David,
Ah, good points. The pi ecosystem is no problem. I have a couple of
handfuls of them lying around doing duty as my entertainment center, my
simh host, my network lab, etc. I don't mind tasking one to the
retro-printer. You are absolutely correct that I could just save the
files over serial, but I want the retro feel and be able to "print
screen" and what not. I figure if the retro-printer works well enough
and is emotionally satifying, great, if not, next up is to try a real
printer.
Will
On 10/19/22 3:05 PM, David Szasz wrote:
Your project "todo" list is very concise. Reviewing the
"Retro-Printer", you will also have to purchase, set up, and learn the
Raspberry Pi ecosystem to use it. A humble alternative is to redirect
the printout from your model 100 via a null modem cable to an empty
file on your personal computer via the serial terminal on that
personal computer (or removable memory device). That would require a
highly modified "PRINT" or "PRINT USING" command which is beyond my
age-addled mind at the moment. Or just print or save to an empty file
on model 100 and transfer that separately. Since you would be most
concerned with program listings, just saving the listing to a text
file and transferring that back to your desktop PC is the cheapest and
most expedient solution.
Regards, good luck
On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 2:02 PM Peter Vollan <[email protected]> wrote:
36 dollars just for that?! For god's sake, you should have asked
us first, there's lots of other places.
On Tue, 18 Oct 2022 at 17:03, Will Senn <[email protected]> wrote:
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 <http://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 <http://cmzasm.ba>, and byteit.ba
<http://byteit.ba>, I'm looking for something commercial -
say the Tandy Assembler or the Custom Software Assembler)
Thanks!
Will
