6 May
1997
6 May
'97
3:40 p.m.
On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Larry Anderson & Diane Hare wrote:
Let's see, I printed out some stuff from the univerity's catalogue...
(where'd I put that?) Ah!
There was a book entitled "Waterloo 6809 Assembler : tutorial and
reference manual", which has on the cover a SuperPet, and listed in the
SUBJECT is : Assembler language
PET (Computer) --Programming
Commodore Superpet computers.
That one looks fairly technical, but alas I have no SuperPet. :)
The only other mentions of the PET in the printout I've got here, are
"Mostly BASIC : applications for your PET" and "Microcomputers in science
teaching : especially the PET in physics".
Haven't seen "Hand-on BASIC...", thankfully. ;)
Well, I'll see what I can do. I'm not scared of eventually writing the
whole thing in assembly, or even with a monitor (I typed in the monitor
that was in the COMPUTE!'s First Book of VIC, and I could use the PET for
that purpose as well).
I don't think I'll need quite that much. A friend of mine (who has since
moved to Toronto and I've lost track of him) expanded his VIC-20 up to 48K
by himself. And as an interesting asside, he also interfaced a UART to
his VIC so it could go up to 9600bps, and he was working on interfacing a
CGA card to the VIC as well, before he was hired by IBM and suddenly
didn't have any time for his projects anymore.
OK, how do you want 'em? :)
BTW, one program from Cursor #2 was damaged and won't load anymore. I've
been wanting to fix that for a while, but I loaned my Amiga 1000's sampler
to someone a few years back and he loaned it to someone... who moved to
Ontario. <s> The damage is just in the header, so it shouldn't be hard to
fix once I can get it sampled and stored on disk.
I'll have to see if I can hunt that down.
Actually, I believe the quote you had in your other post said the 4116 was
16k bits... which would make my board 64K, which is too big without some
kind of bank switching scheme, isn't it?
...But the
only PET books this library has are things like
collections of type-in programs for the PET, and books on using the PET in
an educational environment. Nothing good and technical.
The technical ones are some of the hardest to locate, some of mine
came from a Commodore Group weeding out their library, I bought them via
mail. The most PET books I've come across are old college and school
textbooks (anyone see "Hands-On BASIC with the Commodore PET?" yuk.) Subject: BBSes on old hardware and SuperVIC
Cool! I'll have to look for that. BTW, a friend of mine in London, Ont.,
has just reported that he's found a 16K RAM cart for the VIC and he's
mailing it to me. Pretty sad when other people are finding more stuff for
my collection than I am. :)
(re: VIC-20) I'd put at least 32K in it, with
a memory
protection toggle on the RAM so that it could run images of cartridges
from disk.
There is a file I think on funet.fi's FTP that describes and internal
mod that does just that. :) I intend to
write the software on my own, but fast serial routines might
come in handy. I want to at least get 2400bps out of the thing.
Most of the BASIC boards I have is up to 1200 baud, I know for 2400 you
probably have to tweak the timing registers, cause the computer does not
provide decent numbers. I don't
think that'll be a problem for the VIC-20, as it's faster at I/O than the
64. I'll probably have to put in a lot of RAM, though, to act as buffers
for the slow disk drives. :)
There have been a bunch of articles for adding 256k to 1 meg internally
to the 64 and bank-switching, not sure if that's possible on the VIC
though, they may be adaptable. Do you mean
the music teacher's programs, or the Cursor tapes? :)
YES! YES! Mine are also from High School and I can say I have
programs from 13 to
into the 20s I think. No originals here either *sniff*
Say... howsabout sending copies of those to me? :)
Ouranos! is an
awesome game, BTW. I had the PET print up the listing and I
intended to port it to the Amiga, but I never got around to it. I don't
think it'd be the same, though, on anything but another PET with glaring
white screen.
Weather War II for the Commodore-64 is a re-write of Ouranos! nifty
little character graphic castles, SID sound, sprites were used to add
some foliage (just for looks) My 'calculator keyboard' PET has 1.0 too. I
have the schematics and
diagnostics for it too... Has been modified with a reset switch has
ability to use a skyles add-on keyboard (you have to load and run a
program first), and of course, expandamem.
Cool! The lack of a reset switch bugs me sometimes.
Um... hold
it... how are the 4116's arranged? You probably said, but of
course I can't go back into my mailbox to read that while I'm replying to
this one (I knew there was a reason I should my system to do this
locally!). If they're 16K by 4, then that certainly WOULD be more than
8K. :)
I think those are only 8kx1. I did look at my expandamem board and the
chips with the plates on them had (c)Mostek written. Heck I'll toss in some disks full of other goodies
too. But don't hold
your breath I tend to froget doing things (like mailing stuff) for a
spell.
Cool! Thanks.
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca