22 Aug
2000
22 Aug
'00
7:57 a.m.
The PC6 was a disapointment :-(. It's a Casio
clone, of course (I forget
which model). It's got the same BASIC (essentially) as the PC4, with the
same 10 'program areas' and common variables for all programs. It does
have more memory (8K IIRC).
The 'assembler' is a cheat!. It's not an assembler for the PC6's CPU,
it's an assembler for a mythical 16 bit CPU. There's also a simulator for
said CPU in the machine so you can run your 'assembly language' programs.
But it's pretty limited in what it can do, and you certainly can't access
hardware features of the PC6.
Well, heck, that *does* suck. I take it back. What does the "assembly
language" look like, though, just for laughs?
The PC2 on the other hand (Sharp PC1500 almost-clone)
is a very nice
machine. A decent 8-bit CPU (similar-ish to the Z80, it's a custom Sharp
chip called an LH5801). A proper expansion bus (16 bit address, 8 bit
data, etc). PEEK, POKE, CALL in the BASIC so you can load machine code
programs (real machine code for the LH5801) and run them. An optional
RS232 interface, etc. Incidentally, the Sharp interface is
RS232/Cetronics, the Tandy one is RS232 only. The only difference is that
Tandy missed out the 3rd circuit board containing the buffers for the
Centronics port -- the I/O chip (LH5811) and ROM code to drive it are
there. The little 4 colour plotter is fun too :-)
I had nothing but trouble with them. The first one I got, the plotter's
range of movement was an imperceptible twitch. Since you can't get the
rechargeable batteries anymore (what a dumb design -- why not just have
it directly driven off a wall-wart or a proper battery pack?), I tried
jury-rigging my own with one matching the specs from, of course, Rat Shack.
I got the printhead to move a whole line and *then* go back to twitching.
The second one I had was actually a Sharp PC1510? (I think) and it quit
working after two days!
To be fair, neither came with a manual, so I didn't know about the
advanced features. At that point the only Tandy Pocket Computer I had
personally owned was my trusty PC-4.
The thing I really liked about the PC-4, and missed on the PC-2, was the
segmented program space. Only having one big program on the -2 was annoying.
Too bad the PC-4 has a max RAM size of 1,568 bytes, but it's impressively
economical with it. I was using it last year to do concentration gradient
calculations in the bio lab when I was doing research, a facility in
which it did admirably, and still had enough space to do atomic weights and
a game of blackjack. :-)
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn? -- Beagle, "The Last
Unicorn"