On Sat, 11 Jun 1994 11:44:15 +0100 (BST), Nigel J Kettlewell said: me> That reminds me. The Sam is very fussy about the programs it reads in from me> tape.
> Never knew that. Mind you, I never use tape. I'm sure it's true of disk files too, but you've probably never sees it because the Sam saves out files that it can load back later (just think of all that space which is being wasted by saving out the 512-byte gap in every program :-) ). I discovered this fussiness while I was writing a spectrum-to-Sam converter (which means, incidentally, that I can now send programs from the +3 to the Sam via the MIDI port. BTW, this brings up a "bug" in SamDOS: the native Sam is able to save and load through the MIDI port using "device N", but as soon as you load SamDOS it thinks that N is an invalid device). > Well well well. Try it - fiddle about with INPUT #2, I think it goes wrong > when the screen tries to scroll up - ie when you go off the bottom of the > screen. I haven't actually got a Sam right here, but I'll try and remember... > You're not kidding. The Messenger had a proper one - you had to plug this > PCB into the Euroconnector (having taken your printer interface out, of > course) and it had a new NMI button with debounce. It's trivial to make. I have one connected to my +3 (and another built in to my spectrum). Why on earth they didn't design it properly I'll never know... me> (although, because of a huge stack-cleaning hack, the snapshot me> software manages most times). > It always used to work for me, but never does now. Not that I'm bothered. If you load in a spectrum ROM, install the snapshot code and turn the Sam into a spectrum, then even invoking the NMI routine by typing "PRINT USR 102" doesn't give a safe return. The snapshot routine cleans the stack too viciously and gets rid of the return address... imc
