9 Oct
2006
9 Oct
'06
4:41 p.m.
--- "Richard A. Cini" <rcini at optonline.net> wrote:
Chris:
This is an exercise in learning more than
anything.
Alright then! This I can appreciate! Wooohooo
I worked for
Radio Shack in the late'80's when they used the T2K
for the Store Operating
System and I always thought it had great graphics.
For it's time yes indeed.
After reading the Technical Reference Manual I'm
beginning to
appreciate how oddly designed it was.
I've forgotten alot, but in reality there's alot of
peecee in there. A mobo with a very high chip count,
though granted floppy, video and parallel/serial stuph
built in. It was said that when they ported XENIX to
it, all of it's bugs started kicking. There were 40+
service center bulletins (read mods), as I'm sure
you'd know if you worked there (again bless you ;). If
you google "Jeff Hellige" you'll find his geocities
site and IIRC you can download all the bulletins. If
he's not on classiccmp already he should be dang.
When it was
introduced in 1983 or
1984, PCs already existed for 2+ years so why, oh
why, did they decide to
ignore the "PC compatible" trend.
It's been said that some did (and as you know some
others did) for fear of litigation. Some of these
outfits were big enough that they thought that
improving on the original they'd shanghai the
developing standard. That was my understanding. After
all, they were kind of sort of IBM compatible already.
Makes sense, no?
They must have
gotten the SMC chips on
special because so far I haven't found anyone else
who used them. The only
stuff that works is programs which are either
designed specifically for it
or uses only MS-DOS system calls.
Right, "well behaved" programs that only talked to
the hardware through DOS or BIOS calls should run. But
as is always the case the vendor supplied API's or
whatever you want to call them are too slow to be
tolerated. Include the Commie 64 and the Macintosh in
that category.
BIOS source, bootstrap code or anything like that
that you could
provide would be greatly appreciated.
I'll make a point of digging them out. Don't hesitate
to remind me if I take too long.
I'll look over your work as time allows Richard, for
curiosity's sake more then anything. You know that
Lisa emulator probably needs some extra hands when you
get through with this... ;)
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