26 Aug
2004
26 Aug
'04
4:56 a.m.
Am 25 Aug 2004 19:02 meinte Stan Barr:
"Hans Franke"
<Hans.Franke(a)siemens.com> said:
> Personaly I prefer the 125x Series, the ancessor of all of the 8Bit
> 12xx and 13xx Machines. The 13xx are just to big, without any real
> advantage, but the big drawback that you could no longer use the
> CE-125 docking station (cassette, printer, additional baterie and
> serial).
I have one of those, a 1251, docking station etc and
even some paper
left for the printer! I remember finding the Basic keywords for the
serial port, but I don't recall coming across any info on the hardware.
It was a very useful machine which saw a lot of use in work.
Well, the serial Port on the CE125 was never an official thing.
You had to do assembly to use it.
This is also connected to my best memories about the 1251... At one
point - I was on a boreing ride home from Berlin - I started to play
explore the Basic. By accident I came across that it has a PEEK command,
which was not described in the manual... So I used the abrevaion feature
to learn more. You could speed up typing by only enter as many letters
until a keyword gots unique, and a fullstop ... P. -> PRINT, GOT. -> GOTO,
GOS. -> GOSUB and so on - it it wasn't unique, it picked the first
(GO.->GOSUB). I tried all 1,2 and some 3 letter combinations *G* But
all I found where the usual suspects: PEEK, POKE and CALL and one or
two realy strange ones.
From there on I tried to get more knowledge about the
structure. Well,
after several ways to haeng the machine, I figured the Programm
RAM,
and wrote a programm, writeing a programm line with all 255 possible
op-codes ... so seeing what was in there :) Also I found that the
display line was a memory mapped bitmap !!! Yeah, soon I had my first
high res demo ... two tanks comeing in (with SOUND!) and blowing up
each other, and a train passing by:)
Still I couldn'T figure out any way to figure out the machine language.
About half a year later Sharp finaly released a machine language manual.
Maybe there have been more people than just me writeing to Sharp (in
Japan) to ask for information :))
So finaly I figured out that the CPU distinguish between an internal
Memory on the CPU, and external, as the basic sees it.
Still, it's been a lot of fun.
Gruss
H.
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