 IRQhndlr bsr input Is there a received byte in ACIA if ne 3 NO interrupt was generated by clock jsr regIRQ 3Go to usual interrupt handling routine bsr input Recheck for received byte one might arrive endif during the previous routine rts Return from interrupt process input lda ACIAstat Check ACIA status anda 00001000 Is bit 3 set byte received i eq 3 NO byte not received andec 11111011 Clear zero flag means nonzero result found else YES by
51. ny disk file to a printer which accepts the Centronics protocol and obviates the need for any hardware interface except a home made cable AN ALARMING ARTICLE Do you have a task that gets along pretty well without by Loch Rose you most of the time but intermittently needs some oper ator help I supply here a routine that will literally make SuperPET cry for your attention from the built in speaker Because that speaker is none too loud I experimented to find the most aggravating sound voted most likely to jerk you rudely from your hammock To make the alarm ring twice you need only insert call alarm 2 into your program To make the alarm ring until you press a key insert call alarm 0 With minor revisions it should work in almost every SuperPET language 9000 proc alarm repeat repeat is number of alarm signals requested 9010 if repeat gt 0 9020 for k 1 to repeat If repeat lt 0 repeat alarm until user hits 9030 call noise a key 9040 next k 9050 else 9060 print gt print HIT ANY KEY TO STOP NOISES 3 9070 poke 301 peek 303 empty keyboard buffer 9080 loop 9090 call noise 9100 get keypress 9110 until keypress 9120 print print 9130 endif 9140 endproc 9150 9160 proc noise actually makes the noise 9170 location 59464 9180 poke 59467 16 poke 59466 15 9190 for i 1 to 8 SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 165 August September 1985 9200 for j 6 to 10 9210 poke location
52. p for five minutes or so and even then may only flicker a bit now and then Fear not be very patient the file is being copied We are con tinually surprised by the difference in performance between Tandon made and Micropolis drives the Tandons are noisy as a boiler factory but very fast the Micropolis drives quiet but slow Given a choice we ll take the Tandons ANOTHER OBSCENITY Anent our complaint about folks hiding on off switches and such in 3 II Brad Bjorndahl writes that his favorite obscenity on SPET is the brightness control knob which you 1 can t find or 2 get hold of Well swipe a short piece of surgical tubing from your doctor or a snippet of soft vacuum tubing from your service station slip it over the knob and you can find and fondle the hidden obscene and unmentionable device as often as you please HIGH RES GRAPHICS Brad also writes that a high resolution graphics board for SuperPET and 8032 and 4032 PETs was demonstrated to TPUG recently having reso lution of 640 x 250 two display pages which can be scrolled 32K of RAM which may be used as a RAM disk with OS9 mixed graphics and text price is under 300 Canadian from High Res Technologies 16 English Ivyway Toronto Ontario Canada M2H 3M4 Brad says users will have to write their own application software and that the board may be used in 6809 mode If you are interested get in touch with the maker CLEANING THAT COMPUTER In the June 85 BYTE Jerry Pournelle
53. readily accomplished through multiple functions A direct definition of the signum function serves to demonstrate how this works Sgn A has the value 1 if A lt 0 O if A 0 and 1 if ADO SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 178 August September 1985 SGN 1 ws0 ELSE Ww ELSE 1 w 0 0 The function ELSE handles the condition that A is non positive WINDOW INTO 0S 9 What the User Receives with Super 0S 9 Version by Gerry Gold and Avy Moise Weds In mid August four disks will be distri buted to all OS 9 owners This provides the TPUG release of V1 1 disk 1 V1 0 with XCom9 telecom software a subset of the Su per 0S 9 asm and b09 files that permit user redefinition of many defaults e g the keyboard and I O ports disks 2 3 and an extensively revised manual that includes sample source codes for various system utilities All other source files which are not copyrighted by Microware Inc and which are not included on the release disks may be obtained on request from Avygdor Moise for 49 at 120 Torresdale Ave Apt 1207 Willowdale Ontario Canada M2R 3N7 Tel 1 416 667 9898 at home or with the same prefixes 3954 at work XCOM9 is a telecommunication program with terminal emulation mode upload and download capabilities supports X on X off and X modem protocols Since XCOM9 is a compact program it can co reside with any other 0S 9 program Commercial Software available from TPUG Although TPUG does not normally dis tribute
54. ring you default to strings of 16 characters if they are not dimensioned Everybody else who sees HALGOL tells Hal how he ought to redesign it why shouldn t we After all DA has only put 100 000 of its own money into creating it why not ask Hal to have DA spend an other tidy fortune to accomodate us He can always say No and probably will Let us pass from the language to the hardware required to use HALGOL with SPET We ll cover it in three sections 1 Hooking Up The hardware may be installed on machines of all vintages 2 and 3 board without soldering The instructions ask you to tack two power leads to the 8032 motherboard these merely pick up 5 volts and ground which you may do by poking the wires into the unused 9000 ROM socket pins 24 and 12 respectively according to Terry P Terry notes that there m may be one 8032 motherboard type which requires modification no factory made SPET used it if you have one Digital Acoustics supplies the parts for the change Everything needed for the hookup cables parts instructions is sent from DA as part of the Grande package defined below 2 The Beacoup Grande The board on which the MC68000 and its associated RAM and support chips are mounted is named the Beacoup Grande for reasons which ll soon be obvious DA used to make a board named the Grande which was equipped with 64K DRAM Dynamic RAM chips the new 256K DRAM chips became so plentiful and cheap that Hal switched
55. rrupt flag register port_A equ e84f 3 Port A without handshake set_via lda 255 sta ddra 3Make all port_A lines outputs lda acr anda 227 sta acr Disable shift register lda perif anda 254 sta perif Set cal for negative transition ora 128 ora 64 sta perif Set up CB2 for proper pulse ora 32 sta perif Put cb2 high rts send it lda port _Aca1 Reading port _Aca1 clears ifr ldx command SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 163 August September 1985 delay loop lda x quif eq sta port_A 3Put data on output port lda perif anda 11011111 NOT 32 sta perif sPull CB2 low for stx count jsr delay sabout 21 ms lda perif ora 32 sta perif Put CB2 high loop lda ifr Acknowledged anda 2 2 weight bit of ifr should be set until ne keep waiting if not lda port _Aca1 Clear ifr ldx count 3 eCMD file shown below endloop rts 3 icom9 3 org 7F01 pshs x 3 icom9 b09 ldx 0a60 causes 21 ms delay loop leax 1 x until eq puls x rts command fcb 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 These buffers filled from language count Shown feb 00 00 end below is the heart of a microBASIC program which uses the ML module above It configures the VIA and then sets frequency by poking the necessary values to the buffers above and then SYSing the ML module itself Anyone who wants a copy of the entire program send a self addressed stamped envelope to Editor PO Box 411 Hatteras N C 27943 100 110 120
56. s being extendible to a forthcoming expansion box which can hold 6 maybe more megabytes of RAM and some custom boards Monitor keyboard and system enclosure are separate in the current fashion A 20 megabyte hard disk is promised from Tecmar We re happy to see that the RETURN key is huge Selectric style and that Commodore had the wit to put the four cursor keys tight against the main keyboard where a touch typist can use them without losing rhythm Ever had tennis elbow Weep for cursor wrist The problem for Commodore as for Atari is software and in the U S at least lack of a dealer network to sell and support Amiga Kindly Uncle Jack Tramiel SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 151 August September 1985 having thrown his dealers to the wolves before he left Commodore Last we heard Commodore executives were about to safari into the commercial wilds hunting dealers to stock the Amiga Computerland and some other chains have refused to order it as a standard chain item though their individual stores are free to stock it It ll be months before we see the machine on dealer shelves maybe more for we don t know if the Amiga has passed the FCC tests for radio frequ ency interference at last report the the C 128 was hung up there As does the ST the Amiga offers a mouse and a Mac like user interface named Intuition Commodore unlike Atari and Apple does not presume that mommy knows best users are allowed to bypass the icon ja
57. s the VIA for Centronics sim ulation and 2 send_it which I call whenever I output a command string to the transceiver The first subroutine is used only once at start of session to set up the VIA The second calls a delay subroutine to time the strobe pulse I need 21 milliseconds most printers require at most 1 millisecond The program of course also sends the commands from SuperPET to the transceiver The assembly language program in listing 1 is called from a microBASIC driver The code gives you an idea of the bit twiddling required to use the VIA One in teresting note you can hear this program working The CB 2 line is the same one used for the SPET bell When the strings are output each CB 2 pulse is heard as a click Listing 1 Routine via_set sets up the VIA for communications by imitat ing Centronics protocol CB2 sends NOT STB CA1 senses NOT ACKnowledge This is listing 1 3icom9 asm we we we Routine send_it sends commands to an icom 720 transceiver setting mode USB LSB RTTY CW AM VFO is set to a frequency may be set from 0 1 to 29 9999 MHz Delay sets the length of the NOT STB pulse a value of 0A60 creates a 21 millisecond delay wo we we wo we wo Versatile Interface Adapter via Addresses port _Aca1 equ e841 port A with CA1 handshake ddra equ e843 Data direction register acr equ e84b Auxiliary control register perif equ e84c Peripheral control register ifr equ e84d Inte
58. s the subroutines above xref nextread nextstore inbuffer endbuffer init signoff send SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 172 August September 1985 kyputb equ dd82 Gets character from keyboard into B register bputscn equ d714 Prints character in B on screen service_ equ 32 3See end of program main gsr init Connect user interrupt handler loop jsr kyputb Get character from keyboard if ne If character found in keyboard empb 139 sis it shifted period on the keypad PF beq endit YES end program jsr send else transmit character endif ldx nextread Load input buffer read pointer empx nextstore Is buffer empty LE ne NO input buffer not empty so ldb 9 X load character from buffer increment pointer empx f endbuffer Is pointer past end of buffer bin hs YES wrap pointer to start of buffer ldx inbuffer endif stx nextread Store new value of read pointer guess tstb Test character taken from input buffer quif eq cif character is a null skip empb 10 quif eq If character is a lt line feed gt skip jsr bputsen Print character to screen endguess endif endloop endit jsr signoff Disconnect interrupt handler elr service _ Causes program to return to main menu rts B I T S B YTES amp B U G S by Gary Ratliff Sr 215 Pemberton Drive Pearl Mississippi 39208 We have completed a milestone in this column all the details of how to create assembly language programs using the SuperPET
59. se and this imprecision 140 c 1 then is incorporated at each cycle into the result 150 for i 1 to number The benchmark is designed to determine relative speed 160 c c a and relative precision though somewhat crudely We 170 c c b show in a table below errors generated by the math 180 c c a packages in several current languages I found that 190 c c b the routine runs in 104 seconds in BASIC 4 0 and also 200 next i gives zero error in microBASIC it requires 150 sec 210 print Done onds and there is no reported error This 220 print Time time t seconds does not necessarily mean there was no 230 print Error 3 c 1 actual error but that the error if any is so small it cannot be stated You can get an appreciation of this from the program Paranoia by R Kapinski pub lished in the Feb 1985 issue of BYTE He shows that in every math package there is a number he calls ulpone it is the smallest number which when added to or subtracted from one can be recognized by the machine as different from one Any error smaller than ulpone is invisible For HALGOL ulpone is 3 553E 15 for all of the SuperPET languages 2 328E 10 Thus we know the errors are smaller than ulpone for the benchmark above whenever the error is reported as zero below No significance should be attached to the errors shown below unless they are related to ulpone and to the number of bits employed in the FP routines in HALGOL there are 48 in SuperPET 32
60. t s easier to copy or to revise the one written by Terry Peterson and published on p 115 of Vol I No 9 We have extracted Terry s algorithm below it will generate the M W code to set any de vice number The code values found below in angle brackets are the decimal ASCII codes to transmit Write a program in any language to send them to your drive new device choose new_var new_device 32 new_talk new_device 64 The command to be sent is in general form M W lt 12 gt lt 0 gt lt 2 gt lt new_var gt lt new_talk gt We give a specific example for a change to device 9 the variables then take on these values new device 9 new_var 9 32 new_talk 9 64 as shown at left j It is quite simple to use the algorithm to determine M W lt 12 gt lt 0 gt lt 2 gt lt 41 gt lt 73 gt the commands for any legal device number The command is sent to the command channel of the drive itself to ieeeX 15 where X is the present device number The Commodore manual says that the drive should be initialized before you send a device change command but we and Reg Beck have never found it necessary Now having the code ask yourself if you really want to load a language and a program each time you need to change device number Obviously you won t What are your other alternatives with software reset 1 Well poor Bodsworth sent program output to disk and then COPied the file to a drive Gee that works fine at the start but when SuperPET tries to c
61. te received so ldb ACTAdata sread received byte andb 01111111 Clear bit 7 of received byte ldx nextstore Load input buffer store pointer stb X store received byte in buffer cmpx endbuffer Is pointer past end of buffer if hs ldx inbuffer Yes wrap pointer to start of buffer endif cmpx nextread Has pointer caught up to read pointer if ne stx nextstore No store new pointer value endif orce 00000100 Set zero flag means zero result found endif rts nextstore rmb 2 sInput buffer store pointer nextread rm mb 2 Input buffer read pointer inbuffer rmb 80 An 80 byte buffer you can make it any size endbuffer feb O Just a marker for end of buffer NOTE I do not recommend simply printing received bytes directly on the screen because the printing process can be too slow when data arrives at 1200 baud you may lose bytes That is the reason we employ a buffer Next is a routine that transmits one byte to send a series of bytes you simply call it repeatedly You ll note that it checks for received bytes this should not be necessary because received bytes should trigger an interrupt which deals with them immediately However I find it necessary to do it this way to avoid losing an occasional byte and will be delighted if someone can tell me why 3send asm Subroutine transmits a byte supplied in register B SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 171 August September 1985 xref input xdef send bputscn equ d
62. u write to or read from ACIAdata 2 Bit 4 is cleared when you store an out going byte in ACIAdata and set when that byte is actually transmitted 3 Bit 7 is set when the ACIA requests an interrupt of which more below The command register ACIAcmd at EFF2 allows you to request a receiver interrupt by clearing bit 1 If you do so then whenever the ACIA receives a data byte and places it in ACIAdata it sends an interrupt request signal IRQ to the CPU See Gazette I No 15 p 276ff for articles on interrupts To take advantage of the receiver interrupt you must supply an interrupt handling routine that checks the ACIA and removes the received byte from ACIAdata This method deals with each data byte as soon as it arrives so any following bytes cannot overwrite it The control register ACIAcont at EFF3 controls serial port parameters such as baud rate You can set it with SETUP or with subroutine sioinit_ which is documented on p 185 of the Assembler manual I shall now outline some machine language routines that perform interrupt driven telecommunications At the end of this article cel main asm will weave them together If main include disk 1 watlib exp and the subroutines following are assembled you org 1000 may link this package into a working telecommuni mairi bog cations package which loads at main menu init bo9 signoff b09 Should you choose to use the package the command send b09 file is pri
63. w device number Then you become annoyed Every time you turn the drives on you must 1 Turn on the drive which will be device 9 turn off the one which will be device 8 2 software set the active drive to device 9 and 3 turn on the second drive which then becomes device 8 If you crash lose power or reset to 6502 both drives reset to device 8 you must again trudge through the setup procedure The obvious solution is to hard wire one of the drives as device 9 see below to leave both drive switches on and to connect the power cords of both drives to a single outlet controlled by a master switch In the remainder of this article we ll cover how to change device number by software and how to do it by hard wiring There are three ways to go about a software reset The easiest is to employ the program on the first ISPUG Utility disk chgadrs mod written by Terry Peterson It loads from main menu keep it on your language disk and call it whenever you want a device reset Oh you don t have ISPUG Utility Disk I The second way to get a software reset is to write a program which sends the proper commands to the disk drive using the Memory Write M W commands found in the various editions of the User s Manual for your disk drive We simplify matters by printing below the easy way to determine the M W code for any legal device number SuperPET Gazette Vol II No 6 166 August September 1985 You may write your own M W program but i
64. zz and access the operating system Amiga DOS directly The DOS is reported to have many of the features of Unix and MS DOS it damn well better allow more than 8 character filenames it includes batch files Finally we see a machine with a simple easy to learn user interface for novices and direct access to DOS for experts at which we utter three great cheers and cry About time While we suspect our long search for a sensible successor to SuperPET may be over we aren t about to divorce the old dear She possesses too much useful software we re going to keep her until the insulation rots off Caution before purchase is well advised on both the ST and the Amiga New compu ters are never quite as good as the first enthusiastic reviews They always have bugs time alone reveals their genetic mistakes In addition we hear that the operating system and the languages for both are being or have been written in C not in assembly Having been penalized by not so optimum compiled code generated by a C like language WSL for the last few years we will not walk innocent and unaware into a thicket of long slow code which the innate speed of the 68000 is supposed to overcome Remember that poor Lisa died from an overdose of an OS in Pascal despite her microprocessor that the Mac s 68000 has never overcome the glacial slowness of a Basic written in C and that the chief reason for a new computer is higher performance We ll have to see a few benchm

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The new 68000 machines are out&mdash; Atari`s ST and the

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The new 68000 machines are out— Atari`s ST and the