BOO-YAH-SHACKA-LACKA-LACK!
Back with the cool kids, bustin' rhymes, fightin' off the women.
Well anyway; welcome, welcome back, back to the 'hood..yeah, SHACKA_LACKA_LACK!.
As usual i may miss the first couple of days as weather allowing, i will be in the Scottish mountains drinking beer, eating black bun and listening to bagpipes.
When i get back?
Well something with the Acorn Electron, just because the wife got one for me for xmas. She also bought me a bottle of rum, so thats me set really. I also have bits on order and if they arrive i might get around to fixing and playing with my Sharp MZ700 which i recently bought; alas it blew up as soon as i switched it on.
Anything else? Erm... i also have a C64 floppy disk in the post somewhere which has a few utilities that could be fun.
In short, no real plans, but three machines to play with when the fancy takes me.
And i should tell you, i have a fancy a-plenty, some would even call me a dandy, rum soaked, but a dandy nonetheless!.
Firstly hats off to the crew who had a plan and finished it off, or got pretty close. Well done guys. It was nice to see the newbie stuff being engaging (I'M A NEWBIE 'TILL I DIE!) as well as some of the other stuff that i aspire too. And of course the stuff i dont actually get, but i know its 'hard' (Printstar, as always, i am looking at you).
My favorites this time around have to be the stuff done by Paleoferrosaurus, because i always love his stuff. Hail Paleoferrosaurus! And Gcoville, because his coolness is within, but defiantly without my reach. Great going, and i loved the lot - Mr Ville, Feel free to sell me one of your boards for cheap! - Hail Gcoville!
The rest?
Well there was Jason Knight and his graphics doohicky which i have yet to run; ConceitedJerk, teased, but failed to deliver, which was a shame as UK ebay has nowt when it comes to Handspring and their Springboard modules. I so lusted after them at the time, i hope he manages at least a few pics before the end. Mmphosis was mysterious again, just like Batman, but not the Micheal Keaton one. Rob Sayers did nothing at all, yet i still followed his posts. Morrissey my arse!
Pukka as always is a joy to have around and it wouldnt be RC without that PC guy that joins in, if only to do nothing at all, yes its Mr Crazzywolfie. Togart did well, as did Earl; few as his posts were. And i do hope that the 'Little Beige Box' delivers more, either this time or next.
For me, the best newcomer has to go to AlienNerdUK. And here is hoping he visits next time and becomes one of the sad regulars that bash away at pointless personal challenges every 5 months. But as always of course, a big final hurrah to everybody that took part, even if you got no further than the first post. Your friends all laughed at you when you said you were doing this and it was harder than it seemed.
So finally me!
I was my usual rubbish-ness-ness but i have never really found that a hinderance; and i have been doing this now since the summer of 2006. Every five months since then....FFS!
Anyhoo! - What did i actually achieve? Erm .... well i drew a star and wrote my name using the Electron and 6502 assembly. A piss poor effort by anyones standards, but i did get a bit further along, conceptually, which i count as a success; mostly as i have low standards however. What else, well that was about it. I fixed the MZ-700 and my 1541 drive broke. And thats about it. Kinda piss poor. Oh well!
Tonight tho, as i knew it would be the last free-time i would have before the end of the month i thought i would chuck something together. And what can you throw together quickly while seemingly giving something of value? Why, i give you 'ART' -'!'
It is, what it is, and cannot be redefined outwith the environ of its construction and certainly not outwith the current retrochallenge epoch-ness; if you are willing to redefine the concept. It would i think however, be reductionist to consider it in any way other than from a position incorporating the sensibilities of Gestalt. I also finished my xmas rum.
Anyway i leave you with a song in my heart, a yearning for the summer and this crappy video.
All the best.
25th Jan
Well i feel lots better compared to yesterday, but still sleepy. As planned i have been out for the birthday of the wife. I have a belly full of crayfish and Italian sausage. I didn't think i was going to get anything done tonight and indeed i have not and will not. Tomorrow i also work late and won't be back until after 9pm.
Erm... i have no idea what to do for the last few days. Clearly momentum has been lost, as has focus.
Something about the Acorn Electron and assembly programming was it....?
Why is the MZ-700 out then.....?
Large capacitors and broken floppy drives....?
Old Amstrad magazine....?
Pascal...?
Do i have any rum left....?
24th Jan
I have felt crap all day.
BOLLOX!
Its my wife and child you should feel sorry for.
23rd Jan
Well sorting out a BASIC for the MZ700 was less an ordeal than i thought it was going to be, in fact i got stock MZ700 BASIC,Forth and FORTRAN; Logo sadly didn't load. So thats grand then. I, in total, made three disks up, each being around 30mins of audio and then transfered to tape. So about 2hours all in to make them. And they seem to mostly work. They are not my images after all, so you never really know if it is your converting and writing that is the problem or the original image creation. One thing that i did notice was the time it takes the machine to name the program, i had noticed this with the 80K but hadn't quite noticed it, if you know what i mean. In effect a program can be loading happily but the screen still says PLAY. No feedback. Halfway through loading then it might come up with LOADING PROGRAM. Weird way of doing things; you dont know if its found a file or crashed or, or...
I must say tho, the initial offering of games are of a pretty poor standard. I mean this is a Z80, 64k machine that can do eight colours and it performs like a colourised version of the 80k - I guess thats compatibility for you.
Back to BASICs tho, the tapes i have now work with the BASIC, they are of course as poor as the other games. I think everyone knows to body swerve a game called Maths Tank.
Clearly with a headline game like Donkey Kong you want the best graphics available. And these are the best graphics available it seems. You know what else gives it an 'age' as far as games is concerned? The death march. Remember when every game designer thought it cool to have part of the Death or Funeral March play with every life lost. Three times per game. By game 6 you hated that bloody tune, and for a while every game did it. Anyway, i was prompted to remember that when playing a game. My hackles rose quite quickly with that.
So, with all of that aside, i guess we have a week left of this retro computing nonsense; saying that, how many of us actually stop?
Of that week i can say that Tuesday is out as its the wives birthday, and Robert Burns' should you care about such things - haggis anyone? - Wednesday i am working late and the Saturday will be a day of eating and drinking because of the wives birthday with the Sunday being a potential wash out do to a dodgy last pint (probably) the evening before. So by my reckoning that will leave me with no more than five days, but more likely four, but perhaps three (cos i am lazy) until we all wrap up. Hmmm.....
22nd Jan
So the MZ700 then... Well firstly the BASIC. I have three BASICS for the 80k and all three load on the MZ700, however the only one that actually runs properly is the simplest one, the one that originally shipped with the 80k in, what, 1979? Its pretty erm... basic and a lot of BASIC software will not run on it. So for example after many attempts to get 'Chemistry Tutor' to run, i then had to edit a bunch of lines as this version of BAIC does not understand 'PRINT:PRINT' as part of a statement. I got the program working in a fashion and it was able to tell me many things about 104 elements, but thats not quite the point. Bum!
I have of course already said have i not, that the early Sharp machines dont have BASIC or anything else "in ROM" - The advantage being that you can load whatever language you fancy and it runs native. The downside is my current predicament. I really could do with getting hold of a BASIC for the MZ700. In the medium term this will be easy. I will contact the Sharp User Club UK, send them some cash and they will make up some data cassettes for me. They are a bunch of super guys. In the immediate term however, i fear i may have to go through the hassle of finding some image files, converting them to audio, burning them to a CD then making a cassette from that. Its a pain in the arse, but it does work.
Anyway as far as this evening, well i have discovered that the simple BASIC i have will not load the MZ700 software i have, no great surprise. i have also discovered that you cannot load BASIC programs from tape using the usual "" wildcard. If you try that it will just look for a file called "" - From this, you need to know the actual name of each program. Thats a big pain!
Another big pain? Well if you have a crash in BASIC and the system hangs and you reset, then you are dumped back at the monitor and have to load BASIC again. Quite, quite annoying.
On the positive, the in-built tape deck is working fine, so thats less clutter at the back which is nice.
Apart from that i dug around some tapes and moved some BASIC games that were stuck in tapes that carried mostly machine code programs. And while i was at it i played a wee game of StarTrek and Lunar Lander. As you can see, the software is very much of the MZ80k type, ie the late 70s / early 80s games found on most home computers, rather than those that developed on the back of the C64 and Spectrum movement.
Its weird how that works. I mean, how many version of the 'bomber' game do you have? You know, your plane travels across the screen dropping a line each time. You have to bomb the city before you crash into buildings. One of the oldest home computer arcade games i think. I recently typed in a version for the Epson HX-20 that i found in an old issue of the users group newsletter. I think i also have a version produced by Commodore for the 64, and i remember playing it on the ZX81 also. You know, a good project would be to gather as many original releases of that game as possible. Followed by every flavour of Wumpus.
21st Jan
Golly! That week went past fast. Early starts, late finishes and the in-laws staying certainly prevents any retro fun. However i have managed to grab a wee bit of time today.
As i have previously said, the final capacitor i needed to repair the MZ-700 arrived the other day. Speaking of capacitors, trying to get one shop that can sell me a 4700uf and a 6800uf axial electrolytic capacitor to repair the 1541 drive is harder than it would seem. I can get them, but not from the same shop, well not at the voltages i want them. One place wanted to charge me £12 to ship one. The single capacitor in question was £2.69. I mean, £12 shipping... WTF!
Anyhoo - the reasonably priced capacitors needed to repair the MZ-700 arrived from Maplins and in they went without issue and the machine booted and now works without fault. Hurrah!
I have made a wee video for those that don't know the Sharp MZ machines.
Apart from it being quite a nice machine in its own right, the fact that it is software compatible with the MZ-80k is a very good thing. My 80k has problems loading from cassette and i have a load of 80k software so it was a shame that i couldn't play with it; but now i can. Some key combos seem a little different, but from my initial plays, everything is loading as it should. The last thing i got up to with the 80k was 'Hello World' in Sharp Interpreter Pascal SP-4015, i guess i have the opportunity to continue.
But mostly i went through the tapes and tried to load the 6 tapes that came with the machine, after all as nice as running the 80k software is, i also want to see what the 700 can actually do.
19th Jan
Still nowt from me. The in-laws are here, and the computer room is the spare room, and the spare room is the bed room, and the bed room has big floppy drives laying around the place.
17th Jan
Well i am a bit knackered. After a day training manual handling skills to a bunch of folk, i confess i can't be arsed. I have both the 1451 and the 4040 laying around with their tops off and i need to put them back together before i can compute with anything. And to be honest i shouldn't really do that until i see if any of the ICs are compatible, which i cant be arsed to do at this point in time. My computer room is a bit of a cowpe and needs tidied before i can get back to anything.
The best i managed was to have a look at a couple of old Amstrad computer magazines i got the other day. I really do quite fancy winning the C5 competition they have running. I wonder if the original winner still has it, or was he laughed out of town.
16th Jan
Well the floppy drive worked and then it didn't. What sort of problem lends itself to be intermittent like that? The big capacitors are suspect, i think they are way out when tested. Hmmm.
The pain in the bum is that i just bought a box of software for the C64 that looked quite good, not a game in sight. I was looking forward to playing about with it, but alas, it seems not to be at this point.
15th Jan
Very little time today, but i figured i would have a look at the 1541 floppy drive for my C64. I only bought it recently and it worked fine, then it developed and intermittent fault where the motor would spin and the red led would flash twice repeatedly. Looking around online i cant actually find a troubleshoot guide that precisely describes my problem which is a shame. It could be the DOS ROM or it could be the 16k RAM chip or it could be any old thing. Either way its not working. When it previously exhibited this fault, unplugging it for a number of hours would make it work again. Sadly that trick seems not to be working and no matter what i do, when it is switched on for the first time, the motor whirs, the led blinks and bugger all else happens.
So i have opened it up and i am swapping what chips i can with spares i have lying around. The others i guess i should search for to see if they are common or perhaps i have compatible versions kicking about somewhere. I have a busted CBM duel floppy for the PET that has been handy for replacements in the past. I may be lucky this time.
14th Jan
What did i learn today?
I had one of those 'bigger picture' experiences whereby i finally got the idea of the accumulator.
I knew that you put stuff in the accumulator, either addresses which contain the thing you want to work on, or numbers. Now i further understood that these numbers could be actual numbers, for example 10, or representative of something else, for example 10 = PLOT.
What i did not understand was how the magical world could be programmed through this. Today i realised that if i put 10 in the accumulator, that 10 will change in its 10-ness depending on which subroutine i call to act upon it.
Yes, i know basic stuff, but i have just got this. So while i was printing with some success, to do other things i need to continue in the same way but use different JSR &xxxx calls. Now don't get me wrong, i cant program for toffee, but my understanding has moved somewhat.
To make sounds for example i now realise that i need to find the subroutine that deals with it, what the control codes are for that subroutine and then what format the data instructions should take. Exactly the same as with printing, just...different.
And they say gazing into space picking your nose is a bad thing.
However, just because i know 'how' something 'is' doesn't of course mean that i can actually do it. I know how to paint a vase of sun flowers but nobody is going to pay me millions for it. So with that i have been struggling with the system call OSWORD. OSWORD will allow me to make sounds and a whole bunch of other stuff. The challenge is finding out how to pass stuff through the X and Y registers to the accumulator to be acted upon by OSWORD. I do this by using something called a 'parameter block' i have no idea what that is, but i think i am responsible for setting it up in memory. I have no idea how to do any of that. But i do know what the control code is, that would be 7. 7 is the 'sound' control code, OSWORD has a whole bunch other control codes. I guess if i figure out 'sound' then i will have a good chance of figuring out the execution of a few of the other OSWORD functions.
However, all i can do just now, is successfully assemble a program using OSWORD that doesn't do anything. However, it should in fact BEEP.
Did i learn anything else? Yes, my 6 year old likes dancing to Uriah Heep, particularly when busting bubble wrap.
13th Jan
Well i found how to take the pen off the paper and also how to make solid triangles. I got a book you see, "Start Programming With The Electron" and while it didn't cover any assembly it gave enough pointers and directions to try,and frankly nice as it was to figure out - it was actually the PLOT commands entered prior to the PLOT locations. LDA#5 is draw line from start to PLOT point, LDA#4 is MOVE and so on - i think i have tired of geometric shapes now and should move on.
I haven't tackled sounds yet and i still have not managed to call my user definable graphics either.
However you know what else i have not done? Sit down with the other folks blogs and looked around. Urbancamo reminded me of that last night. I have not tried any of the PC code and i have not looked around at the links the other RCers have posted. That may well be tomorrow or Saturday.
Anyway to round off the evening drinking run with the electron i listened to Hawkwind and played Mr Wiz.
It worked for me, its The Spirt of the Age Retrochallenge after all!
12th Jan
Well i mostly figured the assembly PLOTing. I have not figured out how to 'lift the pen' as it were, so i have to draw like 'etcha-sketch' - Still i drew a star. Big whoop! - Yeah, yeah, i know, but still, its a pleasing thing if you are dumb like me.
The screen coordinates are worked out like so:-
Say you want to plot 600x300, this would be converted like so.
600 = (2*256+88) / 300 = (1*256+44)
This would become :-
LDA#88
LDA#2
Both of those making up the 600, followed by:
LDA#44
LDA#1
Being the 300. These are then printed to the screen using OSWRCH. There is obviously a better way to do this, but that is as far as i have managed. I really need to figure out how to 'lift the pen'.
11th Jan
Well yesterday i was hammering away the best i could with my ever so sleepy head trying to find an easy way to tackle screen addresses. Complicated stuff if you are a virginal newbie like myself. Clearly if you look at the stuff that PrintStar bashes out and you realise that there is a heck of a lot to this, and i have a few deficits as far as knowledge is concerned. All i really want to do is draw something. Anything.
The routines i found were complicated and importantly served up as code, code to be inserted into your ever so complicated program that you are working on. There seemed to be nothing for me, the idiot.
But then i remembered the small program that drew a line that i found in the manual way back day one.
Now its clunky as hell, really all i have done is take the original program that drew a single line and multiplied by three to make three lines, each routine called separately from each other at the end. However, the locations of the screen 'plots' are evident within the program so can be played with. But as it stands i am still only playing with the instruction LDA and, well thats it really. There is the screen print system call &FFEE, but really that is all. Clearly the whole X-Y of the screen locations is dealt with within the program through LDA as well as the actual screen write, but at this point i am unsure where and how. I can guess, but don't know. I did have a list of the various values that can be used with LDA# but i am buggered if i can remember which of the many digital files for the Electron i have holds it.
I am working late tomorrow so i wont make a post, although i will try and keep with the twitter feed. Later dudes!
9th Jan
By golly have i been sleepy today. Honest i tried and tried, but mostly i stared into space. Occasionally my head fell back and i sat like that with my mouth open. It wasn't going to happen.
Oh well - Tomorrow night i will be sleepy, but will make the effort as i am working late on tuesday. Come next weekend i hope to swap machines for a wee bit, so i want to get something working by then. Not that it matters a damn if i don't mind you!
But to give you something i thought i would post some pictures of another computer that i got for xmas.
8th Jan
Well i bashed away tonight trying to call my graphics from assembly and get them to animate. It sadly did not work. I did manage to call them to the screen and i could place them around the screen but i couldn't get the second graphic to overwrite the first even if i put the graphic in the same location. It would, each time, sit next to it, but never upon it.
I wasn't being particularly stylish by the end either as i was starting in BASIC then out to an assembly code portion then back to BASIC again and then back to assembly code. Frankly i think i deserved to fail.
By the end i gave up and started trawling the web. I may have found some info that could help. However i couldn't be arsed by then, its now 11pm. Perhaps a couple of hours tomorrow can be found.
7th Jan
Aww the best to yoos buddie boys, aye aww the best!
A footered a wee bit th' day.
A didnae dae much but a goat a bitty text movin' like. User definable graphics; aww'eh thum defined like. No bad, but no great. Its a stert. Next a guess wid be tae make it faestir using thum as variables an then callin' thum fae an assembly routine. Summit like that a guess.
Cheers now.
See ya th' moorn.
Oh! A made a vid fir ya. Firgoat! Add firgit me heid so a wid.
6th Jan
A couple of thanks - Pointless thanks, but i shall make them anyway.
Thank you Roy Warner for your 6 part Assembler tutorial originally from The Electron User Group, i have no idea what year, it looks like it was from a paper zine from the time. Either way, its a great wee primer, but its a shame that it stops just as we get to graphics.
The second thanks goes to the rum makers. Thats all. Cheers guys, its an art.
And finally a big thank you to Johnny Cash and his American III - Solitary Man album. Phenomenal pacing through a song that man had. The only person to time after time consistently reinvent other peoples works as completely his own. Stunning. A distant second could be Melanie and her covers of Ruby Tuesday and Mr Tambourine Man however. Brings a tear.
Anything else; well i was back at work, so only a couple of hours sleep last night- recovering from holiday waking hours- then up at 6am. So i am a little puggled today. I did have a wee play for an hour but nothing much. The best i can do is plan the coming week. Here we are a week into this session and not much to show. I think my focus will be getting something to move on the screen. Be it a moving a letter or letters across the screen, or better, some sort of graphic shape, even if that is only a couple of lines. That seems doable over the coming week.
5th Jan
I honestly cant imagine i will get anything done this evening. Ho-De-Hum!
My hands fine tho, thanks for asking.
4th Jan - UPDATE
The neck of lamb was very nice, however i scalded myself cooking some sprouts for the kid. She did at least eat all the sprouts i made. Either way i spent most of the night, and indeed i still am every 10mins or so, bathing my hand in cold water. It seems to be doing the trick, but clearly no good for computer use.
Inbetween the incredible pain i managed, just for you you understand, to place some text in the middle of the screen.
4th Jan
Well i continued the progress, in that i found a spiffing tutorial for Electron assembly online. Well it might not be spiffing, but the examples worked straight away which none apart from the user manual had up to this point.
I played around with text string printing and some VDU codes. It has been fun in an unremarkable sort of way. Still haven't figured out printing to any part of the screen yet. There does seem to be something possible with the VDU command, but not sure yet. Either way. Dull but fruitful so far today.
Neck of lamb for dinner.
3rd Jan - UPDATE
Well after many more hours i did it!
A couple of things i was doing mixed-up-wrong and i have still a whole shit load of stuff to figure out. However, as the picture above states... TA-DA!
Firstly i was getting confused with what i was putting in the accumulator. The initial examples i found were reserving a memory addresses for a later keyboard input, these being of course in hex. I was then wandering about with my ASCII codes and wondering why it wasn't working. I simply wasn't seeing the difference between &70 and #70. I didn't in this case want to reserve a specific address space. All i wanted was to reserve an area of memory or a start address at the beginning of the program then load the accumulator and then print it out, then load the accumulator and then get that printed out and so on. I am aware that there is a command of sorts called EQUB which allows string handling but that seemed to be beyond me. As you can see i am starting very far down the ladder. The ladder in fact is still next door and i have yet to borrow it from the neighbour.
This was the first thing.
The next thing i had to discover was something called system calls, such as OSWRCH, which stands for i can only assume, OS WRite CHaracter. I had got my head around the idea of op-codes to mnemonics. I had spent some time in the past converting mnemonics into hex op-codes to then POKE them into the ZX81, so i got that 'idea', but i thought that was the whole thing. I hadn't reckoned on the fact that a machine would have defined subroutines to invoke. All those books advertising the ZX81 ROM disassembled make a bit more sense to me now.
Anyway! - I load a character into the accumulator and then i call OSWRCH which is found at &FFEE - the Electron uses & rather than $ for memory addresses - And invoking that results in a write to the screen. On the picture, that would be the WGOODF before the cursor prompt >.
Seemingly simple. I cant believe how long i have spent on this today.
HURRAH!!
I wonder if i can write to somewhere else on the screen?
3rd Jan
Hello World!
Back from New Year stuff and you now have my full attention. Not that it amounts to much.
So today i set about playing with assembly on the Electron, it has an assembler built in and things can be called from BASIC, so it doesn't require any further tools if you are just having a simple play around.
Much to my amazement i completely failed to do anything of note. I failed to get "hello world" - Yes, really, that level of failure.
I did manage to get the Electron to beep, i managed to get it to print a character but i couldn't get it to beep and print a character and i was unable to get any more than one character printed at any one time. I did draw a line and then moved the line about a wee bit, ala PLOT, but that was it.
I am really quite amazed that i should fail at Hello World, i have tried a range of examples but none seem to work or they throw up errors that are beyond my ken at this time. Part of the problem is that the Electron and the BBC are kinda the same, but only kinda, and from that, the few examples out there are for the BBC, and to complicate further there are differing versions of BBC assembly, or so it seems at this point anyway.
Onwards and upwards i guess...!
30th Dec 2010
Well here is a wee intro video. A howdy and a look-see if the Electron is alien to you.
I also spent the night going through the Introduction Cassette. I know these guys spend their time making the actual hardware, but i have always been amazed at the poor quality of every 'Intro' tape or disk. They never show off the quality of the machine. If anything they make every machine look equally shit. Perhaps thats the idea.
I also had a wee look through the manual and discovered why it is that folk like BBC basic, which this uses - It is a cut down BBC machine after all. Anyway tho, i discovered that assembly mnemonics exist with the BASIC . You understand? When you switch on you can start entering assembly straight away, no dropping out of BASIC, no hiding statements within REM statements and then poking values. You can mix and match BASIC and assembly in the same program, all nice and visable.
I wont confess to understanding it at this point, but i like the fact that you can do this easily:-
10 P% = &70
20 [OPT 3
30 .START LDA #76
40 JSR &FFEE
50 RTS
60 ]
70 CALL START
All this does is print the letter L, well it does one more thing but i havent read that far, point is its all there from boot up. The manual has 60 pages worth of assembly info which is pretty good. I wouldn't have thought it from this sort of machine and from this time period. Goodie!
Anyway see you all the 2nd or 3rd. Eat, drink and be merry!