Unfortunately, 2MHz mode â€" while it would aid enormously in unpacking the frames and sorting out the data â€" would not help in transferring that data to the VDC RAM, which AFAIUI operates at circa 1MHz regardless. That's why that one register has a status flag in it to say when the VDC has finished its operations and is ready to have its registers twiddled some more, and why ignoring that bit causes data to go missing.

Considering we had light pens from at least the early 80s, it seems odd we had to wait for Palmpilots etc for pen-based computer interfaces to take off. :¬)


Now there’s a project… implementing a Palm-like interface on a Commodore… :¬D


PS: Ruthven, I’m pretty sure light pens will only work in port 1 regardless of other considerations, because port 2 doesn't have the connection to that detection circuit. Anyone know if I’m remembering that correctly?

Better copyediting? No offence intended, but the bizarre way commas are used on the current front page is a huge distraction from the otherwise interesting content. I kept wanting to correct it.

I personally think that adding fast-serial support to the µIEC/SD2IEC project would be the most widely useful move. I’d do it myself if I thought I could get it working in less time than “a few years,” but as some of you may recall I am already way late with a variety of other projects, including a mostly unrelated µIEC enhancement. Adding more to my backlog queue would not be productive.


Does anyone think there would be much public support behind putting a bounty on adding the fast-serial feature? I am conflicted on the point; I’m in favour but have no money to put where my mouth is.


G.

Ah, somehow I missed that. I have never seen 12 hour time use a zero. Interesting.

I fully agree that 24 hour time is much more logical and less ambiguous, but the 12-hour format is what people grow up with Over Here â€" and unless you join the military or get a job involving shift work, there is little incentive to switch over, not when compared with the mental gear-clashing caused by having to convert between the 24 hour time on your watch and the 12 hour time every person, sign and television around you is using. A lot of people around here are so innumerate they can’t even multiply by 10 without a calculator â€" adding and subtracting 12 all the time is well beyond most of them.

Lokalhorst: What do you mean, two variants? You’re the third of us to point out the same answer.

Technically, _exactly_ 12:00 in the middle of the day is noon and neither AM nor PM (which abbreviations stand for the Latin for Before and After Midday), but we call it 12:00 PM because most of that particular minute (say 12:00:00.0000000....0001 through 12:59:59) happens after the exact moment of noon. Similarly, midnight is called 12:00 AM because most of the minute with that name happens the next morning.

This gave me a dreadful headache when I was a small child first trying to understand it, but is internally consistent.

If you mean the little sled thingy that carries the head back and forth is jammed on its rails, be not alarmed, the same thing happened to mine. All I had to do was wait for it to start trying to move and give it a careful but firm push in the right direction. It came unstuck with a /crack/ noise. Nothing broke, it's just it had fused slightly to the rails. It has worked perfectly ever since.

According to the Canonical List of Commodore Products on zimmers.net, the commodore 8" drives included the CBM 8060, 8061, 8062, 8280, and 8280 LP. All save the first were apparently dual drives.

Why not just do this the usual way and use the normal BASIC snippet?

(from memory, may be slightly inaccurate):

10 OPEN 4,4 : REM OPEN FILE TO PRINTER
20 CMD 4 : REM REDIRECT OUTPUT TO FILE #4
30 LOAD "$",8 : LIST : REM GET/LIST DIRECTORY

Commodores (and VICE) don't like unit #31 because it's an invalid address. The Commodore serial bus is based on the IEEE-488 bus used in PETs, which uses commands with a 3-bit command field and a 5-bit address field. Should allow addresses from 0-31, right? well, sort of… address 31 is used as a broadcast address to tell all devices to stop doing whatever the command field specifies. The Kernal does little or no internal sanity checking on the numbers you try to use, so you can easily make it very confused by telling everything to stop talking when you actually meant to tell the nonexistent device #31 to do the opposite.

’Fraid not. All the files on that site were hosted on Commodore64.org, which appears to not be there any more.

Quote from: BloodyCactus on April 15, 2010, 02:59 AMuh.. forgot to tell the wife I bought it and I cant exactly hide it anywhere

The arrangement here is I can bring home whatever I like as long as there's room on the shelf for it, but that says nothing of how to pay for any of it... maybe if you get her something she's been wanting in appeasement? :¬D

Ruthven,

I recommend Jim Butterfield’s machine language book (either edition) if you can find a copy. The man was a genius at explaining stuff in an easy-to-understand way.

I checked, and mine was definitely from BasicWayne. That was in March 2008, though; he might have stopped.

alee650 is the one who sold me the "Turbo Assembler 128" ROM that turned out to be undeclared 64-mode software, and may possibly have not even worked; certainly I was never able to get it to start, due in no small part to the complete absence of instructions beyond “plug this into your function ROM slot” that came with it. I seem to recall I tried to email them about it but I never heard back. Caveat emptor.

That BasicWayne fellow flogs ’em. I’m pretty sure his are fakes, but if they work, who cares?

At a guess, the serial communication takes so long to transfer data that you’re better off just doing your calculating in the 8502 CPU.

No worries, Robert, a fellow on a Dutch Commodore group pointed me to a nice scanned copy on Bombjack. Darned if I know why Google doesn’t know about it, but whatever. If you do happen to run across a physical copy next time you’re looking, I’d appreciate the option to acquire it, but there’s no longer any urgency.

Regards,
G.

What the subject says. Has anyone got one of these manuals? I bought the hardware today at the used computer dealer for $7, but after hours of Googling I am no closer to finding out exactly what it is capable of.

I did find out that it doesn’t do descenders â€" I seem to have a knack for accidentally acquiring Commodore printers that lack that functionality, as my other specimen is an MPS-803 â€" and also that it is supposed to be considerably quieter than its predecessor, the 3022. Nice to know but not terribly helpful. :¬)

TIA,
G.

Welcome number Six. Who is number Two? </obPrisonerRef>

Don’t feel too old for being into Commodores since the mid-eighties; I think most of us were. I started using the family SX-64 in 1984 at the age of 7, and I don’t think I’m at all unique in that. I might be a little unusual in that I still have it, mind you. :¬)

A closer look reveals that those are all from the 8296, not the earlier 8032 family which used a different board. There is a difference table, but it's abbreviated and does not explain what the signals are used for.

I’ve already been in touch with Bill Degnan â€" he’s the one with the upgrade kits, of which he only has one left for sale â€" but I haven't tried mailing Larry yet. I’ll try him today.

Thanks for the tip about MARCH,
Gordon

It’s the kind with the “Fat 40” universal 40/80-column motherboard. There is a fellow on one of the PET sites who sells new-old-stock official Commodore-branded 64K RAM upgrades that will work on this model, but they appear to preclude other modifications within the case due to being physically enormous. (I am particularly taken with the idea of the internal IDE modification I’ve heard rumours of, but there are others possible.) Also, I’m not at all sure I could afford to pay for such a beast; with shipping and so on, they are quite expensive by my standards.

Does anyone have any pointers to documentation on using the 100 expansion header pins at the back right of the motherboard? I know from the 8296 documents I’ve examined that 50 of them are just ground-plane pairs, but I lack detailed explanation (and reliable identification) of the 50 actual signal pins. I haven’t even seen a reliable indication of what kind of female connector you would use to plug onto the two 50-pin headers!

Hoping someone’s gone this route before me,
gsteemso

As far as I know, the only thing you can do is ask the user and hope they tell the truth.

I tend to get my machines (of whatever type, even including an Apple Lisa 2/5, on one memorable occasion) for free. All it takes is being willing to wait 10 years and getting to know people who are unloading their collections. A lot of enthusiasts don't care about the money as long as "their baby" goes to a good home.