I'm loving my m100. It's an endless source of fascination - very old
school, but amazingly well preserved and usable. I haven't done much
with it beyond learning about how to connect it to my Mac via serial -
which works flawlessly in both directions with TEENY.CO and dl, yay,
running stuff from club100 on it - go Starblaze :), and refreshing on
BASIC sans renum and tron/troff! Mostly, I've been reading everything in
sight (virtually speaking) and preparing to dive into its software guts
more seriously - quickly moving into 8085 territory.
BTW, I did get my BASIC banner program written and working as I remember
it did in the 1984 timeframe based on the bitmaps in ROM (basically just
asks for a string, get's each character of the string's character map,
asks the user for a character to print and one to not print, pixel on
char and pixel off char, asks for a multiplier, then prints to screen
with the multiplier applied in both rows and columns, nothing fancy) -
thanks for pointing me to the ROM address of the characters set. But
other than that, It's all been reading and planning... which brings me
to the weekend projects I have mapped out for the next bit of time:
1. Get a REXCPM (ordered up) installed and running doing whatever it is
that it does :).
2. Get a Retro Printer and Centronix-Parallel printer cable ordered
(saving up), installed, and running. Hopefully, it's like having an
Epson MX-80 without the noise, greenbar and ribbon fuss. I do still want
to print out pages and pages of dot matrix listings, but to my laser
printer!
3. Make a new Cassette Cable for my Califone AVR tape recorder which has
MIC, not LINE. Got a plan, need cables - sheesh, amazon is expensive for
5 pin DIN male aluminum solderable, 2.5mm TS mono, 3.5 mm TS mono, 1/4
inch mono cable, and 570M ohm resistor ($36 USD). but I want to try the
DIY route and I don't know where else to look for this kinda stuff...
Yeah, I know cassettes are so 70's, but hey I wanna see it work in 2022
and compare the experience with my PAL-1 (KIM-1) cassette stuff - which
was dismal - very, very unreliable and fickle. I'm hoping to learn a
bit, play a bit, and have it actually work more often than not.
4. Write a disassembler or maybe even a monitor for the M100 based on
what I've read about (Jake Commander's article) and experienced KIM-1,
Apple ii-e, Commodore, etc. Surely, I don't have to live in BASIC?
5. Disassemble the M100 ROM - I know it's been done before, but surely I
can do it too, right?
That's what I have planned anyway, as it proceeds, I'm sure I'll get
distracted with shiny objects and other interests, but hey, better to
have a plan than not! This weekend, I have to update a couple of
Research Unix howtos (v6 and v7), so I doubt I'll get much m100 stuff,
but I just might :).
Here are a few questions related to the plan - please feel free to
answer them or to make comments or suggestions related to the plan!
q1. Will the retroprinter let me print reams of dot matrix pages to
laser printer or do I have to go to PDF and then print the PDF?
q2. Is there a monitor for the M100 available?
q3. Does anybody know of any available commercial assembler that runs on
the M100 (I know about cross assemblers, but that's not what I'm looking
for here and I know about cmzasm.ba, and byteit.ba, I'm looking for
something commercial - say the Tandy Assembler or the Custom Software
Assembler)
Thanks!
Will
