Journal Jeremiah Cornelius's Journal: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 11
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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances." -- Seymour Cray
Ah, memories! (Score:2)
I'd make a loop that POKEd a randome number to a random address, and see how long it took the computer (tape driven) to crash. Occasionally the screen would garbage up into tiny colored dots, when it shouldn't have done that, as it was supposedly incapable of anything but the crudest graphics. Further study (well, playing around) showed that there was a certain address that would trigger it.
I bought a repair manual for it and discovered that its video chip was capable of far higher resolution than the machi
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Was this on a Vic 20 or a 64? Both had that video chip.
You could also do it on a TI, but you needed either Assembly or Extended Basic to do it, because regular TI Basic didn't have Poke (and was actually a double-interpreted basic written in another interpreted language called GPL).
I miss single-tasking 8 and 16 bit computers running at 1 MHZ. I sure wish somebody would port a good TI-99/4A interpreter to Android (I have a C64 one and an Apple one).
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TRS-80 MC10. Same video chip and had a 6502 processor iirc (and I may not RC because it was thre decades ago).
I miss single-tasking 8 and 16 bit computers running at 1 MHZ. I sure wish somebody would port a good TI-99/4A interpreter to Android
Agreed, but the interpreter I would like to see surely doesn't exist -- one for a TS-1000 that would run programs written in Z-80 assembly that the code went down to the bare metal; I probably still have a tape of the tanks program I wrote. Hard to write decent games
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The MC10 used the 6803, part of the same 68xx family used in the TRS-80 CoCo (which used the 6809, while 8-bit, had some 16-bit math opcodes). I had the CoCo and it was where I first learned assembly.
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Either your memory is a lot better than mine or you looked it up. You're right, now that I see the chip number, it was the 6803. I never did program that one in assembly, but I programmed the TS-1000 (Z-80) in assembly.
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I was just one of those nerds that memorized most of the Radio Shack calatog when I was a kid. :-) I was down with the TRS-80s and knew them well. As I said, I learned assembly on the Coco which was the MC-10s big brother. I don't think I could tell you what CPU was in most of the other personal computers of that era. I think the Apple II was a 6502?
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I think the Apple II was a 6502?
I could be wrong, but I think you're right; that's what I remember. I also remember loving the Apple IIe, they had them at the public library and I used them extensively, despite the fact that I had an MC-10 and a TS-1000. Lots of good games on that machine, including a Pac Man clone that was identical to the machines you stuck quarters in to play.
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Apple ][+ was 6502.
I had a C/PM co-processor card in ours - with a Zilog Z-80. It let you run a separate 8080 system, using the Apple as a hosting terminal. That was combined with a Microsoft 80-column card, which turned the NTSC TV into a "real" display. I think that the ][e came out, a year later, and 80 column was built in.
This was a Cadillac setup - with 2 FDDs. Add paddles and there were no slots left. I'd swap the paddles with a modem. :-)
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Interesting, I didn't know (or have forgotten) that there were Z-80 CP/M machines. I thought (or misremembered) that they were all 8080. But then, no "microcomputer" was compatible with any other one, even with the "same" operating system back then.
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Zilog's chip was binary compatible with the 8080. The company was started with ex-Intel engineers.
They were the AMD of 1976. :-)
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I briefly owned one. Dog-slow, but I could run xlisp on it.