Hi folks. Just joined this mailing list today.
I've been reading messages from the archives for a little while this evening,
and I'm glad I did, because I was originally going to blindly wade in here with
'Anybody know where I can buy a NADSBox and one or more REX modules?
Please???' - I see I'm nowhere near the first in line. :(
(edit: This message got a lot longer than I'd originally planned - what comes
next is a saga that would not have been nearly as interesting (and might even
have been over already) if it weren't for all the hard work that folks here
have done and continue to do to keep the M100 alive and relevant. Thank You to
all of you from my family.)
I'm fairly new to the M100 world. Admired and drooled over the M100/T102/T200
in the Radio Shack catalogue back in the day, but couldn't possibly afford one
back then. Happened across one for sale early this year and succumbed to the
nostalgia factor.
As soon as I showed it to my kids, they were enthralled. (13 year old boy, 8.5
year old girl.) Bashed out a quick program to greet them by name. Next thing
I know I'm tracking down PDFs of the manuals because my son wants to know how
to generate sound and I don't remember... Then I'm trawling ebay looking for
more machines and putting VirtualT on a laptop because they're fighting for
time on mine...
Now I've got four (one for parts) and looking for another parts machine because
mine has started developing dead columns of pixels in the bottom half of the
display and the parts machine already has a bad display... have accumulated
printed copies of a few of the manuals, a TPDD2 which I had to re-belt (which
thankfully came with a utility disk, although I see that's no longer such a
concern as of very recently, thanks Kurt!), miscellaneous cables (but no
parallel cable yet), and one UR-II (v1.21 - sadly, no Sardine support, although
I've found that having IDEA! on the go is fantastic - I love that program).
The kids are still mad at it, each after their own nature. They both have been
working on text adventure games, but my son seems more focused on adding music
at every step, while my daughter is very focused on the story. I think it's a
fantastic thing to teach kids even in this age. They've been through a few
rounds of the heartache unexpected cold resets can bring, and learned the
importance of backups and the fun of combing through the recovered contents of
RAM looking for bits of their documents. They're thinking through the logic of
their programs and getting a closer 'feel' for how it all works. My daughter
is using hers to write stories and a journal, too.
It's been a ton of fun so far. Since I discovered the various resources
available for interfacing with modern computers, things got a lot easier (even
before I got the disk drive operational). Experiencing what REX and a NADSBox
would be like through using VirtualT has had me longing to have these
facilities available on our physical hardware... still, we've been doing quite
well. I'm no stranger to rs-232 interfaces so starting off transferring text
files was a piece of cake... when I discovered TBACK it was almost
world-changing. Being able to make regular backups easily... being able to
swap back and forth between different memory images for different purposes in a
very REX-like manner (except not portable)... and the most fun, being able to
drop TBACK images files into VirtualT in place of RAM.BIN made copying
individual files so much easier.
Then discovered mComm. Moved my TPDD folder into Dropbox so I can have mComm
on machines at work and at home instead of just on the same box as VirtualT.
Hoping to be able to access that Dropbox TPDD folder using the Android version
of mComm.
I'd love to add a Bluetooth serial interface to one (or more) of my machines,
and I've got a couple of ideas of my own for that, although I'd love to hear
what anybody else has already done. (Of course it won't be useful for mComm
TPDD access unless I have a REX module since I won't have any way of using the
TS-DOS with modified delays... would still be fun for telnetting into my home
server wirelessly.)
Full of ideas, but with precious little spare time to spend implementing them.
:( Still, it's been inspiring and fascinating to be able to connect with my
kids over something that gives them a different perspective on computing than
video games, Youtube, and Minecraft.
jim
