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TMQ Vol III.iii

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1. One last favour I know you could not know it because I never told you but my name is actually spelled with an as the last letter I used to always type my name in capital letters to avoid the problem of the acute accent which looks so strange to English speaking people But now thanks to IBM character set 2 I can spell my name correctly For those interested the pronunciation of Michel Houde is something like mee shell u day The letter H is not pronounced the pair OU is pronounced like an American U not like a British U i e no diphthongization and the letter I is like your E remember the Beatles song Michelle Letters to the Editor 16 Letters to the Editor Volume IM iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii System Library File s extents Fm Patricia Mansfield I upgraded to LDOS 5 3 in June when my students had left school for the summer and thought I had had a successful upgrade I only have a 5 Meg disk so I used your built in JCL and all went smoothly I have a network 3 System and can boot up all my stations load and save Pascal BASIC programs get directories etc The HOST on the other hand is going crazy when you use it as a standalone I can load and run Pascal and BASIC programs from the host but the DOS programs aren t working This is what is happening DIR is OK LIST either locks up the system or gives a scrambled directory
2. iii 11 iii iv iv ii n 2 ii ii iv iv it Index to Volume II Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Laser Printer LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB LB86 LBASIC LBASIC LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS LDOS Licensing LINK LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS WW w w w w w w w Ww WoW WWW wo Wde ee A f D Ui U O M A A A M M A A A A A A A A A A A cn Ww Oo ADAAIA AAA OA O w w w w w w w w ww Index to Volume II Diff between various types of laser printers A use for LB database DEF file revealed Feedback from a new LB user LB and memory constraints LB Installation Manual LB DEF Files Little Brother and Data Importing MAXDOS6 and Little Brother Moving from field to field TRSCROSS moves LB database Unsolicited comment on LB Using LB under LSDOS 6 3 LB86 Configuration problem INKEY and LBASIC EDOS Journals Volume IT DATEFIX JCL and MOD flag Does DIR SYS need a date DOS errors from BASIC LDOS Clock display LDOS Manual TABSETs Time Manager Project Manager and Scripsit TRSDOS 1 3 to LDOS 5 3 Why KI DVR for SPOOL Patches for extending the system year LDOS 5 1 4 Quick Reference Cards Updating the CMD V Patch for LDOS 5 1 4 2
3. 49 The Hardware Corner Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii We had a small supply of the 64180 manual but are now sold out I have al ready made programming changes to MRAS to support the 64180 OP codes But I am not ready to release it because of some changes to the linker which I want to make I suspect it may be available in a few months Lastly it would be rather difficult if not impossible to adapt a PC type CGA or EGA card to the TRS 80 Our host adap tor doesn t need much magical to adapt to the PC bus since the controller is an 8 bit device and doesn t use the host s RAM memory PC video is memory mapped thus an adaptor to that would be out of the question On the other hand with your XLR8er you have the capability of con necting a full featured color video card Check out the one from BYTE magazine designed by Steve Ciarcia That can con nect up to the XLR8er s external I O bus I don t remember the issue it was a few years ago 4P with XLR8er graphics and modem Fm Donald A Singer Dear Roy As usual I ve held off until the last minute to send in this order and take advantage of the enclosed card in part because I was debating getting an XLR8er board aswell While I d like to take advantage of the hardware discount I decided that I still have too many questions about the XLR8er to order one If you could enclose answers with my order or a
4. 703 450 4181 MC VISA CHOICE 800 MfESOSYS 1P 5P EST Monday Friday Orders Only VA residents add sales tax S amp H US 2 Canada 3 Foreign 6 ee ie amare ae et ee Volume Ilii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 The following programs although shown in their respective source code language are nevertheless applications which may be directly usable by the non programming user All you need do is obtain the assembled compiled program from the DISK NOTES 3 3 diskette whichis associated with this issue of THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY The problem is common you have a number of files with the same name but you are not certain if the contents is the same which versions are they and which patches have been applied Maybe there are even some files with different names but with the same contents At the mo ment you want to find out you know you should have managed you files better and listed all installed patches in a history file But in real life you sometimes forget to patch a copy of a file you lost the history file or you got the file in a collection from someone else What can you do to find out to check your Volume Il iii Applications for the User Applications for the User Volume Iil iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti files The first thing to do is look at the directory information if the files are of different size then they surely are differ ent But when a fil
5. Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Bob There are at least a half dozen different schemes programs for doing that routing printer data to disk Each works or fails in different circumstances so you get them all and try each until you find one that works with this particular combination of CPU DOS TSRs and applications soft ware BRO the Libs over on IBMHW and IBMSYS for the various programs I think that there s a fairly good one over on CLM332 also I think that there are a few specifically for the screen capture application try CTLALT plus I think I just saw a new one recently and there s one included with Dan Briklin s DEMO program Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Hardin PrtSc does go through INT 17 which can be routed to any hardware parallel printer by rearranging the base addresses but as you say you must intercept INT17 or INT5 if all you care about is PRtSc to do logical device routing like to a disk file DOS Subjects m l Ii l a i Al wh l rl Ml The LDOS 5 3 upgrade kit is now available to take your Model Ilf or 4 in 3 mode to the year 2000 LDOS 5 3 provides complete media compatibility with LS DOS 6 3 the newest Model 4 DOS released by Logical Systems Inc With LDOS 5 3 you can add 12 years to the life of your software Just look at these improvements over version 5 1 4 e Date support through December 31 1999 time stamping for files LDOS frees up 14 additional file slots for da
6. Foreign rates vary from 30 year to Can ada and Mexico to 35 for Europe and other zone D areas to 40 year for zone E places such as Australia and Japan What s a VLSI Fm Pete Betz Could someone please tell me what VLSI means Specifically the term in question is VLSI microcomputer technology I ve seen the term before but can t remember what it is Further is there any book or back issue of a magazine that anyone can recommend that contains a good glossary of all these infernal acronyms abbreviations and contractions for various systems languages hardware etc Pd appreciate it Fm Ray Pelzer Pete VLSI is an acro nym for Very Large Scale Integration a term referring to the extreme density of components within a single integrated circuit chip This is the next step up from LSI which isn t Very A good example might be that a calculator on a chip could be considered LSI technology reasonably well packed number of tran sistors on that single chip while a com puter microprocessor like aZ 80 or more obviously an 80386 would be consid ered VLSI Fm Adam Rubin Pete SSI small scale integration MSI medium scale integra tion LSI large scale integration and VLSI very large scale integration refer to the density of the circuits on one IC integrated circuit or chip The fol lowing table is from Radio Shack s Understanding Computer Science book
7. figuration There s no bug in Michel s code at least not any I have found yet He s also been using that software inter face for about 9 10 months Fm Fred Oberding Roy Disregard my previous message I woke up this AM with a clearer head and have re applied RSHARD6 all my other sysgened files and all is well again I am not too sure why as I had already tried re sysgening although not from a disk w o a sysgened file By the way will there be any patches to change Michel s default of 1 1 40 for those of us that can handle a faster 64180 I presently am running SET180 to change the speed after bootup Fm MISOSYS Inc If you get Disk Notes 3 2 or the revised interface diskette you will get the source code to the software interface which generated the patch With that you could easily tweak any of the initialization code to adjust to your situ ation Fm Frank Slinkman Fred One thing you can do to get about a 2 3 increase in speed is to patch SETX and fix XLB OOTA so that they AND OBCH instead of AND OFCH before the OUTO A 36H command The 6th REFW bit in RCR 36H when set specifies a 3T refresh cycle and when reset specifies a 2T refresh cycle Resetting this bet will gain you 1T out of every 43 a worthwhile speedup if your machine can handle it Mine has been running acouple of months with REFW reset with no problems Fm Fred Oberding Frank thanks for the info I don t have the source
8. m sure that a patch or two would benefit the most people That s what makes this place so useful Thanks for the help Fm Mark Mueller Roy You read my mind I screamed help when the work system went down and needed a quick fix to getit back up again Fixed it is and into EXMEM I go Fm David Huelsmann Mark No prob lem If you should take the time to modify EXMEM to check whether it needs to double buffer I am sure we would all like to share your efforts to our benefit Fm Ken Strickler Roy I have imple mented the PEXMEM and ERAMDISK from M Houde and have found that NOW I CAN HAVE OD PRO WAM and ERAMDISK all together I think that I am about 4 bytes short of getting ZSHELL in there too NEEDLESS TO SAY I AM MORE THAN A LITTLE EXCITED I may goto ALTRES again since I have patched it per TMQ to work in Bank 10 I Would lose the use of the BUFFERED DRIVES but the programs that I WRITE OPEN and CLOSE the DISK FILE on EACH OCCURRENCE of ACCESS to prevent an UN CLOSED FILE This applies to WRITE FILES I have found a 14 increase in speed in listing a file but I will have to load OD outside of BANKS 1 2 in order to RE SERVE those banks for applications If you have a QUICK N DIRTY to force OD above BANK 2 I would SURE BE GRATEFUL I have also started to experiment with MINIDOS enabled and so far notmuch testing yet the SIFT CLEAR combina tion passes wit
9. s review of EnhComp in TMQ IJIIL ii A pat on the back to Mark it was well written and quite comprehensive while short enough to be interesting I also feel that s an excellent way of presenting features of your products that might otherwise pass unnoticed by your readers MISOSYS Products Tidbits 38 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume IH I have been using Pro EnhComp almost from day one and after some initial bu glets were exterminated find it very inter esting However there is just one thing that on certain jobs tends to keep me away from it in favor of straight interpre tive Basic I handle a number of data bases in inter pretive Basic most of the programs are quite long and elaborate Invariably my programs are written so when writing to disk it is done in duplicate one write to the working disk and one to the backup A typical program is arranged so a number of entries are made and a save command THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 is given by the operator when finished however if the number of entries exceeds a certain figure say 300 for instance the program stops the operator and saves This establishes a compromise maximum that can be in RAM at any given moment to avoid excessive loss in case of power failure while avoiding wasted time due to over frequent saves to floppies When one gets into long and complex programs there are numerous errors to be considered togethe
10. s test into EXMEM Fm Mark Mueller Addendum this morning I tested the system without EXMEM installed The problems with ERAMDISK disappeared However with out itinstalled acall to SVC 108 produces the deadly ERROR 2BH SVC error Changing the call to SVC 125 solves the problem but as I mentioned above it would require the changing of a bunch of programs which is not practical Can anyone please tell me at least how to vector 108 to 125 for the time being Fm David Huelsmann Mark The TMQ write up was a little confusing ERAM DISK will use EITHER SVC 108 or 125 If 108 is available it will use that SVC whether or not 125 is available I solved my problem I too need to have EXMEM resident by reassembling ERAMDISK without the calls to 108 thereby having both bank page utilities able to be resident until such time as the EXMEM is modified to recognize need for double buffering Since you may not have the capabilities of re assembling let me work up a patch of NOP s for you that should solve your problem in the same way The promised patches to ERAMDISK CMD follow They are pretty short but you will probably want to create a file to use so that you can reverse these patches once EXMEM is updated Once you install these patches both EX MEM and PEXMEM can be resident without worry ing about what ERAMDISK will use Fm Mark Mueller David Actually I do have MRAS so reassembling would be no real problem but I
11. Besides once either SETX or SET180 make their writes to the internal ports the code is not used again Therefore assuming the right data is being written to the internal ports it should not matter whether you use SETX or SET 180 to write it Since you wererunning 0 1 80 previously with no problems the speed is probably not causing the problem Could it just be coincidental Perhaps you re getting power spikes or something You don t operate an arc welder while the computeris idling do you Or have a teenage son who likes to play practical jokes Or a toddler who likes to press orange buttons Seriously though why not reassemble SETX at 7000H run it and see what happens That will put the bad memory question to the acid test If the problem persists then maybe youneed to re check the patches or create a new system disk and apply the patches to that If that doesn t do it slow the computer down to 1 1 40 and enable the refresh cycle wait state and see if maybe the speed is the problem after all Fm Fred Oberding Frank thank you again for your input I nave SYSO SYS patched now so my computer boots up with 1 1 80 I hope Roy can get my order out before he goes off for the holidays as I would like to go through the source of the XLS YSOA patch to change it to boot up with 0 memory wait states Sull having problems with SETX over SET180 and I m still not sure why I suspected memory as it is the only vari ab
12. COPY does the same as LIST I have to use BACKUP to copy files some of the files I tried to copy are old files others are newly created with 5 3 KILL is OK PURGE is OK FORMAT is OK CONV is OK I don t use a lot of utilities so I don t know if there are any other problems I guess the main question I have is about COPY and LIST Could these two programs be bad on the source disk Please advise me as to what you think I should do Fm MISOSYS Inc Sounds like one of the library files went to more than two extents For the files SYS6 SYS and SYS7 SYS the column heading DE must be either a 1 ora 2 If 3 or higher then PURGE the bad file and re copy it from the floppy Use the BACKUP command for that Then recheck the number of extents taken up by the library file If still more than 2 then itmay be necessary to back up all the files from that drive parti tion re format the partition move the DOS back onto the partition then restore all of the files Date not current Fm Lloyd Evans MCTRUG Pres have just became the librarian for the clubs J II1 4 library and am having some trouble with 6 3 s Backup by class function If bit 4 in Dir 1 gets set certain Backup com mands will not find it BACKUP file name ext s d will not work nor will any backup command other than a mirror image backup 5 3 does work as expected Both tech manuals say that a sign should be in the da
13. OTOH INI can only load 256 bytes any way as you pointed out My reasoning for saying lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt would work is this If the FDC gets confused it will simply set and stare It s looking for a specific code or pattern of codes After pulling a disk while the drive is selected the FDC still sets there and stares If you place a format which the FDC recognizes and press the lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt to start the motors running again the FDC will see patterns it recognizes return something or simply reset it s busy signal and allow the system to continue with what it was doing If an error occurs LSDOS normally re tries the operation If not the application will attempt to recover Or LSDOS will print an error message on the screen after the command line entry Either way the system will return What happens after that depends on what error is returned by the FDC and or DOS Fm MISOSYS Inc Actually Shane INI only reads ONE byte It depends on the surrounding code as to how many bytes are going to be read If the INI instruction is repeated then the number of times it is repeated will equal the number of bytes read In the FDC driver it is looped via a DJNZ instruction The B register was initially zero therefore that results in a repetition of 256 INIs thus only 256 bytes are read Another routine which loops the INI until data transfer is com plete would read as many bytes as were in the sec
14. REMOVE CONFIG SYS CCC 0 REMOVE SWAP CMD 0 SET FF FORMS FLT FILTER PR FF FORMS C 85 1I 0 L 55 M 2 SET DS KSMPLUS2 FLT S 100 E FILTER KI DS SETKI W 10 R 1 SYSTEM TYPE NO EXIT LSDOS KSM Now with regard to IFC which I recently got as part of your new GO CMD pack age I greatly enjoy using it and have been kicking myself for not having discovered it earlier as it s an enormous help in putting new and elaborate system disks together I wish I d discovered it years ago as it would have saved me many long hours moving files around from disk to disk I invariably run all my system disks with VERIFY turned on and note that IFC defaults to off unless one remembers to change it to on with the alter parame ters command Aye there is the rub I have to remember I have also noted when using IFC from a system disk that s SYSGENed to VERIFY on that if I use the Q command and query DOS for DEVICE it tells me that VERIFY is on at the same time that IFC tells me it is off Does IFC in defaulting to VERIFY off turn off the DOS VERIFY I SYSGENed And perhaps turns it back on when return ing to DOS If my system disk will guarantee that VERIFY will be on via SYSGEN what ever the status of IFC then Ihave nothing to worry about and can just forget it However if what counts is what IFC is telling me then some patch would be very welcome to make IFC default al ways t
15. WINLINK BAS the demon stration program included with the PRO WAM Toolkit M 51 225 has caused the computer to reboot after the this is a test sequence got to line 25 On further exami nation of the manual I found the follow ing on P 44 under Window execute Function 12 The following statement illustrates a use of WEXEC to invoke the CAL applica tion from the WAMO APL library used when installing PRO WAM 155 PRINT 1 CHRS 1 CHRS 12 CARDX Assuming that perhaps CARDX was an error I changed it to CAL in line 155 The computer rebooted as before Still suspecting line 155 I remarked itoutfor the next run This time the program ran more or less as described with no reboot 0 K you say what sort of weird configu ration were you running at the time Old Model 4 with 512k Alpha Tech board and pin 7 on U3 removed LS DOS 6 3 Level K PRO WAM 2 01a WAMO APL with everything in it including Mr Ed Utili ties Basic 6 2 plus Micro Systems en hanced version of Basic Superdrive Anitek s ramdisk emulator taking up 12 32k banks running as the system drive and having BASIC WAMO APL on it Forms filter installed KSM active All of the preceding is usually well behaved with all the PRO WAM applications running fine AS an experiment I went back to a plain version of the DOS acopy of my original level LS DOS 6 3 with FIXBOOT ap plied Basic 1 01 02 high memory at
16. been an issue since 1951 but when thing put together since 1944 nobody did much beyond emergency measures in Eastern Europe for a few months A lot of problems are just politics or even just white noise TRS 80 Clubs amp BBS sys tems Fm MISOSYS Inc In our last issue of THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Irequested input from any club or BBS still serving the TRS 80 community of users I wanted Letters to the Editor Bix Letters to the Editor Volume IUI iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume ITI 111 the information to start a section in TMQ which would list the known clubs and bulletin board systems In this issue Iam publishing the responses I have so far received In future issues the appropriate names and addresses will be moved toa continuing list So if you are representa tive of aclub or BBS catering to the TRS 80 users and are not yet on my list please submit your information Fm Ralf Folkerts Roy I m thinking about operating a Model 4 BBS so the European TRS users may have a BBS to communicate with and especially exchange Public Domain Software If you think this idea is not too bad could you please ask in the next TMQ if anyone is interested in a Model 4 BBS to exchange SW INFO Those ones interested could leave me a MSG at that BBS If you print that ques tion in TMQ I would start a trial opera tion at the day I receive my TMQ Opera tion hours will be from about 19 0
17. been trying to do that with a couple of files written in Mod 4 Superscripsit But when I try the conversion the Mod 3 reports filespec NOT CONVERTED Protected File I ve tried to remove protection or passwords with ATTRIB But so far no luck Who wants to tell me what I m doing wrong Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Dayton I answered this over on PCS 21 but for everyone else the problem is that Model 3 TRSDOS 1 3 s CONVERT utility is mistaking the extended dating for a pass word Just go ahead and format the 35 track disk under TRSDOS 6 2 that will make an old format disk to which you should be able to copy the file and do the conversion Fm Dayton Sumner Joe Worked like a charm Thanks The reason I wanted to do it was so I could use my Mod 3 Proofread Dictionary to check the text If any one else wants to move a Superscripsit file To or FROM either Mod 3 or Mod 4 you have to correct the print driver spec Otherwise Scripsit can t find the file DEBUG print to file Fm Adam Rubin Roy I ought to men tion it I had PR routed to a file and was using DEBUG E option When it came time to allocate more disk space to the file the system crashed rather violently A bit of digging disclosed that when disk space needs to be allocated the system reads the GAT into x 2300 which clob bers the tail end of SYS5 I suppose the best work around would be to pre allo cate the file as with LDOS or avoid
18. but they seem to focus on only filtering the output of a device not patch ing in to an existing driver Could you refer me to a good explanation of how this is accomplished I am sure that my fellow XLR8er users could benefit from the completion of such a project I have Michel Houde s patches installed and they function flawlessly at 1 1 80 but would like to be able to oper ate at 0 1 80 as I could with Hibanks and Fixall Sure is nice to have the extra lomem though Now is the time to order PRO WAM Fm MISOSYS Inc FIXALL trapped the interrupts Since keyboard scanning is usually done by an interrupt handler you re using type ahead trap the interrupts That gets a little hairy it insists that your filter be in low memory You may want to just examine THE SOURCE and patch directly into the keyboard handler If you haven t read THE PROGRAMMER S GUIDE then that s another reference for filtering But you need to deal with the interrupts because its not the fetching of the character it s the scanning of the keyboard Fm Daniel L Srebnick Roy Sounds tough I ll have to give this some more thought Perhaps it s time to order The Programmers Guide before I decide Cheap M4 scanner Fm Frank Slinkman Well I finally did it Some of you may recall a thread on the LDOS forum dealing with importing graphics images into the Model 4 I fi nally gave up on the TV project Even with the XLR8er board the po
19. ii It ii Eis A1 II i II ii II iv It i It ii Ir ii Eis Ir iii II i II iv II ii It ii Ir iii Li 21 IL 1L II ii It iii It iv II iv It iv IIr iii II iv II iv II iv II iv Ir iii II iii Ir iii iit i II iv II iv II iv Index to Volume II Volume UL iii EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EXCEL EXMEM Family Update Floating point Floating Point Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy Floppy FORTH Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive FORTRAN GOBBLING BOX GreatBac 86 GW BASIC GW BASIC GW BASIC Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Hard Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive Drive drive drive drive drive drive HD64180 HD64180 HD64180 HIBANKS HIRES HO HQ HQ HYPERSOFT JCL JCL JCL JCL THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 SIN RANDOM and PRINT USING Using EnhComp for 100 280 code Using 280 labels for GOSUBs MS DOS EXCEL report by Bill Schroeder LSI EXMEM lt gt BASIC Interfacing by Mark A Mueller by Roy Soltoff C vs BASIC floating point data Floating point woes 360K floppy disk drive Disk drive questions DOS doesn t BOOT Double sided BOOT disks Drive sleeping Drive speed revisited More on 2 sided Floppies On disk drive terminat
20. iv 28 TRSDOS 6 2 SYSTEM TIME II iv 28 WORD Microsoft WORD and mixed column printing It ii 43 WORD Microsoft WORD and the Daisy Wheel II II ii 43 WORD Using Microsoft WORD with a Tandy DW II II i 45 XLR8 Notes on XLR8 II iii 70 XLR8 Problems with RAMDISK and HD II i 80 XLR8 What board is best XLR8 or AlphTech Megamem II iv 89 XLR8 XLR8 What is it II iv 88 XLR8 4P in Mod III Mode by Gary Lee Phillips II i 94 XLR8 Assistance needed II iii 75 XLR8 Capabilities II iii 74 Index to Volume II 68 Index to Volume II Volume IIT iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii XLR8 Ciarcia Buss Option II iii 73 XLR8 Device timeouts II iv 89 XLR8 Different capabilities of HD64180 packages II i 81 XLR8 FIXALL IS needed II iv 93 XLR8 FIXBANK i II 3 16 XLR8 FIXBANKS by Rex A Basham II iii 37 XLR8 Fixes for LSDOS 6 3 and TRSHD6 II i 82 XLR8 MISOSYS sole distributor now current prices II iv 4 XLR8 Non gate array Rev A 260 1069 is non compatible II iv 4 XLR8 PRO WAM with the XLR8 er II iv 78 XLR8 Problems with booting in MOD III Mode II i 14 XLR8 Problems with booting requiring MODELA III II i 81 XLR8 RAM requirements il i 81 XLR8 RAMDISK and DATECONV II iii 75 XLR8 Revised HIBANKS II iv 95 XLR8 Serious disk problems II iv 90 XLR8 Speeding issues II iv 91 XLR8 Using the 64180 s MLT opcode II iii 75 XLR8 XLR8 and Z280 equivalent speed II i 89 XLR8 XLR8 and ZEUS II i 89 XLR8 XLR8 speedup
21. lt gt EXMEM BUFDATA BAS by Edwin Ketola II ii 63 BASIC EXMEM lt gt BASIC Interfacing by Mark A Mueller II iv 55 BASIC FILES default II iii 28 BASIC How to ATTRIB from inside BASIC LEi 27 BASIC LDOS errors from BASIC II iv 27 Index to Volume II 60 Index to Volume II Volume IM iii BASIC BASIC BEDFORD Cc Cc Cc C CATALOG CATALOG COBOL COMPUSERVE COMPUSERVE DAC Easy P roll DEBUG DED86 DESKMATE DISK NOTES DISK NOTES DISK NOTES DISK NOTES DISK NOTES diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK diskDISK DOS DOS DOS DOS DOS DOS DOS x 3 DOS x 3 DSM4 DSM4 DTP DTP ED ASM 86 EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp EnhComp Index to Volume II THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Model III to 4 conversion BRORT MOD324 Testing PRINTER READY fm BASIC by Dick Hollenbeck Bedford Integr Accounting Softw for Small Bus Bits and Pieces on C by Ken Peck Changing function return types The lighter side of C Using the correct conversion character Suggestions and reply about the how if and when TRS 80 Software and Hardware from MISOSYS Inc Patches to enable some RS COBOL to work under 5 3 European access to Compuserve Too much of it DAC Easy Payroll 2 0 Not Easy Debugging bank switching Version 2 0 now available for 59 95 S amp H Programs which use too
22. method used by a commercial program available for MS DOS and one which is available from us for the Model 4 I forget the name of the MS DOS program but its thrust is recovery from catatastro phy What it does is store every keystroke which is entered and writes that out to disk don t ask me what it does when it gets a disk error If you have to recover at some point later in time you can play back all of the keystrokes If you don t need all of the keystrokes just edit the file I believe that you have our GO SYS pack age One of the programs in that package is KISTORE FLT designed as a front end for ZSHELL KISTORE is used to cap ture all keystrokes and send them to afile The purpose of the file is to re play the entire sequence of keystrokes via ZSHELL for total automation of the job It may be interesting for you to give that a try EnhComp bug in LSET RSET Fm MISOSYS Inc Paul Evellyn pro vided a telephone bug report he experi enced with EnhComp Here s my answer Paul This is in response to your telephone report of January 11th concerning a sus pected bug in PRO EnhComp I used the example program you provided to con firm your report and to find the root cause of the problem As it turns out the bug was in the com piler An incorrect test was made in the code common to LSET and RSET This placed an address to the presumed scalar field variable into the execution stream regardless of whether or not
23. the FDC during the time the busy code was looping waiting on the BUSY flag to become inactive If the motor did time out before BUSY became inactive lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt should work correctly The only three cases where it wouldn t restart the drive motors would be if the interrupts were disabled prior to disk I O or if the SE LECT or lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt code seg ments were corrupted by some external force or if there is a hardware problem with the FDC itself Barring those three cases lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt should always recover Whether an error is reported or not is dependent on the state of the system at the time Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Shane note that the interrupts are always off after the second byte has been transferred With out looking at The Source a bargain at the current price of 40 Anyone at all vaguely interested in this thread who doesn t al ready have it should get it Idon t recall exactly when they get turned back on but I seem to recall that was one of the things you had to remember about disk I O even if you have interrupts off calling the disk driver with a successful result will DOS Subjects 19 DOS Subjects Volume Il iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume I iii always return with interrupts on Fm Shane Dawalt Joe you re abso lutely right he says as reaching for his copy of The Source Hmmm Well then how does lt SHIFT gt l
24. throughput Note that S amp H figures are US 48 States If Features Improved speed up to 8 MHz Z80 equivalent Hawaii amp Alaska Outside US please write On board AT command set Expanded RAM 256KB memory optional or call for shipping charges Automatic Answer Expanded I O Ciarcia bus optional Automatic Dial Software utilities LS DOS 6 x LDOS 5 x Automatic Fallback or CP M one provided each additional 10 VX A N E i ar Adaptive Equalization Simple plug in installati e One sear eani es ee l Dual RJ1iC modular telephone plugs Af High speed signal for use with BBS XLR8er 0K Ram R MB 003 175 5S8H evga erage XLR8er 256K Ram R MB 004 255 5S amp H i Analog loopback self test mode TT512P H 4P 512 89 95 5S amp H Please specify Computer Model amp Number 26 Index to Volume II 69 Index to Volume II Volume IM iii e GO CMD product is a collection of products designed to provide additional util ty for your computer operation The prod cts in this group have been rewritten for odel 4 LS DOS 6 3 You get FASTBACK and FASTREAD for hard disk large file archive restore PRO CESS to manipulate executable command files COMP to com pare two files or disks FED2 to investigate and zap disk or file sectors on a full screen basis IFC updated with new features for teractively copying moving renaming de
25. ucts Space permitting perhaps I can expand on the contents in a TMQ issue As far as the hardware modification to pin 7 of U3 I have not done it I therefore cannot attest to it being worthwhile al though it has made the rounds Check out another modification in this issue for 5 MHz for those machines which can handle it The thing to look out for in any speedup modification is whether the ex panded memory banks can hold execut ing code Test out asped up machine with the SPOOLer in a expanded memory bank If it works you generally have reliable operation memory wise I think it was an editing error which de leted the reference to INTADDR The value is 39H That s the address of the jump vector associated with the CPU inter rupt at 38H My reference to Multiplan using the extra 64K memory was relating tothe TRSDOS version of Multiplan I would doubt that a CP M version of Multiplan would use any extra memory since there is no standard of expanded memory addressing under CP M Your 11K of spreadsheet probably is all that s available from your TPA Fm Michael Rogers FREMANTLE W A 6160 AUSTRALIA Roy Please find enclosed my Mister ED disk for refresh with the new TED APP Also the revised 5 5 x 8 5 documentation very nice it is too mentions REGENBU2 BAS Could I also have this put on the disk I was only supplied with the original REGENBU BAS designed for use with PRO WAM release 1 Running
26. CRC In order to do that I have changed MC JCL to add the dMISOSYS switch automatically when the MCP preproces sor is invoked I thought that an identifi cation like this was created automatically by MCP but I could not find any refer ence to itin the manual CRC should also compile without with other compilers the only possible problem areas are the support of wildcard file specifications and the detection of end of file with a binary file you should not rely on the character input function returning the EOF value In order to run CRC you type CRC switches filelist The switches are optional If CRC is in voked without any arguments it displays a usage message telling you how to invoke it More detailed information is displayed when you enter CRC h See cut out box Itis allowed to use wildcards in the filelist using a for any character or a for part of the filename but the wildcard scanner does not include system or invis ible files The output can be redirected to any other file or device by means of Sdestination or gt gt destination Dur ing output redirection CRC will display a gt for every file processed If the f flag is given the name of every argument file is displayed Applications for the User Volume III 1ii RC version 1 4 C 1988 by Hans de Wolf RC computes the 16 bit CCITT Cyclic edundancy Check for the files given as argument Wildc
27. DOS MSCRIPT OCR OS PaDS PaDS PaDS PASCAL PASCAL PASCAL Patch Patch PC DOS 3 2 Piracy Piracy Poll Power Supply Printer Printer Printer PRO WAM PRO WAM PRO WAM PRO WAM PRO WAM PRO WAM PRO WAM a a 66 Index to Volume II Index to Volume II MRAS compatible with 180 Patch queries by Shane Dawalt The hi res graphics library and UNREL When does MLINK zero DS regions Why does MLINK abort Z80 Emulator for PC z80mu3 arc 286 Express Board AST s Booting How long it takes DAC Easy Payroll 2 0 Not raay BEWARE Disappearing Cursor Editor Environment Variables By Hardin Brothers Graphics boards Hard drive How can I redirect printer output to a file Keyboards interchangeability Migrating to MS DOS MISOSYS MS DOS Utilities Monitors MS DOS 3 3 on AST Premium 286 MS DOS and number of drives MS DOS File Length Print spooling Printer Redirection PRN2FILE Dec 22 87 PC Mag Q amp A RAMdisk as System disk Recommendation to upgrade to Version 3 0 or higher W 2s on disk for IRS Which DOS Which PC Recommended AST Premium 286 Which Wordprocessor Clockpatches Optical Character Recognition Bits amp Pieces Information on Operating Systems PaDS and DOS LIB modules PDS Mod4 amp ATTRIB patch PRO PADS amp date handling Alcor Pascal amp Profile4 Alcor Pascal amp Profile4 PASCAL as an addon to MC NO Updates Patches How to go about them Why you shouid avoid
28. FFFF no added filters or drivers of any sort and a copy of the original PRO WAM disk Same result a reboot after this is a test 25 appears in the window I went back to 6 2 with FIXBOOT ap plied BASIC 1 01 01 same result By the way 6 2 or 6 3 without FIXBOOT applied just locks up after this is a test 25 appears no reboot As a final check to eliminate me and my system as the cause instead of some cacto blastus famous bug in WINLINK CMD or WINLINK BAS below are my exact steps in trying to run WINLINK BAS 1 Install PRO WAM 2 Install WINLINK message WL device is now installed appears 3 Load BASIC 4 Load WINLINK BAS 5 Run WINLINK BAS Now appears then this is a test x ap pears when this is a test 25 appears there is a very short pause and then a reboot Letters to the Editor 9 Letters to the Editor Volume IIT ii1 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IU 1ii Finally there is a line included at the end of the disk version of WINLINK BAS which does not appear in the printed ver sion 9999 SAVE winlink bas 6 REM Save the program What is the meaning of this Investigations here in Australia reveal a considerable variety of SEAGATE hard drives available I know that if I went to buy one and say that I wanted to use it on a Model 4 I would get blank looks Probably the blankest if I asked at a Tandy store Incidentally Tand
29. Lv Lii Getting around disk errors MONITOR ous IV COLL It il a na IL iv ii LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS LSDOS Volume Il iii LSFEDIT LSFEDII LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI LSI Column LSI Column LSI Column LSI Column LSI Column LSI PATCHES M4 lt gt MS DOS M4 lt gt MS DOS M80 L80 MACE MARK III COLL MAX 80 MAX 80 MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC MC AAAA AH oO a Ww Ww Ww w w w Index to Volume II THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Real Time Clock Site licence SYS6 7 8 SYS Libraries SYSDRV CMD by David Goben TXP CMD and ERROR 2b Upgrading from 6 x Programs which use too much system stack Bug with 256 sector cylinders FED s UPDATE command BASIC printer driver Equipment in use FORMAT Getting to know the user world with a thump How long will the Model 4 be supported LSI to leave TRS 80 market by June 30th 1988 On single CPU software licences Problems users have with SYSGEN when converting Problems with older drives Thanks for support i TMQ LSI Corner Suggestion for pre marketing by Bill Schroeder by Bill Schroeder LSDOS 6 3 SITE or USER licence Can you port them TRSCROSS Z80 Emulator for PC z80mu3 arc Bug in M80 H header file Bug in Mace s FORMATF Files missing from Mk III Collection Take MC to the MAX The MAX 80 batteries revi
30. WAM How about Mister ED s TED II ii 95 PRO WAM How did I edit DIALER macros II ii 96 PRO WAM How exactly to EXPORT II iii 67 PRO WAM Logical ENTER with PHRASE II iv 78 PRO WAM Memory Usage pfs FILE and PRO WAM II iii 28 PRO WAM Minor CAL bug CAL fixed II i 76 PRO WAM Minor problems with PHRASE II i 69 PRO WAM PRO WAM and ALLWRITE Please read README II 2 72 PRO WAM PRO WAM and Mister ED II iii 68 PRO WAM PRO WAM nad Job Control Language II ii 97 PRO WAM PRO WAM and wordprocessing II ii 93 PRO WAM PRO WAM with the XLR8er II iv 78 PRO WAM PRO WAM DOS SPOOLER and ALLWRITE II ii 96 PRO WAM Programmer s Toolkit When ii 2 75 PRO WAM PRUN and JCL abort II ii 68 PRO WAM PRUN Invoking TED from it II ii 99 PRO WAM Removing PRO WAM Itl iii 68 PRO WAM SuperScripsit and PHRASE APP II iii 67 PRO WAM SuperScripsit Scripsit PRO and CTL 255 II i 70 PRO WAM TERM APP How smart is it II i 70 PRO WAM The bank of your choice II iv 79 PRO WAM TODO bug TODO fixed II i 74 PRO WAM TODO DAT only creates on drive 0 II ii 96 PRO WAM WAMDUMP by Claude E Hunter II iv 54 PRO WAM Where or when is the Programmer s Toolkit II ii 94 PRO WAM XLR8 PRO WAM and low memory squeeze II ii 98 PRO WAM You can t invoke applications from EXPORT II i 73 PRODUCER How to get rid of obsolete records II iv 31 Profile4 Alcor Pascal amp Profile4d II iv 31 PROGRAM Grade Book Program II ii 29 Public Domain PD Software Librarian x a Ogee ls
31. an INC and a DEC Here s the patch to correct that booboo Talata e erete Aaa Golden Oldies SWAP Fm Charles A Ainsworth Roy Here s a little problem I hadn t noticed before with the XLR8er which could be quite a nuisance on occasion I m not expecting a specific answer to this letter but you may wish to consider it for a reply in TMQ First I ll describe my setups Setup 1 is a stock unaltered 4D in native 4 Mhz mode LSDOS with four floppy drives numbers 2 and 3 ENABLEd FORMS FLT and KSMPLUS2 FLT installed typeahead off VERIFY on SETKI W 10 R 1 Setup 2 is another 4D LSDOS with 150 ns chips and the complete XLR8er hard ware Operating under Michel Houde s files and with his patches applied to the distribution disk LSDOS files Inciden tally the problem I am about to describe is exactly the same with Rex Basham s HIBANKS The RAM disk is first set up as 4 as part of my bootup JCL and then there s a SWAP 0 4 command so the original drive zero becomes drive 4 SYSTEM DELAY is SYSGENed In setup 1 whenever I give the DEVICE command the drives are scanned in suc cession and if a drive has no disk I get as expected NO DISK for that drive If I misspell a command e g FRMAT or BCKUP or call inerror fora non resident file the system scans all drives and re ports Program not found All of which is correct and as it should be With setup 2 if I issue DEVICE mis spell a com
32. attached to the BLUE card for discounts Not enough ROOM for order ing on BLUE CARD Any money saved by BULK SHIPPING I would like ap plies to a GIFT CERTIFICATE or SUB SCRIPTION EXTENSION or SOFT WARE or SOMETHING for MICHEL HOUDE in appreciation for his XLR8ER programs I hope that they will be on the DISK NOTES disk Ihave RAMBLED long enough now and will get this on its way The DISK has this letter on it so that you can edit publish the parts you would like to if any I hope that you and yours had a wonderful Christmas and the NEW YEAR is the BEST EVER Fm Martin Pollard May 26 1988 Roy received your advertising brochure in the mail the other day and I must say I am pleased to see MISOSYS and the other companies who still support my Model 4 band together to keep us TRS 80 users informed I also noticed your 40 deal on any one language product a deal that came just in time I am the system operator programmer of a Tandy 6000 XENIX system where I work and am learning C I was planning to purchase PRO MC at full price I picked up M4 FORTRAN real cheap so MRAS is not needed but I still may purchase MLIB but this deal is too good to pass up Now on to the questions did you even doubt I had some lt grin gt I read with interest LSI s statement that they are leaving the TRS 80 market and handing sales and support of LS DOS 6 3 over to you Personally I think that is wonderful as you are the
33. author of LDOS it s kind of like the offspring have re turned to the nest so to speak Ialso feel better about dealing with a company that trusts its customers more than LSI does did As you now have responsibility of 6 3 here s the obvious question Did the hardware lock protection ever really exist and if so is it going to remain in place Naturally I can understand if you cannot comment before the transition of 6 3 from LSI to you takes place but perhaps a mention in TMQ if that s the case I m really curious Your ad for the XLR8er makes no men tion of H I Tech Do they still exist Mine is on the fritz and needs fixing If so are you their main distributor now If they have left who is now in charge of repairs One of my on going projects is disassem bling LS DOS 6 3 into EDAS source code for my own use only with help from THE SOURCE This is what made me skeptical about the hardware lock that LSI claims exists as my disassemblies of LOWCORE and SYSRES show abso lutely no evidence of it other than the Serial and customer service numbers and the checking routine in SYS3 In trying to take PATCH CMD apart I noticed a nice chunk of pages missing from Vol ume 3 guess where the pages were lo cated Is this true of ALL copies of Vol ume 3 or did I just get a bad copy I bought my current set from you a few years ago I have read so much about MC that I have decid
34. average person gives off about a liter a day The methane rises in the atmosphere and is converted to carbon dioxide whichacts like glass in a greenhouse allowing the sun s radiation through but preventing the Earth s heat from escaping Ruminant animals put off large amounts of methane because microbes in their stomachs digest their food While most of the digestion results in useable nutrients the bacteria convert about 6 or 7 percent of the food to methane gas Donald Johnson a specialist in animal nutrition has for years used closed ex perimental chambers to measure all of the heat and gases put off by cows and sheep If antibiotics are mixed with feed some of the bacteria that produce the methane are killed and the animals can use their feed more efficiently Their methane output is cut by up to 30 percent Johnson said that diet modifications us ing some commercially available feed that contains antibiotics or by some other method could be used to reduce significantly the amount of methane put into the atmosphere Fm Jim Beard Frank Antibiotics were routinely used in animal feed at one time until it was discovered that human consumption of milk and meat caused a low level of the anit biotics in people This can lead to cumulative toxic reactions in susceptible individuals evolution of re sistant bacteria in the world at large and other undesirable effects so the practice was discon
35. code yet but have looked at SETX with LSFEDII and believe the patch should be D00 CO BC F00 CO FC You say to fix XLBOOTA but don t you mean XLSYSOA There is a AND OFCH in it but not in XLBOOTA I can t find an OUTO A 36H with LSFEDII in either SETX nor BOOT SYS or SYSO SYS after the patches have been applied By the way have you experienced any unexplained re boots while using SETX My computer doesnot seem to like SETX I guess I could be having a memory prob lem where it loads I haven t seen the problem while using the computer but if I leave it idle for a few minutes it will re boot itself No problem while using SET180 Oh and thanks for the speed up patch for it you left on this SIG Fm Frank Slinkman Fred I wrote my last response to you off the top of my head without the listings in front of me You are quite correct the changes should be made to XLSYSOA not XLBOOTA The patch line code at starting at 10 37 in the D10 2E line should be BC F6 03 changed from FC F6 02 to remove the extra wait state from the refresh cycle and to change from a 40T to an 80T refresh interval This will change the instructions from AND OFCH OR 2toAND OBCH OR 3 Your patch to SETX is correct No I have had absolutely no problems with SETX It seems to me that if you were having memory problems in the area beginning at 2600H which is where SETX loads you d be having problems with a lot more than just SETX
36. drive 1 disk or anew copy Note that the data which was so labori ously input has not been lost However as far as I see it EnhComp does not allow such things and in the event of such errors it reports the error and jumps to LSDOS Ready leaving one wondering just what to do and very especially how to recover that half hour or hour of hard work which was expended inputting material from the keyboard for addition to the data base As far as I am aware and I may be wrong the only way to get up and running again is to call the EnhComp CMD program once more and begin en tering one s material from the start Or is there some form of warm restart without data loss that I don t know about or may have missed somehow Turning now to another aspect One ad vantage of EnhComp I have found quite useful as compared to interpretive Basic is that although EnhComp produces a CMD file substantially larger than the file MISOSYS Products Tidbits 39 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume II i1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume III iii written originally for compilation in the aggregate one ends up with less disk ac cess time than with interpretive Basic where two stages are involved loading BASIC CMD and then the Basic pro gram Anything that helps me to load faster from floppy drives has my blessing Floppy drives as you may have noted are those cute mechanical electrical electronic gadge
37. file the HIT sector would overwrite the GAT sector Here the chain of events REMOV reads the GAT sector into DIRBUF and the HIT sector into SBUFF at 1D00H the file is removed through the removal process the HIT and GAT sectors are written back The trouble is since EXMEM is controlling disk I O and performing its double buffering DIR BUF now contains the HIT sector not the GAT sector REMOV does not check for this but then again it never had to I solved this problem and cut down the chance of similar problems occurring by modifying EXMEM to perform double buffering only if the user s buffer is above TFOOH Also since I tightened up the driver code by moving MOVSTAK to EXMEM s entry point the loaded driver is a bit smaller than the previous version even with the added code If you like I can shoot the source and object files over to you if and when I make another TMQ submission Sixthly I am glad to hear that EDAS will be enhanced with the HD64180 instruc tion set in addition to MRAS EDAS serves my assembly needs just fine as does M80 for my MC programming I look forward to reading the announce ment of the enhanced EDAS and DSMBLR Letters to the Editor 13 Letters to the Editor Volume IM iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IT iti in a future TMQ Seventhly my statement about the close ness of MC to the proposed ANSI stan dard for C stemmed from
38. from Radio Shack It includes an adaptor to hook the hard drive to the Model 1 Expansion Interface 40 pin I O bus LDOS 5 1 3 and the drivers I managed to get one last July they may still be available If possible I would recommend making your hard drive host adaptor use the same 50 pin I O port address lines as the Radio Shack Hard Drive This would make it compatible with existing drivers and other hardware such as the Model 1 adaptor the Micro Labs Joy Mouse Interface and the VS 100 voice synthesizer For your readers using LeScript version 1 7 or VisiCalc version 02 09 02 with an XLR8er board I have included patches to enable these programs to use memory banks other than 1 and 2 These patches work fine but have not been extensively tested The LeScript patches work with the print spooler and PRO NTO PRO WAM but I don t know about other programs The VisiCalc patches bomb most of the time with PRO NTO PRO WAM but I don t know about the print spooler or other programs Finally I am interested in knowing if any Double Duty like programs that would work from a PRO WAM window have been written or if such a program is fea sible Fm MISOSYS Inc Thanks for the in put I just know that some folks are going to be interested in those patches I am not familiar with the Bi tech multi plexor but Powersoft appears to be sell ing itnow Perhaps one of my readers who is intimately familiar with the multiplexor
39. information may be of use to any TMQ readers who may be in need of some excellent communication soft ware for LDOS or LSDOS 2 sided Prompt Patch Fm MISOSYS Inc I was recently asked to supply a patch to LS DOS 6 3 so that FORMAT would prompt for the number of sides to format if the parameter was not entered on the command line parameter String Here s the patch PATCH SYSO0 SYS LSIDOS D00 81 11 F00 81 31 Update on LesCRIPT Fm Michael Rogers Regarding LeScript version 1 81 release date 11 23 88 again works with PRO WA How ever as the date really appears as 11 23 80 I d say that Anitek could bea potential customer for LS DOS 6 3 Help A Eke Corvus rive Sirs As you are about the only source of information on TRS 80 equipment I can trust I am hoping you can help me My brother who is blind uses a Model 4D with an Alpha Products speech syn thesizer He received a donation of a Corvus hard disk but did not get any information with it The ID label on the rear states that it is a 6mb model and rev D serial 322 A 0287 With it came two cables the first with three female 34 pin connectors one at one end and the other two on the op posite side at the other end Of the two at one end one of the con nectors is larger than the others and does not fit any of the con nectors on the drive The other vdeo VER Cemote cable has a 34 em Co pin female con nector on one end ke
40. is nothing official from LSI concerning booting LS DOS directly from a hard drive on the Model 4P According to LSI they were willing toimplement the boot changes for Tandy but were unable to reach agree ment on the price The 4P is different from other Model 4s as its BOOT ROM has provisions for reading the boot sector off of a hard drive I recollect that Bob Snapp once posted a message on Com puserveas to how to adapt the 4Ps BOOT ROM into the Model 4 which would then negate Model III operation Also one of our forum sections has the details on patching the BOOT SYS file to accom plish that But that kind of patching was probably release dependent SinceI never looked at the posted file I really don t know Someone else reading my response can probably comment on that Also make note to read The Blurb I have will included a note a revised ROMC avail able for the Model 4 All XLR8er boards are the same regard less of intended target machine installa tion The thing which is different is the mounting arrangement That then deter mines the length of interconnecting cable and whether a replacement shield is pro vided I have published in TMQ 3 1 and 3 2 the list of piece parts available for a hard drive assembly As soon as I can deter mine the availability of the host adaptor I will provide pricing for that Fm Jeff Joseph Roy I m very pleased with the revised docs for the XLR8er Sure beats the daylight
41. managing their data It s menu driven for ease of use absolutely no programming needed Requires a Model 4 with 128K orahard drive LB86 an MS DOS version is also available Store up to 65534 records per data base Up to 1024 characters per record Up to 64 fields per record Nine field types for flexibility Select and sort on up to 8 fields Keep multiple indexes for accessing data 10 input update screens per data base 10 printout formats per data base Extensive on line help available 74 95 5S amp H PRO WAM M 51 025 74 95 85S amp H S amp H 5 6 Canada 15 Other 8 MISOSYS Products Tidbits 46 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume IIL iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti Drive 1 troubles Fm Peter Amschel am keeping my model 4 s going as best I can I have a BBS system running on one of them atall times Fastplus by Mel Patrick and I use the other one to do bookkeeping Versa Ledger general ledger and payroll I have had some trouble with one of my ma chines though It appeared that drive 1 was acting up so I took it to the RS for repair and then when I got it back the thing would not format disks in drive one Every try would show 2 15 flawed grans and backups would be rejected I took it back to RS and they said they could find nothing wrong with it but now I have it back and it will still not format disks in drive 1 I can fo
42. much system stack Contents of DISK NOTES 2 1 revised numbering Contents of DISK NOTES 2 2 DISK NOTES 2 3 DISK NOTES 2 4 IS PRICED AT 10 00 S amp H They are NOT public domain Aerocomp diskDISK FIX Aerocomp HD drivers Correction to diskDISK patches diskDISK and Aerocomp 20 Meg HD continued diskDISK and memory usage Hard drive users do you need diskDISK How to use diskDISK Large diskDISKs LS diskDISK and the DOS network flag Miscellaneous problems with diskDISK More problems with Aerocomp drives Problems with diskDISK and Aerocomp 20Meg HD diskDISK configurations COMPATIBILITY between different DOS Is DOS 6 slow Other DOSs Removing protected files PURGE Resurrecting lost files TRSDOS TANDY Support Why not hierarchical directories Security for 5 3 amp 6 3 When is 25 5k only less than Eliminating SORT from DSM4 Searching with DSM4 by Charles A Ainsworth Bits and pieces about the new look TMQ GEM 3 Notice of release 4 0 ED ASM 86 Bugs amp Suggestions Does LOF have a bug EnhComp 2 6 release EnhComp and OUT Manual Deficiencies No OUT with OUT Problem with INPUT Problem with search and replace Problems with OUT and DIM statements Q amp A REF bug and benchmarks BEWARE 61 Volume I1 in It iii It iv IIT iii II iii II i Lis il 2 It iv II iii II iii IIT ii II i II 1i It 2 It iv II ii IIs 1 Ir ii Ir iii II iv IIr iii II iv It iii Ir
43. no problem Don t forget that if you change the drive assignments for the data base et al after establishing the path settings you will have to modify them using View Modify If you have the database on a diskdisk that needs to be assigned to the same drive number each time you use it Now why did we add this Because we believe that it will speed up the search time LB used to take to initially access a data base when you had many drives on line Note also that the PFL file will be created on the first available drive which is usually drive 0 unless write protected After a PFL is created it can be copied to another drive and removed from 0 but if it is on a high numbered drive LB then has to search for it MC C Compiler Printing from MC compiled programs Fm Gene Szedenits Jr I am having trouble writing to my printer from a ProMC program I can fopen it and putc the bytes fine except that sending a large block will overflow the printer s buffer The usual feof and ferror do not seem to indicate anything amiss Also Ican not detect whether or not I have remembered to turn the printer on I would rather not resort to CTL to check printer status if there is some portable solution in C Fm MISOSYS Inc You can t use feof on acharacter device How are you able to overrun your printer s buffer If it gets full it should issue a busy status FopenQing PR wil
44. of Steve Gi bson s SpinRite 1 Take the drive out and flip it over Loosen all the screws Tighten them all barely snug with the driver except the one in the front which you finger tighten only Put a tiny dab of nail polish on the edges of them all to keep them from loosening with vibration Copy down the factory bad track info 2 Reinstall the drive but only use three of the four screws Check the controller if it is a WD 27X probably and remove the sector translation jumper if it 1s in place I don t know the number but the dealer should have have provided docu mentation 3 Do a low level format after the ma chine has warmed up for about twenty minutes with the case on Make sure that you enter the factory bad track info you read off the drive in step one Re do the FDISK and high level FORMAT re in stall DOS 4 Now before you put your software back on run SpinRite on the drive 5 Restore the software and things should run fine unless the drive is defective The reason for the above rigamorole is that the low end Seagate s appear to be very sensitive to stress Loosening the logic board screws prevent uneven ther mal expansion between the board and casting to apply torque Same goes with not putting in all four mounting screws a minor misalignment in the case holes or distortion when the outer case is screwed down can otherwise be transferred to the drive casting Itis also very importa
45. one We use LB to generate the bills for TMQ subscription renewals AlthoughLB provides only a20 line print screen for defining your printout the screen has a virtual width of 208 columns Since you can embed newline controls into the screen you can in fact construct a print out for much larger than 20 print lines for a single record The restricting factor would be the combination of length and width With your 28 line invoice I don t see much ofa problem it s probably not even an 80 column format Fm Mostyn H Lower Dear Sir I have been asked by our Editor Rod Stevenson who still receives T M Q to advise that your magazine is much appreciated within our group which covers membersin South Australia and quite a number who are from other Australian states who reside remotely from their Capital City We represent users of Tandy Models I to IV amp other Tandy Machines About 50 of Members use Models I to IV still and many run these as PCs Our membership and equipment list is updated periodically on a Model I Personally I am involved in Analog to Digital Conversion for a variety of weather instruments I have made and use a Model I amp a Model lV because of the very good Input Output information written around these Machines by various people some years ago and still available I use Model IV for filing rainfall and other weather data for W Processor Hires Graphics for Real time weather and to run an Amat
46. out I had to run stuff from the APL files and you didn t exactly say that emphatically enough for me in the docs Sorry bout that I could have upgraded my Pro WAM Version 1 You don t read Easyplex I don t register software unless the regis tration has postage paid How much money could I have saved Fm MISOSYS Inc Sorry but you for got to read some of the sentences in the manual Invoking applications tells you that applications are read from memory or from UNIVERSAL or from PRUN UNIVERSAL says that Thereafter any UNIVERSAL requests will be satisfied from that library on the drive where the library was found Was that not clear As far as notification of the upgrade I don t care whether you do or do not reg ister software We advertised the upgrade for many months in 80 Micro before they folded We advertised the upgradein THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY We sent a letter to all registered owners of PRO NTO PRO WAM release 1 If you did not fall into any of those categories then you were not in the know Wait One more category It was discussed here on our CompuServe forum as well you must have seen some of the messages So you had four ways to find out At this time the upgrade costs 39 95 5 S amp H and re turn of the old PRO NTO PRO WAM disk APPLICATION SOFTWARE TO STRETCH MISOSYS PRO WAM version 2 Window amp Application Manager Our applications turn your 128K M
47. same manner To eliminate the spotty video shield the ribbon cable in alumi num foil and then insulate the foil so that The Hardware Corner it does not short if it comes into contact with the mother board This solves the problem nicely Fm Timothy Sewell Daniel I did that and there was no improvement Do you have any other suggestions Fm Shane Dawalt Timothy I believe someone had a similar problem with in stalling the XLR8er board in the model 4 with a hi res board installed The graphics board was moved and apparently the problem was caused by using unshielded ribbon cable toconnect the graphics board to the CPU board Noise is absorbed by the ribbon cable which trashes the signals being sent to and from the graphics board The solution was to use a piece shielded ribbon cable or in some way shield the cable being used now I suppose another problem could be that 5MHz is too fast for your hi res board If you board is a MicroLabs it probably is ok to use at SMHz as MicroLabs appar ently uses static RAMs which are nor mally faster than the DRAMs used in Tandy hi res boards OTOH after look ingatmy Tandy hi res board the DRAMs used are of the 150ns variety so they should handle SMHz ok unless the gate array used for timing gets grouchy at and above 4MHz Don t you just love straight answers I think Pd try shielding the cable before Suspecting hardware limitations Fm Frank Slinkman Shane Hi res bo
48. screen models which takes the speed up to 5 Mhz As much as I like the extra speed it causesa problem with the speech synthesizer and clips the speech I know I can slow down the clock in the Model III mode while in BASIC Does anyone know if it s possible to slow down the clock speed in the Model 4 by software Any help would be appreciated Fm Jim Beard Dave the HELP DOS SYSTEM command lists FAST and SLOW as arguments Fm Dave Spiceland Jim I ve discov ered that the problem getting the VS100 voice synthesizer to work is NOT the clock speed but the fact that I m running it off the edge card protruding out of the Joystick Mouse interface sold by Micro Labs for their high res board It plugs into the Model 4 s I O bus It may be a hard ware problem Is there any way I could install a Y connecter on my computer s I O bus and plug BOTH units into the I O bus 4 internal floppy drives Fm Jim Beard My Model 4 is what I call an Erector set computer It is made up of parts from a cassette Model IIT a cheap floppy upgrade over the counter parts Tandy parts etc A summary follows The case keyboard and main board are from a cassette Model 4 The memory chips are from JTC or some such in Sili con Valley The disk chimney is a pair of identical angle irons from a cheap disk upgrade I recommend that you make your own I added ALL the shields from Tandy they are excellent and the critical ones are
49. sending DEBUG s output to a disk file As no one else seems to have run into this so far I don t think it s worth worrying about Fm MISOSYS Inc There are a few problems in dynamic allocation of space when things are routed to a disk file and the file needs to grow You came upon one of them Try generating an error message while you have an active job log and the message just happens to traverse a granule boundary causing the job log file to grow I m not worrying about it The solution is to add a few more I O buffers But who wants to lose 256 bytes of memory for each additional file buffer needed I sure don t Fm Adam Rubin Roy your example with JL and an error message at a gran ule boundary also caused strange results but I agree it s not worth losing 256 bytes for such relatively rare occurrences I was just a bit surprised to run into this prob lem though as I thought all the problems with dynamic file allocation had been solved when 5 x s SYS8 was moved into 6 x s resident OS Shows you what I know about operating systems I guess Fm MISOSYS Inc Adam That s why you need ZSHELL for redirection It adds its own file buffers ar riv GO Ow Fm Theodore Masterton Several months ago I was having trouble with my recon stituted 15 meg Tandy Hard Drive Sev eral people here were very helpful Fi nally I took the unit into the local Tandy shop Service took it apart diagnosed the problem a
50. sided SYSTEM disk EXMEM and MAX 80 Adding AFLAG to LDOS 5 3 by Martin Pollard DATECONV and diskDISK DSK s DEVICE status wrong for WP drives FREE LDOS 5 3 and The Home Accountant THA Limitations of Customer Support Making a REAL 2 sided BOOT disk Molimerx and LDOS 5 3 PROFILE III HD Bug in EFC9 module SVC table doesn t SYSGEN SYSTEM disks DATECONV type ahead TED Can the entire screen be refreshed The last word on Model I LDOS 5 3 The PATCH command s OPTION parameter Using the extended error flag LDOS LOMEM On single CPU software licences Beware of linking DO to PR ALTRES hazardous with LSDOS 6 3 Background Task Beware of wild pointers Checking availability of memory banks eRANK DOS Interfacing IEP in LSDOS 6 3 FORMAT CMD Is DOS 6 slow Other DOSs LINKing DO to a disk file Multiple file transfer with COMM downloads 63 IL IL II II LL EL EL LL II IL II II LI II IL Index to Volume II Volume II iti iv iv iv iv ii iii iv iii mes es LI II Li IL iii Ti ii 111i Problems of 5 1 4 Versions running under LDOS 5 3 IL EE LL IIL LIL LL IL IL iii LL LL LL II E ae Ba IT II IZ IL IL LL iii LL II SLIL LL II II IL Idi I4 LL LL TL II II IL LL LIL iii iii iii iv iv iv ii iv H H iii e iv ii ii ii iv Li ii iii Li
51. that should be able to do 41 Treating an Object as a complex data type to which you send your messages has already been handled by Dick Poun tain in his book Object Oriented Forth Implementation of Data Structures Aca demic Press 1987 However treating an object as a far more intelligent device capable of performing complex calcula tions creating other objects and gener ally having a chat with other Objects has not yet been tackled in Forth at least It is this that I am looking into This work is going to be specified in the Formal Notation known as Z zed This has it s base set firmly in mathematics set theory and as such is in theory at least proverbial using standard mathematics The notation itself was developed by the Programming Research Group at Oxford University An initial standard for the Z notation is given in J M Spivey s book The Z notation a reference manual Prentice Hall 1988 although a true stan dard is being developed it will be several years before it is complete Itis my intention to continue this work on to allow and implement concurrent ob jects working in unison This will be on different logical and physical processors All of the objects in this system will have to be able to send messages to each other This work is being developed on a PC clone with two FB4016 novix Forth boards The novix chip is the predecessor to the Harris RTX chip I would li
52. the Model 4 A better TERM APP adding floppy drives and anew XLR amp er interface Hard drive update I have good news and bad news The bad news comes first After all this time I have finally discovered that the informa tion Western Digital provided me con cerning the programmability of the SDH The Blurb The Blurb Volume II 1 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II ii register of their WD XTGEN controller proved to be false You cannot software select the sector size Needless tosay that created a great big problem for my hard drive project The good news is that there are always alternatives and I am fever ishly working on them One alternative is to use the controller as is and utilize a 512 byte sector size This would require a very large driver since I would have to incorporate a 512 byte sector buffer for buffering I O in addition to the extra overhead for cache control I don t think a driver in the range of 1K would be acceptable Another alternative is to modify the utility of the GEN con troller by additional circuitry on the host adaptor The reason that the GEN doesn t support sector size programming is that the SDH register latch enable isn t wired to anything it deadends at a pin of the controller microprocessor I m in the process of getting the schematics of the controller to ascertain the feasibility of connecting to that lead and driving the latch extern
53. the fact that I have the second edition of K amp R and whenever K amp R is referenced I usually had to hunt all over that darn book to find the reference I have since purchased the original K amp R so all is well You are right though MC is very complete and I understand your position about enhanc ing MC and most of your other TRS 80 software any further Lastly I would definitely like to have advance notice of your TRS 80 hard drive package it sounds like something I would sell my Tandy unit for However I agree with Gary Lee Phillips TMQ III 1 in hoping you will design the unit with a write protect switch It s one of those things I Il miss when I switch to an MS DOS machine you can t imagine how handy that little red button is during pro gram development Sorry to ramble on so long but since I don t have CompuServe yet I am trying to fitin asmuchas I canat one time I have enclosed an SASE in case you wish to reply during your copious free time lt ha ha gt You my also print this and your reply in a future TMQ if you wish P S If you haven t seen it yet and that s doubtful I whole heartedly recommend Who Framed Roger Rabbit as good clean for the most part movie entertain ment for you and your family No time you say Well darn it take a few hours off turn on the answering machine and go see this movie with your family you deserve it Fm MISOSYS Inc Well
54. the fielded variable was a scalar or an array element The test was incorrectly coded Now since two extra bytes appeared in the execution stream the result at runtime could vary according to the interpretation of those two bytes Apparently my test program was such that the result at runtime was inconsequential I have developed a short patch to the compiler which will correct this bug MISOSYS Products Tidbits 40 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume III 11i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii HartFORTH FORTH Compiler I have been interested to see a discussion on FORTH in your last TMQ This prompted me to buy a copy of your PRO HartFORTH Please find enclosed a brief discussion on the merits of the language as I see it I then go on to talk about my current research in the Forth area I ama research assistant currently looking into concurrent object Forth I feel that this may be of some interest to your readers I was interested to see a discussion on FORTH in a recent TMQ This has prompted me to give my views on the matter of the FORTH language The main attribute to FORTH s success as a rapid prototyping language lies in it s unique combination of interactive unrestricted low level access to the hard ware and the unlimited flexibility of the language The only other high level lan guage which offers equivalent levels of machine access is C and a good For
55. to also have a modem board and a high resolu tion graphics board installed Using a 6 cable instead of the one provided by H I Tech I was able to move the board into the compartment inside the 4P which contains the CRT After removing the 4P s plastic case and removing the moth erboard I plugged the 6 cable into the Z 80 socket on the motherboard and folded the cable so that it made a 90 degree turn toward the back of the motherboard the side with the I O ports I then installed the graphics board mine is by Micro Labs and installed the modem board mine is by TeleTrends in its card slot After re installing the motherboard leaving the 12 cable hanging out the back of the computer I plugged the 6 cable into the XLR8er board Then I taped card board squares slightly bigger than the XLR8er board to the front and back of it to keep the board from shorting out on the metal in the 4P s case I then placed the board into the compartment of the 4P which contains the CRT Even though it would probably be better to mount the XLR8er board on something I didn t I just laid it in there Then I screwed the back metal plate of the computer on and re installed the computer in its plastic case I have been using my computer this way for 2 years with no problems If you would be interestedin having pictures showing how I rigged this setup let me know I could send you some For those readers of yours who are look ing for Radi
56. to remove it See the description of this statement in your Disk System Owner s Manual 2 Don t DIMension your arrays as any larger than they need to be If you need to store 700 strings DIM ARRAY 1000 will just waste memory 3 You don t have to DIMension every array in the first line of your program For example if line 240 calculates that you will need to store X strings line 250can be DIM Y X This is especially use ful if you can ERASE an old array before using the new array Y I hope these are helpful If these sugges tions don t do the trick just holler Oh and you d only need to CLEAR string space if you were using Model ITI BASIC Model 4 BASIC and GW BASIC MS DOS users don t have to worry about such things Fm Daniel L Srebnick Dave Disregard my previous statement on CLEARing space I am still stuck in the models I II mode CLEAR ina model 4 environment sets high memory and stack space ac cording to page 2 74 of the BASIC sec tion in the TRSDOS 6 manual That CLEAR 10000 should be removed Fm Dave Spiceland Adam Thanks for the ERASE statement I d never used it before amp is obviously what I need to reallocate memory space I ll try it Fm Dave Spiceland Daniel Got your note on CLEAR amp the Model 4 Takes a bit of re learning to use Model 4 BASIC DOS Subjects 21 DOS Subjects ee he ene ee em ae Volume IIl iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winte
57. went away I also noticed that I could use other DOSes with no problem One solution to this problem is simply to leave SMOOTH on but I m used to typing while the drive is accessed and I d rather have SMOOTH on if possible I suppose I could have the technician alter my drive and get it to work but I d rather not do that since he said it was in fine shape Is there any patch I could make that would allow me to use my new drive and still leave SMOOTH off Thank you very much for listening to my problem and I appreciate any help ad vice or comments you could give me concerning this problem Fm MISOSYS Inc Without getting into the technical aspects SYSTEM SMOOTH solves the problem of drives going to sleep when they are precisely aligned to 300 rpm The other DOSes don thave the problem because they don t have type ahead No other patch will suffice Your drive may not be speed adjustable some use a phase locked loop and are precisely 300 rpm If you can adjust yours align it to 301 302 rpm You can then turn SMOOTH off Source for Mod 4 by Jack Fm Stan Slater Roy First thanks for the advertising Second thanks for the plug for Mod 4 by Jack Fm James L lopez page 17 TMQ IILii If anyone wants to know where they can get a copy of Mod 4 by Jack we bought the copyrights to this manual last fall and have been reprinting it and it has been available all this year from us in an 8 1 2 x 11 larg
58. will not let you installa driver over top of an active drive That design was incorporated into every driver supplied with the DOS that either MI SOSYS or LSI supplied And I believe it is a useful function It guards against disrupting the operation of a drive if the operator types a wrong drive designation Now diskDISK was designed by LSI and is a finished product I took over from them but I can surmise that the operation you have experienced is the operation intended by LSI Judging from internal documentation LSI wanted to make it very easy to attach a diskDISK to a drive slot They also wanted to be able to reas sign a diskDISK to an active drive slot without fussing with the SYSTEM DRIVE d DISABLE parameter first Seems just like a desire to shorten the number of keystrokes Remember that the DD d DISABLE command actually attempts to remove the diskDISK linkage from memory So its easier to just install a new diskDISK over an existing one Although I haven t looked at where your code fits in if it satisfies you to alter the installation procedure of a diskDISK then it s fine with me I printed your code see next page so others with the same consid erations could use your patch EnhComp BASIC compiler review Fm Charles A Ainsworth Roy This letter does not call for a specific reply rather it is written in case it may be of interest together with yourreply to TMQ readers I enjoyed Mark Allen Reed
59. 0 to 07 00 note from editor Since Ralf is located in the Federal Republic of Ger many I suspect that those times are ap proximately Greenwich time I will use FastPlus during the trial phase If the users accept that bbs I will change to FastPlus II Let me know what you think about that idea The number the BBS will operate It s FRG 04223 2632 rep 04223 2632 in the FRG Fm Kevin R Parris The Midlands Plaza BBS 300 1200 24hrs 7 days 803 776 9600 is now beginning its SIXth year of service to the TRS 80 users The system still runs on a TRS 80 Model One com puter and has a ten megabyte hard drive There has not been much activity lately from TRS 80 folks in the local area Columbia SC it seems there are not too many of us left in these parts But there is an upload download area and message section for TRS 80 systems New users cannot download or post messages until after being validated but may read mes sages and see the list of items available for downloading I have been SYSOP since July 6 1988 Fm Lloyd Evans MCTRUG Pres Please include our computer club in your list that supports the TRS 80 user ceived the TMQ vol III ii in good shape the day after Thanksgiving As usual I found a lot of useful reading Since you requested info on BBSs and user Groups supporting TRS 80s I submit the follow ing We are an eclectic group of owners of several brands At present we have two members includin
60. 1981 things have progressed since but at least it s a starting point Most of the chips in the Model 4 4P 4D are LSI although some of the simpler ones 74xx series might be MSI I hope someone more knowledgeable will ex pand on this as I m not positive exactly where the boundaries fall which category current Chips fall into and how close the next stage ELSI I think extremely large scale integration is to production I m not really familiar with dictionaries or glossaries of terms Your local book store will probably have a few to choose from though Fm MISOSYS Inc I believe that the 80486 has in excess of 300 000 transistors in the chip Odds and Ends Fm Barry Thrippleton Morwell VIC AUSTRALIA Dear Roy Please find enclosed my original LS DOS 6 3 disk Since purchase of this software I have acquired another Model 4P computer Would you please update this disk so that I can use it on both of my Model 4P s Any charges for this modification can be made _ on my Mastercard details of which you hold on file I have also enclosed my XLR8er Installa tion Utilities disk As suggested on page 77 of TMQ III please convert this to a special software interface disk The article by Michel Houde is outside my range of comprehension and I hope rele vant instructions will be included with the revised disk In April 88 I Purchased PRO WAM from you I have tried to use it for a name and
61. 2716 s to 27513 s plus some EEPROMs It works by using the RS232 interface and transfers data at 1200 baud for all devices IBM compatible software is provided to operate the EPP 1 but any 22 2 ee communications software will work sat 24 4444 Bs hd tanh isfactorily I personally use TRSDOS62 and the system COM DVR and COMM CMD programs to handle communica tions between my Model 4 and the EPP 1 MEMDISK is used to send and receive all Ce a R i a aa a AEAEE ase A TS are CC ae ee eer eae EA Be ee The Hardware Corner 58 The Hardware Corner Volume IIL iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume III 1ii To program an EPROM requires that you have atext file Saved in the correct format see the instruction book that comes with the EPP 1 and after setting up the EPP 1 as before you use the COMM CMD trans mit commands see DOS manual to send the file from Memdisk to the program mer Be sure to include W CR as the first line of thefile to write to the EPROM One final caution regards 24 pin versus 28 pin EPROMs Make sure to install them in the socket to the bottom and not to the top There is a line marking by the socket which shows the top but nowhere in the manual did I find any reference to the placement so I just experimented to find the correct method Speed a Model 4 to 5 Meg Fm Frank Gottscllalk Keep up this great publication Some of it is way over My head but read it cover to cover a
62. D In fact he has used a disk maintenance utility to check sectors in which he is having problem He will lock them out After a couple days when heruns the disk maintenance utility again the sectors will check ok but other sectors will appear bad So far the shop from which he bought the system only a couple months old has replaced the HD controller board West ern Digital and has tested the power supply which supplies the HD no prob lems found The HD doesn t fail diagnos tics He has noted this sector screwup problem is most active when the machine is warm Any ideas on this situation I think the HD should be replaced but the tech who services the equipment says that if it doesn t fail diagnostics then the hard ware is fine Any info will be appreciated Heis ready to scream Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo First off WD RLL controllers are generally pretty reliable The original Adaptec 2070 was awful flakey but subsequent controllers like the 2072 and 2372 are fine Exactly which Seagate hard drive is he using There isn t one that formats to forty megs under RLL that I know of The ST238R is alittle over thirty meg format ted there is a ST157R which should be about forty five megs but that s a three and a half inch drive available in a five inch frame so I guess that s a possibility If itis really aST238R a few precautions to take after backing up everything and calling up to order a copy
63. DSPLUS has an arithmetic module that is not compatible with the new proc essor Any non numeric fields operate as before but fields listed as numeric gener ate garbage It is unlikely that this war rants any work as there are bigger and better databases available Secondly in the Model 4 mode Tourna ment Chess by Micro Labs inc also has a problem The disk boots the first menu appears and the instructions can be ad dressed without trouble but when you select G for a game the chessboard and all the pieces appear but the CURSOR remains locked in the original position No amount of pressing of any of the arrow keys space bar or lt U gt frees it from the starting block The Rapidos operating system and all the utilities seem unaf fected I notified Micro Labs of this prob lem in March and suggested that they contact users through TMQ but received no acknowledgement I see however that they are still advertising this program in the same issue in which you are offering the XLR8er board Perhaps you can per suade them to investigate and offer a patch for the hard core of TRS 80 users still hanging on out there I do not know if there is any problem with any of their other high resolution packages ALRS8er in a 4P Fm Hans de Wolf Roy I have received the XLR8er board about which I have a few questions In my gate array model 4P I located the 74LS245P chip mentioned in the installa tion manual Acc
64. HE OTHER PROGRAMS ON THE DISK NOTES See ORDER There were so many great articles in the TMQ I hardly know where to start Ireally enjoyed the answers Jim Beard gave for reading an MS DOS disk FORMAT 1 Q N and HOW DO I EXIT BASIC WITHOUT CLOSING FILES SYSTEM BOOT what a RIOT The description of the requested SUPPORT from HARDIN had me laughing so hard I was crying Who said support wasn t FUNNY I suppose to the person in TROUBLE it is very serious I don t mean to be FLIPPANT I am glad to see that you have released new versions of some of your great utili ties I have them in the MARK IV COL LECTION and the MARK IIT COLLEC TION but will BUY them again as the GO SERIES See Order I hope that when you release another LDOS LSDOS version that I won t have to get them again I think that I will like the 5 5 x 8 format although I am currently using 8 5 x 11 in one of those MASTER CATA LOG racks Many thanks to BRAD STILES for the PRO WAM ALLWRITE patch for the stacks and thanks to you to ROY for helping BRAD Might FORWARD a copy to the PRO SOFT people for their next VERSION Roy your article on BINARY MULTI PLICATION is GREAT I m waiting for the rest Roy do you know if there are any patches to make DOSTAMER compatible with PRO WAM I have changed to invoke key to lt cntl gt lt W gt but still have to watch how I load DOSTAMER and PRO WAM to avoid the conflict Maybe Georg
65. Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Model Modem A ELEN Da ee Pee epee eg tee Oe ee ee en ee ee a ee ee ee ee I III Lit III III 4 Monitor MRAS MRAS MRAS MRAS MRAS Index to Volume II THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 On initialising bit fields Patch queries from Shane Dawalt Printer status from C Random file access in C Take MC to the MAX Displaying banks gt 0 WITH MED Model 4 HIRES graphics A little on macros Example of out of warranty case Hotlist for April 1988 Letter to The Pres of The San Gabriel Valley TUG Miscellaneous subjects of importance MISOSYS HOT LIST New no questions asked RETURN policy New policy on Disk Refreshes New TRADEIN Policy Reactions to the printing of TMQ by laser printer Thanks for support To take over LSDOS 6 3 distribution from LSI Trade in offer clarified TRS 80 Software and Hardware from MISOSYS Inc 3 5inch floppy drives for Model 4 4P Boot ROM disassembled by Adam Rubin 64K gt 128K ON 4P Blooming CRT Do your drives appear to slowly read DRAM refresh which RAM chips are suitable Fun and games with printers FORMS Installing the Hardware Interface KI4 Driver MODELA III strikes again Running faster Smartwatch Installation WARNING on CRISAV FLT publ 10 87 80 Micro Searching with DSM4 by Charle
66. Mu Metal I have two 38 watt Astec power supplies one came with the old Model III as did the RS 232 board and the other I bought from Tandy Na tional Parts or did it come out of the cassette Model 4 One supply runs everything except the floppies The other runs all four of the floppies This guaran tees no screen breathing The FDC card is a Tandy unit old style with the three trimpots set up by myself I modified the bus by using cuts and jumpers so that the internal bus was the standard 34 pin floppy bus using advice from jjkd as follows Pin 1 of U17 a 02 goes to TP16 Cut the trace at the IC and solder a2 2K pullup from TP 10 to the 5 bus which is identifiable as 0 ohms from TP1 This forces permanent internal disk drive select You can enhance the internal 34 pin bus to the standard bus by jumpering pins 10 and 12 on J1 the external bus to pins 14 and 6 respectively on the internal bus This gives the internal drives the disk The Hardware Corner 56 The Hardware Corner nn er re rrr ml a a el lm GQ a Volume M iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti select signals for drive 3 pin 14 and drive 4 pin 6 Be careful not to let solder run onto the card edge connectors If you have the newer FDC board with no trimpots cut the trace between pin 1 of U20 the 02 and pin 1 of U19 and tie pin 1 of U19 to 5 with the 2 2K resistor The 5v bus is available
67. PROVED WYSIWIG I too will be remaining with ALLWRITE linked to ELECTRIC WEBSTER and DOTWRITER DOTWRITER offers many more FONTS than any of the WYSIWYG systems that I have seen It is true that you can BUILD your own FONTS but that is available in BOTH SYSTEMS DOTWRITER already has some 50 disks with an average of say 6 FONTS per disk for 300 FONTS That OUGHT to be ENOUGH If you only skimmed the article YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ FOR CONTENT Another seminar covered the technology of the NEW machines soon to bereleased We all think that the 80486 is going to be HOT STUFF That processor was NOT EVENED MENTIONED until I asked INTEL about it after the seminar Appar ently the 80486 is an 80386 with an 80387 on the same chip A co located math co processor The seminar revolved around the new RISC Reduced Instruction Set Computer class of machines While we talk in terms of CYCLES per INSTRUC TION ie 4 to 6 cycles to complete a microinstruction the NEW machines will perform say 4 to 6 INSTRUCTIONS per CYCLE YOU READ THAT RIGHT INSTRUCTIONS PER CYCLE The new computers will have a cycle speed in the 40 to 50 MEGACYCLE RANGE allowing 200 MILLION INSTRUC TIONS PER SECOND Let s see now the Model 4 with XLR8ER at 6 mega cycles divided by 6 cycles per instruction equals 1 MILLION INSTRUCTIONS per second so folks we re looking at 200 times faster The CHIPS were the 80960 by INTEL and the 88100 by Motoro
68. THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY In this issue w The CRC program by Hans de Wolf ts PG a page display program by Dan Velting w Locating high memory routines by Richard Schulman w FIXMAS by David Goben t Jumbo tape backup for PC Clones w New style for TMQ using Pagemaker w and an Index to Volume II When its Winter up North lts Summer down South Volume IIL iii 10 Winter 1988 1989 nnn O LLL e LLL LLL AL AL LE ts a Da lt e o e Volume TT iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii Table of Contents The Blurb 2 Advertising Rates 3 PD Software Librarian 3 New Product DJ10 Jumbo Tape Backup 4 Family Update 4 Letters to the Editor 5 DOS Subjects 17 LDOS and LSDOS Topics 17 MSDOS Topics _ 25 Applications for the User 28 The CRC program by Hans de Wolf 28 FIXMA3 by David Goben 33 PG by Dan Velting 34 Locating high memory routines by Richard Schulman 35 MISOSYS Products Tidbits 38 The Hardware Corner 47 Index to Volume II 60 The Marketplace 70 The Blurb 1 The Blurb Volume III iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti Points to Ponder It s a shame that Jerry Pournelle has al ready used the term computing at Chaos manor because that s what this place has been like lately PIH have to find another word that describes chaos The WORD thesaurus popped up a big list of words of which madhouse was my choice In case you were wondering w
69. THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IT iti locally If you choose to provide your own enclosure you will have to be con cerned with the physical mounting ar rangement for the controller and host adaptor Finally I can t provide the cost at this time for our host adaptor and soft ware as the controller is not complete That makes it difficult to arrive at a cost When it is complete I will certainly an nounce everything at that time On LeScript and PRO WAM I have never received any inquiry from Anitek I wouldn t expect any at this point in the game Fm Ken Strickler Dear Roy Well here it is the NEW YEAR an I am already a member of the BEHIND CLUB I am BEHIND in EVERYTHING Correspon dence Programming THANK YOU S and if I don t HURRY I ll bea member of the WAY BEHIND CLUB But enough of that I read the article from Michel Houde and couldn t wait to try thepatches NEEDLESS TOSAY THEY ARE VERY VERY IMPRESSIVE I feel that the system is visibly and audibly FASTER It looks and sounds as though it is running faster I left the speed at M 1 and R 40 as he did It was not clear if I would have to use the FIXALL FLT if I wanted to go faster I do NEED the ROOM in MEMORY and the slight slow down is a good trade off for the MEM ORY IF YOU HAVE AN XLR8ER CARD THIS SEEMS TO BE A MUST PATCH I WOULD LIKE TO ADD MY THANKS TO MICHEL FOR THE SU PER JOB I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO T
70. Visicalc programme allows about 90K but this is a bit archaic compared to Multiplan PS Youare quite correct G day itis That goes for all of us cobbers from down under Fm MISOSYS Inc Barry Although I answered some questions on the phone I have gotten around to your letter in the stack perhaps I can expand on the re sponse There is no update of a 6 3 to permit its operation on more than one machine at a time The only multi machine version of 6 3 is a site licensed version at 99 5 minus credit for one existing 6 3 It may be cheaper to acquire a second copy Applications programmed for PRO WAM are quite specific once they are designed The ADDRESS APP application was designed to mimic the record structure of PowerMAIL a very popular mailing program from PowerSoft As such it was not designed to support user defined fields as would be a database product like our LB package I have considered bringing Out an application similar to ADDRESS but with a record format controlled by the user within limitations Perhaps one day I may do that if I see that I can justify the development work based on expected sales Allofthe programs included with the GO products are or are derived from older products previously discontinued I am not going to supply detailed information on the programs as its just a rehash of older material hopefully you have one of the older catalogs that detailed the prod
71. a service to the Model HI 4 community of users to publicize the following three things a list of phone numbers of companies still servicing and supporting this market a list of public computer bulletin boards and a list of computer clubs which sup port the TRS 80 user Most of the re sponses received to date appear in the Letters to the Editor column because I wanted to initially publish more than just names and addresses Note that not one company wrote to ask for listing of their phone number Sodon tcall me up on my 800 number and ask for Prosoft s or Powersoft s phone number MISOSYS is not directory assistance In future issues I ll migrate the appropriate data from the Letters column into its own section some where within TMQ TMQ Schedule Our target for mailing the THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY is the last week of the re spective month as follows Winter issue in February Spring issue in May Sum mer issue in August and Fall issue in November This schedule may place your TMQ late in the season based on the cover date however it follows from the mail ing ofissue I ion August 19th 1986 Note that your mailing label usually has the expiration date of your subscription For instance those with 89 05 complete their subscription with this issue If you want to save me the cost of mailing a renewal notice send in your renewal fee quickly I usually wait about a month after TMQ is mailed before sending out renewa
72. able on motor timeout then it would be able to recover If the driver always read a track s sector header before reading a sector then it could determine that the sector size was wrong and pass back an error code All of that coding takes space LS DOS and earlier TRSDOS 6 was not designed to be terribly flexible in reading different media other than what it was designed for That s why it s important in a mixed machine environment to readily label your disks Fm Shane Dawalt Joe Not all the time he says ducking I ve found floppies with garbage on them that the M4 can not break out of It just sets and stares at the disk with great patients I ve letitmull it over for at least a minute before scream ing Somewhere I read that the FDC will sometimes encounter codes on the disk which causes the FDC to loose it go nuts if you will It won t return I ve found that yanking the disk and plac ing a correctly formatted disk in then pressing lt S HIFT gt lt BREAK gt will get the system back up correctly This has oc curred with MSDOS disks too When I let MSDOS disks get mixed in with M4 disks What a mess that was Fm Shane Dawalt Roy Oh geez You make me feel like dirt I didn t expect you torun to The Source Gee I could have done that too if I dig deep enough I was speaking from memory I do remember that buffers may be anywhere I was speak ing of the system loading buffer however
73. ackground shad ing for fix listings and name and address boxes All of this took considerably more time to implement than in the past Previous TMQ s went to press directly from WORD out put I may have run two drafts at most I guess that I may have spent another week just playing with Pagemaker True as I get more experienced with it it will take me less time to utilize to do a given job but I did have to take considerably more time than before Meanwhile other things piled up The kicker came when one by one the family was hit by the flu or other such debilitating illness The flu hit strong in Loudoun County during early February School attendance was down 15 Ben jamin was the first to come down with something he had the runs which lasted for about five days The washing machine could barely keep up with his clothes That started on a Friday By Sunday Stacey came down with the flu Sunday night I felt a tickle in my throat which told the story for me I was miserable by Tuesday and was running a fever of about 102 Stefanie came down with the flu We thought it was a good thing that Benjamin was getting better because Brenda was also coming down with it I was forced to close up for three days as many who called here found out Stacey and Stefanie felt better later in the week but we kept them out of school due to a slight fever By Saturday my fever had gone and I was left with the drips Yesterday Ben j
74. address file While this works admirably for US and AUS addresses or at least most of them it does not cater for UK addresses Unfortunately most of my addresses are in UK so rather than have some in the black book and some in PRO WAM I keep them all in the black book I believe you receive copies of the NAT GUG magazine and if you look at the committee s addresses you will under stand why they can t be used in PRO WAM In case you don t receive the magazines I have enclosed a photocopy gt of an inside front cover If there is a means of overcoming this problem please ad vise This problem is aggravated when you are addressing mail overseas an require a country field l Talking about NATGUG reminds me that I have sent a 4 part review of LB to them for possible publication I hope my re view is accurate and prompts others to purchase this programme which I find very good indeed especially when used in conjunction with the XLR8er and loaded into memory as a RAMDISK Thank you again for the service you have with regard to my XLR8 board The re placement board wasreceived with no tax payments etc necessary and it is up and running Iam very happy with it In the Fall TMQ just received this feels strange as we have just started Summer there is an announcement relating to GO new products Is it possible to have fur ther details on these Products please I have seen a number of references to hardware modi
75. ain switch At power up switch on at the power strip first leaving the computer as yet pow ered down That would avoid any com puter printer interaction Then put the printer off line and power up the com puter and go through the bootup process Then put the printer on line As this fault is so devilishly difficult to reproduce and only happens on an aver age about once in an hour of printout it would probably be of little help for me to send you a disk with affected material besides which I have a hunch it s some how hardware related Coming back to my letter of November 29 with a group of articles I note that in a couple of things of mine you have pub lished my address doesn t appear whereas other contributors addresses are shown I have absolutely no objection for my ad dress to be published not my phone number in case any of my material were to interest anyone who might wish to write me with questions or comments Fm MISOSYS Inc Charles This is in response to your latest of January 2nd As far as the XL8er disk it was made up when I was using an intermediate version of IFC which had a bug in the dating I did correct that on a disk but apparently the disk which I loaded onto the duplicat ing station was not corrected Perhaps that s an omen that the files will last that long the ones into 1999 As far as the left hand margin problem goes I suspect that your printer has a programmable
76. ally I have a local engineer ing Company now involved so that I am able to get a reasonably timely response to the work Another alternative is to explore other controllers I have made the rounds and located one short card XT type controller that would be perfect it has an on board jumper to select a 256 512 or 1024 byte sector size That is an Omti 5510 control ler made by Scientific Micro Systems The problem is that I have located only one They no longer manufacture it Now if I can just locate a few hundred 5510s Since its best not torely on a discontinued part I m placing my bets with the GEN modified by additional circuitry The additional cost of the H A may be offset by the reduced cost of the new GEN2 controller Believe me I had hoped to be able to report more definitive information by now but it just wasn t in the cards Hang in there DJ10 Jumbo Tape Backup I just popped a 40Meg tape drive into my 386 machine That s what I ll be using for backup We are selling them now the Colorado Memory Systems Jumbo DJ10 tape drive Pops right into a XT or AT Has a 3 5 form factor with a 5 25 face plate Uses the DC2000 cartridge and is QIC40 compatible Comes with nice soft ware Just plug and chug the Jumbo plugs into a PC floppy controller slot If your machine configuration already uses all available floppy slots there is a tape adaptor board available which interconnects both the DJ10 and your fl
77. always printed For two files FORMS FLT and BREF CMD both CRC value and file size are zero it is not possible to access the files because the password was not supplied Files that do not exist incorrect argu ment are not listed in the output but a cannot open message is displayed This can be used for a quick compare of disks to check if the same files are present put the first in drive 1 and type CRC c 1 gt diskl erc 0 Put the second disk in the drive and type CRC fc diskl crce 0 CRC will now display an error message for every file that was present on the first disk and missing from the second Applications for the User Volume IIL 1i1 Volume IU iti Although CRC will probably evolve fur ther maybe wildcarding invisible or sys tem files the current version is doing basically what I wanted it to do it pro duces an overview of the files with an identification that can be used to deter mine the version ofa file A suggestion to Roy is it possible to list the CRC values for Misosys software in TMQ soeveryone can check if all patches have been ap plied Fm MISOSYS Inc Hans It s certainly possible but wih all I have got to do around here it would take some time to collect all of the data I ll put it on the drawing board All you got to do is just type it in and then use it Simple as that Applications for the User THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volum
78. amin came down with a fever Last night Stefanie came down with a nose bleed Today Monday I m back at work trying to crank out this column so I can get the winter issue out before spring It has been a rough February My 386 machine now sports an 80 mega byte drive which was needed to load and use the new software Aside from PM I also got MS Excel But I have not had the opportunity yet to utilize it I have a copy of Windows 386 but can t load it yet until I add more memory to the machine My hunch is that for 1989 mid year will be the right time for acquiring four mega bytes of SIMMs With the larger drive Capacity it became evident that backing up to floppies was definitely not the way to go Wanting a reasonably priced alter native that was relatively hands free op eration I chose to install a Colorado Memory Systems DJ10 Jumbo tape drive This is a 40 megabyte drive which uses the DC2000 tape cartridge Backups are pure heaven now How anybody in the MS DOS world can still waste hundreds of dollars ona BACKUP program suchas Fastback when the Jumbo is available for less than 300 with fancy software folks have got to start seeing the light My accolades for the tape drive have nothing to do with the fact that MISOSYS is now selling them Jumbo works If you havea PC with a hard drive and you don t inves tigate the acquisition of a tape backup such as Jumbo then don t come crying to me when disaste
79. ards are supported Execute by cre flags filelist The filename will be printed in the output if multiple files are processed Flags are c disable cre calculation can be sed to create f argument file f read names of input files from files given as argument h display this help text n reverse printing of filename s display file size in bytes Applications for the User Volume IIL iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 The flags can be entered as one argument xxx or as separate arguments x X x and have the following functions c disables the CRC calculation This speeds up the process if you only want to have the file sizes or file names f this flag indicates that not the files given as arguments must be procecessed but that these argu ment files contain the names of the files that must be processed A list like this can be created by means of the c flag s crc shows also the number of bytes in a file This information is of course also available in the directory but it must be calcu lated from number of records record length and number of bytes in the last record Typing CRC cs file is simpler n Determines printing of filenames If only one file is given as argu ment then the filename is not printed in the output but when more than one file is given as argument the file name is printed The n flag reverses this behavi our If the f flag is used file names are
80. ards will be repaired they are currently wran gling that point with the manufacturer the actual fabrication and assembly was done by yet another company The out come may be that if the problem is other than plug in chips the board will be scrapped and the plug in chips transferred to a new board I really don t know what the cost of that will be THE SOURCE omitted nothing except that which was stated as being omitted BASIC hard disk drivers etc If your Volume III was missing pages covering PATCH CMD that was just that particu lar copy Let me know what pages you are missing and I will get replacements to you No one here is trying to hide any thing Now the closeness of MC to the pro posed ANSI C can t be answered because that s a subjective topic Also the ANSI C has not been finalized Some things which MC does not have nor will it ever is function prototyping const storage assignment volatile specifier and anything which has to do with hierarchi cal directories I m sure there are other differences But you ll find MC quite complete in its library implementation Fm Martin Pollard September 20 1988 Roy Thanks for the prompt response your letter of 06 02 88 to my earlier corre spondence I m sorry I couldn t be as prompt but other things forced my atten tion elsewhere I am sure you can under stand that with LS DOS 6 3 support and a third child to take care of co
81. ards work fine with the XLR8er which runs at 6 144MHz so the problem almost has to be shielding Fm Timothy Sewell Roy I have tried shielding the cable as noted and there has been no improvement I thought the new clock speed might be the problem but when I did a SYSTEM slow there was still no improvement I m wondering if there is a way to move the memory board as opposed to the High Rez board Any suggestions Fm MISOSYS Inc SYSTEM FAST or SLOW don t affect the speed with an XLR8er board installed perhaps they also don t affect the speed with Anitek s speedup 57 board How long is your video interface cable Where do you have the hires board positioned Where do you have the video cable positioned Perhaps you may try to ground the aluminum foil shield Fm Daniel L Srebnick If the shielding did not help then you will have to make do with a shorter cable Fm Dave Spiceland Tim haven t seen the other replies but I have the 1 Meg board installed in an OLD Model 4 with the MicroLabs board and I ve been able to use the ML board fine The problem I had was extending the Hi res board away from the bulky 1 Meg board MicroLabs sold me a small extender to take care of that This response might not be exactly what you needed but it could tell you that the configuration you ve got DOES work for someone Let me know if I can tell you more Fm Timothy Sewell Thanks for the re ply Dav
82. around all the baggage of the individual files install code error messages and so forth With a hard disk itisn t so bad at least you have more space to waste Producing the equivalent of CONFIG SYS for an MS DOS machine would be possible for some circumstances but there are a few things that would bite you Some TSRs Terminate and Stay Resi dent programs the equivalent of our driv ers and filters do some hardware setup of write only devices when they are installed There d be no easy way to get a hold of this initialization in the general case The necessary tool was available in the LDOS TRSDOS 6 environment the ICNFG DOS Subjects 25 DOS Subjects Volume III 111 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIl iii vector but even then some folks ignored it For simple programs it could be done but I m not sure it s worth the effort RLL drives Fm Shane Dawalt I seem to recall a small thread a couple of months ago which dealt withRLL HDs Well afriend of my is having a small problem He has an MSDOS machine believe he said it s motherboard is DTE or DTA XT class nonetheless The drive in question is a 40Meg Seagate RLL drive His drive is acting rather nasty His machine will display Booting Error at times but not every time usually 2 out of 20 boots Cold or warm boots doesn t matter He is also having spurious access problems with random sectors on the H
83. arting to insist that she choose her left or her right and be consistent about it Stefanie has been a confirmed rightie for some time now I recently received a letter from a reader who remarked that family includes more than just children That s true and per haps next time I ll address that issue fur ther Since I m still a little foggy from the flu I ll just close this column off with a scanned photo previously mentioned f The Blurb The Blurb Volume Il iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume M iii Science Marches On Fm Frank Slinkman Taken from the Science Notebook Washington Post December 12 1988 p A6 Feed Animal Flatulence and Atmosphere Among the burdens Earth s atmosphere must endure is gas emitted by animals Flatulence is more than malodorous it contributes in a large way to the poten tially catastrophic warming of the globe the greenhouse effect A Colorado State University professor who has spend 20 years studying cow flatulence among other topics has found that as much as one quarter of the methane gas cows produce might be cut by additives to the cows feed Each cow emits 200 to 400 quarts of methane per day The world s cows alone contribute about 50 million metric tons of methane a year Other major methane produc ers include sheep water buffalo goats camels llamas deer elk and caribou The
84. can address those questions On the subject of our intended hard drive it will be bus compatible with the III 4 computers however just because a hard drive plugs into that bus doesn t imply that existing hard disk drivers will work with it No driver other than the one we will be including with the host adaptor will work with it Houde s XLR8er Software Interface Fm Frank Slinkman Roy I have gone through the new patches etc for the XLR8er and still have a BIG question I notice that in all the patches and in SETX the REFW bit bit 6 of RCR 36H is still being left set As far as I can determine the wait state this bit inserts into the refresh cycle is totally unnecessary Re setting it to 0 would cut the refresh cycle to 2T from 3T It seems to me especially now that we re using refresh intervals of 40T instead of 80T that gaining 1 cycle out of every 43 would be a good way of regaining some of that8 lost speed Can you or anyone out there tell me why this bit is being kept set Fm MISOSYS Inc I can t Perhaps Michel assumed that the alteration is not appro priate to every machine Maybe he ll drop me anote Other s more familiar with the hardware side of the Model 4 and 64180 may also have some insight But if it works for you utilize it Fm Fred Oberding Roy After install ing Michel Houde s new patches for the XLR8er I am having a problem access ing the additional memory on my XLR8er
85. ce below 500 Ihave to use off the shelf components I also have to ensure that they are directly re usable in a PC clone The modifications to the drive controller and host adaptor required to accomplish the write protect switch as well as the chassis modifications needed to incorporate a switch into the front panel of the case render such a feature as too costly Don t forget that SYSTEM DRIVE 2 WP exists in software to provide the write protect operation And if you want to be able to easily write protect the entire drive I could easily add another software write protect facility in the driver alterable only via a utility command to guard against programs under test which may twiddle the DCT s soft ware write protect bit That should be sufficient By the way I haven t seemed Roger Rabbit yet but I did take Stacey and Stefanie to see The Land Before Time excellent movie and my in laws took them to see Lady and the Tramp Fm Gordon Collins Roy Having now purchased a hard disk drive and catching up on some reading to be able to use it fully I have seen comments that this could be booted directly by holding down a function key on resetting when using a Model 4P prior to LS DOS 6 3 What has happened with LS DOS 6 3 that this will now not work and is it possible for that function to be reinstated I recently purchased an XLR8er board from MISOSYS through a third party for use on a gate array Model 4P Are a
86. come the dominant DOS of its day the scheme turned off too many folks even though it was eventually bro ken That s why I would never imbed any kind of protection scheme in my soft ware it makes it too cumbersome for the legitimate owner As far as the XLR8er goes Iam currently negotiating with them for manufacturing of the final 100 boards If and when that comes to fruition MISOSYS would then be the source for board repair But I will probably not know if and when for a few more months If we manufacture a defective product we make it right PII get those pages missing from THE SOURCE to you I ve done it before even with folks who bought the books from LSI I am aware of the bug in EXMEM when itis used as the I O driver foraRAMDISK driver Michel pointed that out to me I just haven t had the time yet to go back to that code Since you have why not just pop a disk back to me and I ll get it into the next TMQ I had hoped I would have gotten around to the EDAS source to insert the 64180 as sembly code by now but it hasn t hap pened I even haven t finished up MLINK so the revised MRAS is not yet complete We just have too many irons in the fire But I ll be getting to that one day As far as the hard drive project goes I expect to have some important news in The Blurb which gets written later but I can comment on a write protect switch here It won t happen In order to be able tokeep the pri
87. d a problem determining that the ramdisc was already formatted Without the source code I was not able to check whether I just had a bad copy or not Asit is likely to be another month before DISK NOTES 3 2 arrives I thought I would have a look to see if the problem could be cured Back tracking the problem rather than disassembling ERAMDISK I came to the point where a check was being made between the default GAT X CD in ERAMDISK X 08 location X 3C14A and the setting in ramdisc The algorithm using X 08 as a base would always come up with the wrong answer Changing the default to X C8 seems to cure the prob lem Whether this is the correct approach Tam not sure but it works I look forward to seeing the source until then will leave the byte X 3C1A at X C8 this gives me a working copy XLR8er interfacing Fm Daniel L Srebnick I want to writea filter to use with Michel Houde s new patches that will allow me to run at zero memory wait states and allow for my slow keyboard More or less like Fixall but with out the other memory management that Fixall performs It seems that I must somehow intercept the keyboard driver just before it scans the keyboard insert one wait read the keyboard and then remove the wait Is that how Fixall func tioned Now the above is easy How dol interface all this to the keyboard driver I have reviewed some of the material in the TRSDOS and LDOS manuals on writing filters
88. d is oriented so that the ribbon points upward The cable is then folded back on itself at a 45 degree angle so as to make a 90 degree turn towards the keyboard connec tor The graphics board is placed vertically with the connector towards the top and is positioned into the area between the floppy drive cage and the rear of the mother board cage the trace side with connec tor is towards the motherboard The free end of the 34 pin extender cable is then plugged into the graphics board This requires that the metal bracket screwed into the motherboard cage at the location of the keyboard connector is unscrewed and bent back I tacked on a long piece of wire to the graphics board to extend the micro clip wire The graphics board can be held in place by double sided tape The adventuresome can take the entire ma chine apart remove floppy cage remove FDC board and motherboard then drill a few holes into the motherboard cage at a position to utilize some appropriately sized standoffs Tape is sufficient unless you want a really professional job but then you wouldn t want to use aluminum foil over the ribbon cable Help with Tournament Chess Fm Dr K W Arntsen May I pass on a little information which you may wish to follow up as I see you are now marketing the XLR8er board I installed such a board in my 4P and have so far discovered only two major problems Firstly in the Model III mode my trusty old standby AI
89. d not take long to find If you look at the code around the loop at X 2A43 where the filespec is parsed for the drive number in the FCB once the is found DOCONFIG jumps out of the loop to the routine which pokes the drive number into the sysgen module At this stage HL is pointing to the ASCII drive number but AF still contains the whereas the next module expects it to contain the ASCII drive number The next instruction ands AF with X 07 which should give a binary drive number how ever as AF contains X 3A we always end up with drive 2 which is poked into the sysgen module hence DOCONFIG al ways warns there is no system on the drive The instruction AND 07H should be preceded by LD A HL The second bug is the one which messes the system up Two instructions from the above AND 07H DOCOMFIG calls a routine to find the location of the drive number in the sysgen module At this stage DE contains the address of the con fig sys ccc in the sysgen module which will be replaced by our filespec How ever when returning from the drive ad dress locating routine DE has changed When DOCOMFIG tries to place our file spec into the sysgen module it ends up overwriting part of itself at X 2C88 It seems a PUSH DEand POP DE is missing before and after the call I have patched DOCONFIG and it now seems to work I have used the following patch code MISOSYS Products Tidbits 42 MISOSYS Produc
90. deo cassette recorder so that s proba bly what the video in out is for But I ll post your query in TMQ to see if any of my readers can offer some assistance As far as your 5 Mb drive goes you ought to use our diskDISK facility to circum vent the small file problem Also our Alpha Technology patches printed in TMQ Volume I issue ii provide for interfac ing that AT board through the BANK supervisor call of LS DOS With that it opens up that memory to other programs such as PRO WAM or SAID Memory bank problems need help Fm MISOSYS Inc have received word from two recent purchasers of our XLR8er speedup and memory expansion board that after installation the extra 64K of memory in the standard Model 4 has trouble remembering its contents One reporter noticed by using the PRO WAM DOS Subjects 24 DOS Subjects Volume II iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IT 1ii MED APP facility to examine memory banks 1 and 2 that the memory contents would start to lose bits after a few sec onds It appears to me that the memory cells are not being properly refreshed Any of you hardware hackers ever hear of this kind of problem No problem with the lower 64K of memory was apparent in either of these two cases Both were in relatively new gate array machines one a 4P and one a 4D Let me know if you recognize any particular event common to both these cases Printer Compat
91. directory Once in the appro priate HIT and again in the GAT sector I ve looked through the driver code and don t find anything obvious so far I haven t done enough exploration yet to determine if every write to the ramdisk causes a duplicate sector write Fm MISOSYS Inc Are you using the page extended memory manager You can t use EXMEM until it is revised to suppress double buffering when un nec essary EXMEM works great until you try to use it as the focus of a RAMDRIVE Suggest for now that you use PEXMEM Unless you already are Fm Mark Mueller Roy Does this mean that I can t have both EXMEM and PEXMEM installed at the same time The TMQ info on PEXMEM says it used both SVC 108 and 125 Do youknow if that infers that a call to SVC 108 will invoke PEXMEM I have about 8 BASIC programs operating that use EXMEM through USER11 calls and the thought of going through them and changing them to 125 does not appeal to me BTW I expe rienced the same directory HIT GAT scramble mentioned before Fm MIS OSYS Inc You can have both installed but ERAMDISK will first use EXMEM if installed and then it will use PEXMEM if installed but that would be wasteful It would be better to just re write EXMEM toignore double buffering when not needed I can t get to that right now But you have the source to EXMEM and the source to PEXMEM is on DISK NOTES 3 2 soit would not be a tough job to integrate Michel
92. ducts to Mod II products at 9 1 ratio or more our best guess was for the Model 4 version especially when ordered with THE SOURCE If you want to return it do so and we will replace it The Model I is not dead Fm Peter J Fournier Hello It s been many moons since I ve been here on the LDOS forum on CompuServe The latest issue of The Misosys Quarterly has re mindedme of whatI ve missed I m afraid to admit that I ve done the unthinkable I ve put JIKD s old and venerable Model 1 in a gasp IBM PC clone case Forgive me it was out of sheer desperation My wife needed to use an editor at work school dept and I couldn t see her con necting up two disk drives monitor EI and keyboard To admit the truth it came Out pretty good I have the CPU EI two disk drives and a clone power supply inside the case My wive loves it but has to try and stop people from trying to run MS DOS in it They don t have any idea of the history in that box By the way Joe how do you get a MI to boot up in lower case You did it on all your boot disks but you left no clue as to how Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor Volume I iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume UZ iii TM subscription price Fm Malcolm Franklin What is the cur rent subscription rate for TMQ Fm MISOSYS Inc TMQ subscription is 25 year for 3rd class bulk mailing and 30 year for 1st class both rates are US
93. e s gonna do what Joe said If that doesn t work he said he s fed up with RLL drives Oh well What can I say It s his machine Need a MSDOS route Fm Bob Haynes Another MSDOS ques tion Has anyone been able to implement the equivalent of LSDOS s ROUTE PR PR TXT under MSDOS Perhaps a there s a small PD utility floating about which can do this I ve come across a useful program which has help windows that I want stuffed into an ASCII file for re edit and Shift PrtSc just isn t gonna cut it Fm MISOSY S Inc Check out PRN2FILE in an issue of PC Magazine last year It s also available on their forum here on Fm Daniel L Srebnick Shane I have Compuserve oe ee Eee eee eee DOS Subjects 26 DOS Subjects rr ite ce a arr ee er a Volume III iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume M i Fm Ray Pelzer Bob There are several little TSR programs floating around on the BBS s which allow you to route your printer port to a disk file I think there are a couple over on the IBM forums and if I can wade through the stuff on my 60 meg hd I might be able to find one if you can t Fm Hardin Brothers Bob The problem with Prt Scrm is that it doesn t use the PRN or LPTx device at all try doing a Prt Scrn while something else is print ing There are screen grab utilities and stdprn rerouting utilities around CIS If no one here can suggest a name GO IBMHW and ask there
94. e Fischer would be interested in putting a header in DOSTAMER so that it shows in memory aS something other than un known It is a very powerful shell for the operating system In October I had the opportunity to attend the NORTHCON Computer Convention at the Seattle Center Some 1700 exhib itors were there and seminars were held all 3 days Of the 9 seminars that I at tended several would have a bearing on the current state and future state of mi cros As you would expect at a micro computer convention There was an excellent presentation on Desk Top Pub lishing presented by several of th manu facturers All of the presentations revolved around the WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET WYSIWYG wizzy wig format and as such required either a very fast 80286 or 80386 computer as the hub Laser printers are now or will very soon be available to produce 90 pages per minute Sounds GREAT of course all of this SOFTWARE and HARDWARE is real CHEAP as you can imagine HA if you consider 12 17000 for software and hardware CHEAP Well EXCUSE ME you must have mistaken me for someone WITH BIG BUCKS The other type of Desktop Publishing is of the TEXT FORMATTER type as performed by Allwrite LeScript Scripsit and the like the type of word processors which will operate nicely on OUR little ol machines The article by Lee C Rice PhD in the TMQ v M i was EXCELLENT and considering the cost of the NEW and IM
95. e I will have to check with them Was the extender a specially shielded ribbon cable I have been trying to find shielded ribbon cable in my area South erm California but have had no luck Anybody know of a source Fm Dave Spiceland Tim The extender was NOT acable It was something which literally extended the board an extra inch away from the CPU and Alpha board I got mine from MicroLabs directly Fm MISOSYS Inc I have a source for the 34 conductor shielded ribbon cable Unfortunately it s available only in a 100 foot roll for about 250 I don t need 100 feet If anyone wants some of it and is willing to go along on a group pur chase please let me know I m looking for folks who may want 10 foot hanks Need an EPROM Programmer The Hardware Corner _ have a bit left to treat the rest of the Volume IILiii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Mii Roy I received TMQ just in time to de Hex files so the 1200 Baud doesn t cause the COMM CMD software will drop cide what I wanted for Christmas Thank a problem if you try to read write files characters goodness my wife is understanding and directly to normal disk files at 1200 baud one of my two girls is almost out of college Please send all three Golden Oldies Maintenance System Enhancement and ee Utility With the 30 off coupon I even SYSTEM D dr MEMD T SK 2TCR family Have a nice Christmas and best w
96. e but if you have had the product for some time you may not find the fix on the disk In any event diskDISK s created with DDFORM prior to the patch application will have to be DATECONV d That s the easy solution Assigning diskDISK to active drive slots John Coyne 24 York Close Whitehill Bordon Hampshire GU35 9PX England I have been using diskDISK for some timenow and only recently through being a little careless came across a problem I can install a DD drive on top of an active drive Of course when I disable DD I also lose original drive configuration No problem reactivating the drive through the system command however I did not think DD should allow this I have checked for any patches in TMQ but cannot find any although it is possible I may have missed them I would certainly feel more at ease if I knew the software would not allow me to trample over an active drive Looking at the code of DD there appears to be no check that the destination drive is actually free The software takes the drive number and simple overwrites anything in the DCT slot I have worked up a patch that checks for an active drive Would you please cast your expert eye over it and see if itis suitable I have used a patched DD and packed by Pro cess for a little while and it seems to be OK I hope you find the patch helpful Fm MISOSYS Inc It s true John that DOS drive installation facilities such as DCT programs
97. e IU iti The output from CRC looks as follows SYSO SYS LSIDOS 0 SYS1 SYS LSIDOS 0 SYS2 SYS LSIDOS 0 FORMS FLT 0 MEMDISK DCT 0 DOS HLP 0 FLOPPY DCT 0 BREF CMD 0 CRC CRC CRC CRC CRC CRC CRC 23450 44362 81203 0 65015 13661 X 5B9A size X AD4A size X 79B3 size X 0000 size X FDF7 size X 355D size X 10C7 size X 0000 size Applications for the User 4529 1337 1289 0 3007 20691 673 0 bytes bytes bytes bytes bytes bytes bytes bytes Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IL iii 2 This is in regard to the problem with MODELA III on LS DOS 6 3 having an incorrect EOF offset byte value ref TMQ IIl 1 page 67 Here 1s an easy fix for those who do not have DED FED UTILITY4 Super Utility or any other Disk File edi tor This short program will search for the MODELA III file on Drive 1 If it finds it it uses the Directory Entry Code DEC and Drive Code stored in the File Control Block to load the proper Directory Sector via DIRRD correct the EOF byte from X FO to X FB execute DIRWR to store the corrected directory sector to the disk and then exits A text report will be given if an error ocurrs If all went OK then only the LS DOS Ready line will return My program is called FIXMA3 CMD The way to use itis to place a system work disk containing FIXMA3 CMD in Drive
98. e a 15 meg RS HD hooked up to my 4d I use Roy s drivers RSHARDx for interfacing The HD is partitioned into 6 drives one sur face per drive nothing fancy Sometimes I get the Dos error msg Attempted to read system data record I say some times but once I get the error msg it tends to stay with me until I use a different drive spec d or a different filename A quick look at the free space map showed a directory track on cyl Unless I am wrong I usually am oh well There are eight grans per track I then looked at a listing of DIR SYS list dir sys d hex The listing showed a GAT value of 01Fh for byte 04Ch A value of 01Fh would seem to indicate that only the first 5 grans 01Fh 00011111b of track 76 the directory track are locked out This would lead the OS to try to use those grans for data resulting in the system data record error Any thoughts comments or suggestions Thanks Mike Fm MISOSYS Inc Sounds like some thing de allocated those granules If you have a MAPPER utility such as is found with our GO MTC package check if any file is allocated to that space If not set the value to FF with either FED DEBUG or some other utility DIM amp Mod 4 BASIC Fm Dave Spiceland I m writing a pro gram to retrieve data from a PROFILE database and manipulate the data It works with a lot of records at least 800 at this point and I m having problems with the DIMensio
99. e array board Ill get some time here to try that arrangement Fm Daniel L Srebnick Roy Some time back I promised you details of my XLR8er Graphics board installation Things have been quite hectic so pardon the delay As you may recall I originally attempted to install the XLR8er and Graphyx Solu tion Board into my gate array 1069A model 4 using your instructions I found that the XLR8er would not operate properly using the 7 ribbon cable which allowed mount ing on the reverse side of the mother board I decided that rather than use along cable with the XLR8er I would use the shorter one used in the non graphics in stallation and attempt to instead install the Graphyx Solution board on the re verse side of the motherboard via an extension cable I made up a thirty four conductor ribbon cable with the proper 34 pin plug on one end and a 34 pin socket connector on the other Thecable was long enough to allow it to pass over the top of the Model 4 motherboard on the right hand side I plugged the Micro Labs board into the socket connector and then cemented the shell of the socket onto the metal rail that runs across the top of the Model 4 RF cage I used Weld It adhesive which secured the socket and board nicely I also added some insulation between the top of the graphics board and the RF shield The back of the graphics board faces the back of the M4 motherboard By placing the graphics board in the right hand corn
100. e is changed by means of the D type patches the size does not change This means you need another method The most certain way to check is run a program that compares the files byte by byte such as COMPARE CMD that was sold on the LDOS Utilities disk The result is something you can rely on but the problem with such programs is that you can compare only one pair of files at a time and that the differences if any come out as a long list of mismatching bytes If you have more than two files you must compare all combinations and you still cannot check easy which files are identical A solution for this became obvious when I remembered an option of the DiRectory command on the DEC 10 mainframe I had worked with by means of a special command switch you could have a check sum calculated for each selected file I decided to create a similar program for my model 4P This was a good opportu nity to learn more about the C language it should be the perfect language for a job like this But as this was the first non trivial C program I developed I did not intend to start from scratch I had learned Z80 assembly language by modifying existing source code up to the point that the original could no longer be recog nized and wanted to use the same method to learn C Also reusing existing software is considered to be good software engi neering practice The resulting CRC program is based upon two already existing pieces of C sou
101. e type format and in a three ring binder 17 95 ea plus 4 00 Shipping and Handling For the non technical user it certainly is easier to understand than Tandy s Man ual Kermit is not always a frog Fm Lee C Rice It might be of interest to know that there is a complete version of Kermit available for TRSDOS LSDOS6 One of my colleagues in New York lo cated iton one of the BITNET nodes there in the public domain area and sent me Retrieve information The original ver sion for the Model 4 appears to have been done in the mid 1980s and has been up dated several times When I retrieved the associated files via BITNET lo and behold not only an updated version for TRSDOS6 but ALSO a rather recent version for LDOSS I downloaded them from our central sys tem onto TRSDOS floppies 3 SS flop pies and am sending them on to Vic McClung 914 Crescent Sikeston MO 63801 the person whom you mentioned as a TRS80 software archivist in the last issue of TMQ The first disk contains all of the Model 4 software and some of the Model 3 software the second disk the balance of the Model 3 software and the third disk the full documentation and manual for Kermit All Model 4 programs begin with M4 all Model 3 begin with TRS and the documentation begins with KERM The disks contain all of the assembly code help files and headers SRC HLP EQU so that either version may be assembled or customi
102. ed to purchase it for that and other reasons However I do have one small question How close is it to the proposed ANSI 1988 standard for C This was prompted by my purchase of K amp R s The C Programming Language Second Edi tion which has been changed to reflect the changes in the proposed ANSI C To help expedite a speedy response I have enclosed an SASE I thank you in advance and look forward to your reply ne sss E _ Letters to the Editor 12 Letters to the Editor Volume IM iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM ii Fm MISOSYS Inc Martin Itsure didn t take long for the question about LSDOS 6 3 s hardware lock to get asked I was expecting it sometime but you didn t waste any time I would prefer not to address that issue yet in a private letter I do think I will cover that topic in a future issue of TMQ or TMR which may be its new name That s the best place for the topic Let me get organized here first H 1 Techis still in business as a company They just have no involvement in selling the XLR8er board Due to the fourfold price increase in RAM chips it was no longer attractive for them to continue the sale of the board We wanted to keep it alive so we arranged to take over all distribution of the board However until further notice if you purchased your board through them then you need to deal with them for repair I m not sure that bo
103. ee 4 Public Domain Vic McClung 914 Crescent Sikeston MO 63801 USA II iv 4 QuickBASIC Brief note on Microsoft QuickBasic 3 0 II i 45 QuickBASIC Input SUB for QuickBASIC by William D Schroeder II ii 67 QuickBASIC Throw away GW BASIC and get Microsofts QuickBASIC II ii 35 RATFOR QRAT JCL and other matters II i 78 RATFOR RATFOR Testimonial It i 78 RS 232 Accessing RS 232 from BASIC II i 31 RS 232 Where to go for standards II i 89 RSHARD Getting RSHARD6 DCT into high memory II 37 RSHARD Notes on RSHARD Hard Disk Driver IE 1 25 RSHARD Q amp A re formatting II iv 23 RSHARD What does it support II i 31 SAID Patch queries by Shane Dawalt II iv 13 SAID SAID and tabs Problems No It ii 92 Index to Volume II 67 Index to Volume II Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Il iii Scanner MISOSYS about to get an AST scanner os iv 11 SCRIPSIT CTL 255 and foreign keyboards II iv 17 SCRIPSIT Defaults How to change them it 2 35 SCRIPSIT SuperScripsit Scripsit PRO and CTL 255 It i 70 Service Manual Radio Shack Manuals II iii 80 SET2ZRAM TRSHD3 DCT and SET2ZRAM WARNING ITI i 25 Speed Focus on speed Ir ii 45 Speed Testprograms It aa 55 Speed Testresults II 11 54 SYSRES Faster operation with SYSRES II i 38 TANDY Acronyms SOWG et al oO Bae Fes Fe 8 TANDY How Tandy sells computers II iv 16 TANDY How Tandy sells computers II iii 13 TANDY How well they care for Australian TRS 80 users Ir
104. enbeck Roy Congratula tions on the latest addition to the Soltoff family I can not figure out where you re finding the time and energy to put out TMQ Wherever you re finding it though keep going back because you re doing a great job Latest TMQ III i arrived today and I was happy to note that the PRO WAM Pro grammer s Toolkit is now available My order is enclosed Thought that as long as I was writing Pd ask about a minor aggravation I ve had with LS diskDISK s directory The last time I wrote regarding a problem you straightened me out real quick Hope you can do the same this time If not no sweat I can live with it I m running a 128K 5 meg model 4 Three LS diskDISK files have been in stalled on the hard drive as drives 5 6 and 7 They work like a champ I ve just noticed that on drive 7 s direc tory 1988 dates are coming up 1980 I ve enclosed a printout of the directory I suspect that I ve missed a patch some where but I couldn t find it At any rate if there is a fix I d like to hear about it if there is no fix forget it It s not all that important Keep up the good work and have fun with baby Benjamin Fm MISOSYS Inc You need to DATE CONV the diskDISK For newly created diskDISK s make sure you have applied the DDFORM63 FIX file listed in TMQ Volume II i page 102 I believe that the fix was also added to the DiskDISK pro duction diskett
105. ent func tion was considered un necessary There was also a need to integrate into the DOS some form of modest file copy protection it was a need which originated from soft ware contracts Tandy had with some of their suppliers Remember that TRSDOS 1 3 had a limited form of BACKUP pro tection for selected products That was not because of Tandy s requirements but of the restrictions placed by the suppliers Thus if limited BACKUP programs were to be ported to DOS 6 the DOS had to have some kind of limited BACKUP protection Since DOS 6 supports hard drives and various sized floppy media and LSI re fused to inhibit the COP Ying of limited BACKUP files to various media DOS 6 integrates a file COPY protection limited to permitting the COPY of protected files but not the mass duplication pro vided by BACKUP The DIR 1 bit is associated with the file protection It indi cates that the particular file so flagged should not be BACKED up but can be COPY d along with its protection status Other parts of a diskette indicate the level of BACKUP permitted on a mirror image duplication To my knowledge only cer tain suppliers of Tandy marketed soft ware used the file protection facility At this point in time I see no harm in disclos ing this information Incidentally I don t intend to promulgate any rumor of further DOS enhancements Although some folks are interested in additional features the le
106. er of the cage as seen facing the computer from the rear you can easily connect that clip to U11 running that wire over the top of the motherboard I found it necessary to use some alumi num foil as a shield on the 34 pin ribbon cable to make the extension cable work reliably I then taped over the foil and cable with masking tape to prevent the foil from shorting The RF shield cover fits back on nicely as the Graphics board just clears the top of the cage I have used this installation for over a month now with no problems Fm MISOSYS Inc Sounds like a win ner to me The gate array board has added flexibility since the RS232 interface and Floppy Disk Controller are on the moth erboard That leaves additional space behind the motherboard where the two separate boards are positioned on the 26 1069 machine The set the record straight I have now installed the MicroLabs graphics board into my test machine a 26 1069 Rev C oldie along with the XLR8er What I did was make up an 8 34 pin cable with male female header connectors at the same orientation i e both connectors point to The Hardware Corner 48 The Hardware Corner Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Hf iii the same side of the cable The cable was wrapped in aluminum foil then taped securely to completely cover the foil with something of insulation caliber Thecable plugs into the graphics connector an
107. eur Radio Packet station In the 70 s I bought my Model I for my Consulting Engineering business writing programs for hydrology and hydraulics and now am setting it up for I O opera tions including control of Solar heated swimming pool Hoping this shows that your continued support is very much appreciated Fm F J Seccull Dear Sir Our group would like to become subscribers to your maga zine would you please let me know your Air Mail subscription rates We would also like to know if you have back num bers available and if do the cost per copy and issues available Fm Richard VanHouten Roy I just received my last order One problem I ordered BSORT for LDOS and received BSORT for DOS6 I have a 4P but most of my work is still done on my 3 Maybe someone there thought I meant the 4 ver sion because I ordered The Source at the same time Ican perhaps use BSORT4 in the future but what I wanted was BSORT3 By the way in the last TMQ you re quested BBSs supporting TRS 80s I run the West End BBS 300 1200 baud 24 hrs supporting the I III 4 among others at 914 858 8722 Uploads Downloads free access online games all running on a Model III with a 10 meg hard drive under LDOS 5 3 and TBBS 1 3 Fm MISOSYS Inc We had to guess The correct name for the Model III prod uct is BSORTS1 The full name for the Model 4 product is BSORT MOD324 but we usually abbreviate it to BSORT Since we usually sell Mod 4 pro
108. extraneous date patches Numeric co processor bug in PC DOS 3 2 Here s more on software theft Molimerx and LDOS 5 3 What do you do with your system ASTEC Power Supplies DMP 2100p difference in pinstrike intensity DW II Printer to run under MS DOS Problems with OKIDATA Applications which don t close files Automated Sorting Searching PRO WAM data files MRAS and PRO WAM APPs 40 CPL video mode A better FIXBANK Activating PRO WAM from JCL7s KEYIN Altering PRO WAM window borders Volume M i LLI iv li ii ii iv iv iv 1i 11 1i ii iv ii ee Be oe LiL iv iv iii iv iv 111i ii ii 4343 ii LL Lv 111 iv Lv iv iv iv SALL H He pe ps pie 11i 11i 111 ii ii iv LLL LL Volume Il iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume ITI 1i1 PRO WAM Another CARDX use II iii 69 PRO WAM AT Patches for XLR8 NO II iii 74 PRO WAM BRINGUP WINLINK and PSORT It i 75 PRO WAM BRINGUP DAT left open II iv 77 PRO WAM CAL Another small problem fixed II 11 94 PRO WAM CARD and CARDX must have ONE record II ii 95 PRO WAM CTL255 FLT by Lynn R Sherman II iii 40 PRO WAM Developers Toolkit II iv 79 PRO WAM Displaying banks gt 0 with MED II i 70 PRO WAM Entering protected characters II ii 97 PRO WAM External access of ADDRESS II iii 66 PRO WAM HEAD APP Great but II ii 96 PRO WAM Here s some PRO WAM uses from our readers II ii 94 PRO
109. f 20 Mega bytes That s what we ll be using You can get it from us or obtain one locally Next controllers designed for PC clones don t readily connect to a TRS 80 I O bus Most are just unusable because the sector size supported is fixed at 512 bytes According to Western Digital their con trollers can be programmed to set the sector size We have selected the WDXT GEN controller to use A host adaptor is needed to interface the WDXT GEN controller to the TRS 380 I O bus As the host adaptor design is particular to that controller that s the only one which will work with our host adaptor I have also selected a specific hard drive enclosure which supports two half height drives has a 60 watt power supply and also has a slot underneath the drive mounting space where a Circuit board can be placed The WDXT GEN fits there As it doesn t take up the entire length of the slot the host adaptor will be physically designed so that it meets the controller edge to edge The controller has an edge designed to plug into a PC bus thus our h a will be designed to have a PC type edge card socket which the h a plugs into I intend to sell parts piecemeal as noted in TMQ specifically because of the over seas folk who may have local access to drives and controller Knowing all of this you can obtain the drive and controller eS Letters to the Editor 10 Letters to the Editor Volume I 11i
110. f Dduty I am very concerned that since we have lost 80 Micro we in England no longer have easy knowledge of the TRS80 prod ucts available in the States I do read Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor Volume IM 1ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iti TRSTimes and TRSlink filters over but very late I need for instance to know what Montezuma are at present offering It would be very useful if you could per suade all TRS8O suppliers to advertise in The Misosys Quarterly Fm Frank Gottschalk Dear Roy Your TMQ support of TRS 80 s and down right good deals are commendable Any one who gives me a credit for one pro gram after prepayment for two because they were going to be offered next month as a 2 for 1 offer certainly deserves eve ryone s support In response to your request for TRS 80 Clubs and Bulletin Boards I submit This club has been around since the early Model I s and still going strong expand ing with the new MS DOS world but still twice monthly meetings of avid model 1 IIT amp 4 users It has been a great help to me for many years Another question Can t find anyone with LB4 or is it LBMU 4 Anyway Could I print out a 28 line invoice with it with out having to switch to page 2 as I have to now with PROFILE 4 Fm MISOSYS Inc LBMU M4 is the product which can construct a new LB data base and populate it with data from an older
111. fications to pin 7 of U3 TMQ s Vol Hii amp it Is this modifica tion worthwhile I have also been reading the articles on HIBANKS by R Rasham TMQ s Vol Iiii amp iv In the revised HIBANKS article on the 23rd line of page 96 he refers to an EQU for INTADDR I have searched both articles and cannot find the reference Was it omitted in error or have I misread the reference I purchased in April an XLR8er Installa tion Utilities for use with CP M At that time I only had CP M 2 2 so the board s use was a little restricted However I have since purchased CP M 2 3 and together with the XLR8er I have improved facili ties when using Multiplan for example I noticed in TMQ Vol I i p13 in your response to RM Doerr that you believe Multiplan already makes use of the extra 64k to allow about a 90k spreadsheet I Letters to the Editor Se Letters to the Editor _ Volume IM iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Il iii realize this is probably not a fair question to ask but here goes When I use Multi plan with CP M the available data mem ory is about 11K only Even with the use of the XLR8 board and putting all the programmes onto the RAMDISK M I cannot improve this memory capacity Do you know of anyone that can help with a patch that will enable me to increase the 11K It may be that I require an updated version of Multiplan mine is Dales version 1 06 My Model 4
112. g address of INKY4 is in HL and the Z flag is set NZ if it wasn t found Of course that doesn t entirely solve the problem of how to get this address into BASIC so that you can CALL or USR the routine The method I chose involves passing a parameter to the routine and sending the address back in the parameter The key to finding the routine is to know where to find the name of the routine so it can be loaded into DE The program is shown in listing 2 The parameter passed to this program is the ADDRESS of the program itself That is the secret to finding the location of the name of the routine you wish to locate atasata tata aa aratta e SOFRE Applications for the User 35 Applications for the User Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii The program is exactly 18 bytes long Therefore adding 18 to the address of the program the parameter we passed gives us the location of the name of the routine we are searching for That is the purpose of the LD HL 18 and ADD HL DE in structions The 18 instructions can be loaded into an integer array as shown in the BASIC program in listing 3 On line 16 X is set to the location of X 0 in memory It is both the location of the routine CALLed in line 17 and the pa rameter passed to it The integer INKY4 is the location of the high memory rou tine There is one more secret to success You have to translate the name of t
113. g myself who offer TRS 80 mod 3 amp 4 support We have a limited public domain library and also respond to software and hardware trouble calls in our area of south Mississippi We exist in a small university town and have input from several levels of expertise We support one BBS HUBBUB 601 264 2394 300 baud 8 none amp 1 online from 3 30 pm to 08 30 am which is club spon sored and offers messages only We are about to go 1200 baud in the near future We charge dues of 15 a year and meet at the localdowntown Trustmark Bank nice hall 7 30 pm every 2nd Tuesday The public is welcome Hope this helps get your list underway Fm Roger Storrs Dear Roy Inresponse to your request for information on organ isations supporting TRS8O you will of course please include us tion to our current Newsletter which is published monthly as you know For members from the USA the fee is 21 a year and please I must insist on Sterling The easiest method of payment is by Visa or Mastercard A dollar cheque costs about 1 00 to exchange And we still have the difficulties of the variable exchange rate I can back date membership and will be quite happy to quotenew members for the back issues I now have two XLR8ers one in an early green screen 4P and the other in an early 4 with The N C motherboard I have no difficulty running CP M which I use for my essential database The database runs with the machine at full speed and I a
114. g patch 2 I m uncomfortable with extensive mods to the DOS itself because they are difficult to keep track of if you have lots of flop pies and 3 the documentation for Houde s work is sketchy at best I understand how the original FIXBANKS and HIBANKS work in theory But thisnew approach has me thoroughly confused as to what I need and what it does Should I be able to get HIBANKS to work or is it a waste of effort Are Houde s patches really reliable or have there been problemsreported One of the confusions that arises is that I m not really sure how much of his stuff has to do with European keyboards and how much is really just XLR8er related Will we get a clarifica tion in the next TMQ Fm MISOSYS Inc First off you proba bly did not utilize the corrected HIBANKS or did not make the corrections properly Therevised HIBANKS doesindeed work Also if you obtain the source to Michel s fixes available on either the appropriate DISK NOTES or I believe the revised Mod4 interface disk you will observe with clarity what Michel s patches are doing Yes you would have to redo your driver boot facility Running FIXBANKS without FIXALL will cause problems with things such as running the SPOOLER in one of the XLR8er banks or swapping text banks 3 10 while in SAID or any background operation with the extended memory banks when interrupts are not disabled by the application switching the banks If you are usi
115. hat would the cost of the host adaptor cabling and software be Finally are there any complications in installing your kit with an off the shelf SEAGATE hard drive primarily intended fora PC compatible For instance should the hard drive be purchased formatted OR unformatted The current release of LeScript 1 8 no longer appears to work properly with PRO WAM or DOUBLE DUTY for that matter With PRO WAM loaded any attempt to print to screen or printer causes a lockup The same thing happens with DOUBLE DUTY In fixing bugs in the spelling checker they seemed to have impinged on the area of memory used by PRO WAM Maybe they should get some advice from you before any more revi sions are made it s a pity because LeScript is sO nearly a great program Well that s about all for now You may use any of the above in TMQ Actual articles paid I will supply on disk in ASCII otherwise I hope your scanner can cope with my daisy wheels Fm MISOSYS Inc Michael As far as Mister ED I don t recollect the history of that last order as to whether you sent in the disk for refresh but the ED disk sent with the letter is the older one Pl refresh this one for you The REGENBU2 BAS will be on it The problem you are having with WIN LINK was due to your PROWAM 2 01a not having the WAM23 FIX installed That appeared in TMQ issue Ili page 58 But I can t fault you for not applying the patch as I don t
116. he high memory routine into integers The letters I N K Y and 4 are represented in memory by the ASCII codes 3 78 75 89 and 52 respectively To find out what integers to use let s look at land N Those two letters make up one integer Set I 0 Then poke the codes for the letters into POKE VARPTR I 73 POKE VARPTR I 1 78 Then PRINT 1 and you will find that I 20041 The value for NK is 22859 and the value for 4 carriage return code 13 is 3380 Those are the last three values in the DATA statement at line 15 If your routine name has an even number of characters you can terminate the name with an integer value of 0 31 assuming an extra byte of value 0 following the terminating character I just use 13 from habit High Memory Headers None of this is possible without the proper header My header for INK Y4 is shown in listing 4 The first two bytes jump to the start of the actual routine Next is a two byte integer with the address of the high est byte of memory occupied by the rou tine Then one byte which gives the length of the name of the routine 5 in this case INKY4 There follows two byte reserved for the address of a Device Control Block if the routine is associated with a device and two bytes that are reserved for I don t know what editor s note those remaining two bytes were reserved for future enhancements dr eS a Applications for the User 36 Applications for the User V
117. hics it is an unusual copy of GWBASIC indeed but I would expect as much from Leading Edge Pd check the program for any form of POKE or USR statement could be that a runaway CPU trashed your CMOS RAM for no particularly good reason Fm Theodore Masterton Joe Is your reflection that you would expect as much from Leading Edge a positive or a nega tive I have a least one friend who pro voked a siege of Buyer Dissonance when he commented Oh Leading Edge I hear they aren t really IBM compatible Yep here it is Screen 3 For a CGA equipped computer or a MDA equipped computer with a monochrome monitor Resolution is 640x200 unless MDA is detected then resolution 1s 720x348 Where is the system configuration stored in MSDOS IS there an equivalent to TRSDOS LDOS config sys Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Well LE has always been weird when it comes to video and video support I ve really only come across one or two LE incompatibili ties that mattered in the real world so it really isn t a positive or negative let s call it a push In a MS DOS machine there really isn t any direct equivalent of the CONFIG SYS file at all All drivers filters and so forth are loaded in pieces at boot time by entries in your CONFIG SYS and AUTOEXEC BAT files Sorta like hav ing an AUTOed JCL that builds your system configuration on every boot Sure can be inconvenient when on flop pies as you have to carry
118. hout affecting or is that effecting maybe BOTH anything else in the system I will let you know how it goes Fm MISOSYS Inc I sure wouldn tclose a file after every write access just to have to re open it again If you re that afraid of lost data I would recommend you install a Standby Power Supply to guard against power failures Also if youjustappend an exclamation point to the file specification string when a file is to be opened the DOS will automatically update the directory anytime the file is extended That would be less disk overhead in your example if you are dealing with sequential files If you are dealing withrandom access files you have less to be concerned with The Hardware Corner 54 The Hardware Corner eee a alMlMliuttlMl SAL Volume III iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Ii iii Sorry I have nothing for OD perhaps one of my TMQ readers has Fm John Coyne Roy I must say Michel Houde has done a fine job with the new XLR8 utilities It provided so much space in low memory that I didn t quite know what to do with it all Previously during the system configuration I had no diffi culty in forcing the hard disc driver into high memory this time I really had to work at it Perhaps there is no longer a need to move itinto high memory with all the space below We shall see Thad a little problem with ERAMDISK it would not allow a warm boot ERAM DISK ha
119. hy this issue Of TMQ has arrived a wee late I m here to give you the answer I recently made another acquisition to enhance the appearance of THE MISOSYS QUAR TERLY The text in this issue was pre pared using MS WORD Following that we used Aldus Pagemaker to generate the page compositions This gave me the ability to effortlessly merge graphics and other artwork into TMQ s text composi tion It also gave me the ability to pre cisely define the appearance of each page if I wanted to The result of Pagemaker s capabilities can be seen throughout this issue I tried to avoid overdoing it yet I wanted to introduce some of the graphics effects that go to make a publication more pleas ing to the eye Recognize though that some headings use varied backgrounds Although I expect to narrow the choice of styles to a few I wanted to pepper this issue with variation so that my readers would let me know what they find accept able Needless to say I m sure I don t have to ask for your input A number of readers have asked for list ings expanded to take a full page width That to me was wasteful although I admit that the half page style previously used made a listing difficult to read With PM I switched to a three column format stretch ing the listings to cover two columns This provides a reasonable compromise Listings also include a 10 background shade as they are in many other maga zines I have also used b
120. ibility Fm Charles Riddle Hi there I m new to this forum and actually I m not even sure if you will be able to help me but here goes I have aRadio Shack DMP200 printer and an IBM compatible computer The printer works perfectly in any kind of normal printing mode but I can not get it to work in Graphics mode with applications such as Lotus or Dollars and Sense I have tried setting up the control codes etc but apparently I need some kind of converter file I have gone to Radio shack computer centers but they have been no help Is there anything you can suggest Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Charles There are two possibilities for most of the Tandy dot matrix printers and you can determine which is true from your par ticular printer s manual 1 The printer has only Tandy graphics modes In this case unless a program has specific support for the Tandy printer you are out of luck 2 The printer has a selectable graphics emulation mode In this case there will be a DIP switch somewhere on the printer that is described as IBM Mode vs Tandy Mode Power the printer down flip the switchand power it back up Atthis point you can install configure the software as communicating with either an IBM Graphics Printer or Epson MX 80 and it should fly My guess is that the printer is old enough to fall into category 1 which means that things don t look good A few folks have experimented w
121. id state IC background Could anyone as sist me to the cause of this problem Any help would be greatly appreciated Fm Joe Kyle DiPietraopola Mark what operating system are you booting in Model 3 mode If TRSDOS 1 3 try LDOS if you ve got it If TRSDOS 1 3 will go but LDOS and LS DOS won t the problem might be index pulses from the drive not making it to the controller Another thing you can try right off is to swap drives zero and one to see if the problem follows the drive Getting down to the nuts and bolts of expanding your Model 4 General XLR8er queries Fm Michael Dauphin Roy Weall know the upside of the XLR8 but what is the downside Ifany Can a Model 4 with an XLR8 run without any drivers or filters I know from reading TMQ that some filter and or driver is necessary to take advan tage of the XLR8 features Will the 4D run normally without the driver and or filter Could I boot up my 4D with my original write protected never modified copy of LDOS 5 3 and never know that the XLR8 was installed Will self boot ing software work Or would I have to remove the XLR8 and re install the Z 80 chip I m not happy with the wording of these questions but I think you can get an idea of my concerns from them Oh one more thing I look forward to your Computer Math column in each is sue of TMQ Fm MISOSYS Inc With an XLR8er board installed your machine will run slower at boot up until the sof
122. ing resistors Tandon TM100 2 drives Teac 360K Drive HartFORTH available from MISOSYS for 59 95 S amp H Getting hold of a patchable FORTRAN I The Gobbling Box by Anthony Consentino GreatBac 86 by Sellers amp Co Altering GWBASIC function keys The VAL function Throw it away and get Microsoft s QuickBASIC FDR6AT and dump speed GeatBac 86 by Sellers amp Co Hard Disk interleave Hard disk intermittent Hard drive wanted Harddrive users do you need diskDISK Help with Aerocomp drives How do I UN SYSGEN a hard drive More on upgrading hard drives More problems with Aerocomp drives PERCOM 10 Meg drive under LSDOS 6 3 Problems with Aerocomp s 5 Meg HD driver RSHARD TRSHD3 and SET2RAM Market Research for feasibility of ext Hard drive MS DOS and Hard drive New driver for Aerocomp 20Meg drives Percom Hard drive 3 ST 506 and R S driver Different capabilities of HD64180 packages The HD64180 264180 CPU by David Hall Using the 64180 s MLT opcode revised HIBANKS module for XLR8 MicroLabs HIRES graphics Flyer H by TEK Microsystems Incorporated Sales pitch Preliminary reports on PC4 JCL blues Q amp A When you don t have to compile Model 4 JCL STOP LAIR MEGADV1 Lair of the Dragon by David Goben Index to Volume II 62 sai li ii iii iii iv iv iy iv iv Volume IIL iii Be Bs Ee H H iv iv s ai ii oe ii da iii eE ii iv
123. ink I know where you are coming from your operator would probably grab you to dig out the listing etc The difference between an interpretive program and a compiled one be it EnhComp BASCOM FORTRAN etc or one assembled to aCMD file is that the BASIC interpreter is designed as an inter active facility If something goes wrong the program stops and you are at the controls All compiled programs have to totally predict all errors which could occur and provide all means of recovery Most compiled programs can only strive to reach that level of error handling I recollect that the difference between a BASIC program without a single ON ERROR GOTO trap and one with many is the difference between a beginning programmer s programming and an ex pert s I would also expect the commer cial program to be classified as bullet proof But we all know that the bullet proof program is one to strive for No amount of programming can account for every possible thing which could go wrong The closer the developer comes to that ideal the longer it takes to get the product out The level of perfection is most likely asymptotic with a logarithmic curve There is no way that I know to generalize data recovery in a compiled program which has aborted That s why the developer tries to second guess what could go wrong I recommend that you re look at the envi ronment of error trapping What you may also want to explore is a
124. ion does is see if the sector being written is readable If there was a memory corruption DOS VERIFY would probably not find it If a subsequent sector write corrupted a dif ferent sector on the diskette s track due to head bounce rare DOS VERIFY would probably not discover it because each sector is verified immediately following its write IFC divides available memory into two buffers about 10K 20K each thus many sectors are read after they are written But CRC checking is slow That s why I added the option to inhibit itin IFC If you want to alter the default so that version 4 0 0 IFC s VERIFY is ON apply the following patch PATCH IFC D12 CE FF F12 CE 00 Similarly you can default INV to ON with the patch PATCH IFC D02 36 FF F02 36 00 I see no sense in supplying a patch to change the default of the PRINT option Golden Oldies DOCONFIG Fm John Coyne Roy I have just tried DOCONFIG more than once and each time my system ended up in a mess not always in the same mess but most times unusable I will try and give you some immediate symptoms and I hope to have acloser look later First my system model Ap with LS DOS 6 3 L running an XLR8 with Michel s patches 4 floppies and a hard drive The patches do not cause the problem because I have tried running the basic unconfigured L with the same results 1 Trying to save the current configura tion on drive 0 DOCONFIG filespec 0 s Doco
125. ishes for the new year I m including this next item for anyone who might be interested Wait hold the press I better get this finished and sent to you before this prod uct evaporates also I just received the latest Jameco Electronics catalog and the ART Programmer read on is being closed out for 10 off the normal price It was already a good price and now it s better but better hurry or no more will be avail able With the TRS 80 market slowly drying up it becomes harder to find suit oe able hardware products for system devel Bee opment However an EPROM Program mer I recently found offered by Jameco Electronics 1355 Shoreway Road Belmont CA 94002 415 592 8121 works great and also offers portability to the MS Ss DOS IBM world if and when one ever He es decides to join the rest of the crowd fol lowing Big Blue s lead If you are inter ested you can order their Applied Reader Technology ART EPROM Programmer for 199 95 plus shipping and handling 179 95 closeout price now O AE this Personally I like my TRS 80 Model 4 and will probably still be using it and learning from it long after the current MS DOS standard is but a passing fancy Of course I like many use IBM computers and clones including a Tandy 1000 SX but the gmp a ok NONE LOGGER the Model 4 just feels better to me and is easier to use The ART EPP 1 EPROM Programmer is imported from Holland and will program all current EPROMs from
126. ith graphic translation programs but the results are generally poor at best unless they are implemented an implemented well in the printer it self Fatal GWBASIC amp Leading Edge Fm Theodore Masterton So here I am feeling like I have at least a responsible working knowledge of microcomputers and WHAM I get the dumbs I am converting the old Radio Shack Advanced Statistical Analysis program to run on my new Leading Edge D2 and first run shows that TRSCROSS converting the SETs to PSETs Unfortunately the PSET 10 1 command returned an error So I open the GWBASIC reference and it tells me that the error results from having the wrong SCREEN environment So s I dive in and add a SCREEN x where x is the digit for a Herc monochrome card and its no go the same error But that ain t all The system hung up and my reboot resulted in a frightening message about Wrong Configuration I switched to a bootable floppy that should have had my configuration onit but NO HARD DRIVE C was apparent to the system With sweat on my brow ran setup changed nothing exited and the next attempt to reboot everything is back to normal I cannot stand going back to the days when I knew nothing about how the ma chine did its thing Can someone explain what happened What did I do How did I do it Is it dangerous to program in GWBASIC Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo If your GWBASIC says it has a SCREEN mode that supports Hercules Grap
127. iv 20 TANDY TANDY customers trials and tribulations It iv 13 TANDY Tandy users in the Federal Republic of Germany II ii 12 TANDY 1000 1000ex Monitors IIl iii 35 TANDY 1000 Accelerators II iii 34 TANDY 1000 OUT OF MEMORY cue It iii 33 TANDY 1200 M1200 DOS help IIl iii 36 TANDY 1400LT 1400LT report by Bill Schroeder LSI II iii 31 Tape to disk Tapes Disks and CMD Files by Gary W Shanafelt II iv 50 TED Inadequate documentation IIT i 26 THE GUIDE Photocopied reproduction available 25 3 S amp H US II i 6 THE SOURCE Closeout price 40 00 delivered It iv 4 THE SOURCE Customer Appraisal II iii 14 THE SOURCE Final closeout sale 40 00 delivered IIT iii 4 TMQ Advertising II iv 4 TMQ Comments on new look II iv 2 TMQ Feedback from last issues II i 6 TMQ Feedback from renewal mailing TI 13 TMQ How to submit material I 6 TMQ Kudos we love them II i 11 TMQ Michael Rogers offer of Australian flavour article II iv 19 TMQ Now for some TMQ praises II ii 13 TMQ Out of print copies available for 12 50 S amp H II iv 5 TMQ Out of print TMQ s now available II i 3 TMQ Out of print TMQs now available II i 3 TMQ Renewals Ir 2 3 TMQ Reprints of past issues II 2 1l TMQ Responses to the introduction of laser printing II iv 8 TM Schedule II iv 3 TMQ TMQ Swap Offer A aes DB 7 TRSCROSS Q amp A IC iii 27 TRSDOS Forgotten Passwords IIr iii 23 TRSDOS 1 3 Moving files from LDOS to TRSDOS 1 3 It i 26 TRSDOS 6 2 Model 4 88 Date Time II
128. ix 64K 150ns DRAMs Fm Michael Dauphin Roy My 64K memory chips are 200ns types Looks like I ll have to order 128k of 150ns chips with the XLR8er What are your prices for 128k Fm MISOSYS Inc Mine are 0 since I don t sell them Ever since the price of DRAM skyrocketed I gave up stocking 64K DRAM chips Try Microprocessors Unlimited in Beggs OK at 918 267 4961 But look for 128 row refresh chips not 256 row refresh 7 bit instead of 8 bit According to Joe chips manufactured by Toshiba NEC Hitachi or Motorola should work Ones from TI should not XLRS8er and Hires Graphics Fm John Tollini Roy I have a question about the XLR8er patches in the new TMQ 3 2 It appears that XLSYSOA FIX and XLBOOTA FIX are mutually exclusive with MLT1 FIX amp MLT2 FIX from TMQ 2 3 Also I did discover one typo in XLBOOTA FIX on the fifth line of patch data that starts f06 d6 that should be f04 d6 I have applied these on my system and they seem to work fine No conflicts BTW an order is on the way couldn t resist the special Fm MISOSYS Inc They are mutually exclusive to the MLT fixes as they incor porate them If you already have the MLT fixes in then either use the O parm or Start with a stock master DOS disk Now I m looking at that XLBOOTA FX and I see what you are talking about I also don t know why that period 1s on the 4th patch line I did edit out the comments so that period is probably a car
129. ke to hear from anybody who is interested in this work You can help by simply letting me know how you view an object I hope that the above is of use to somebody If you havea comment of any kind please contact me I am interested to hear from anybody about anything to do with this work no matter how small you think it might be let me know I can be contacted at MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume IIL iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iti Golden Oldies Golden Oldies IFC Fm John Coyne I have not had the chance to try all of the utilities from the GO collection but I am impressed with FED andespecially IFC The O function is a real asset for comparing a working disc with a backup It certainly saves the laborious chore of manually comparing what needs to be copied I sometimes wonder how much more can be squeezed out of the utilities we already have and where do you get all the ideas from I suppose you have a never ending wish list on the wall of the office and we your customers keep on adding to it Psst is there a patch for the verify in IFC to default to on Fm MISOSYS Inc Ask and ye shall find Understand that the VERIFY facil ity in IFC is considerably more demand ing than the simple VERIFY of the DOS IFC s does a total Cylic Rendundanc Check CRC of the destination file against the source file during a file COPY All that the DOS s VERIFY operat
130. l notices TMO advertising If you are interested in reaching a dedi cated TRS 80 audience consider THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY If you have a TRS 80 Model III or 4 related product to sell you can reach these buyers by plac ing your advertisement in our publica tion TMQ is read world wide Our sub scribers are predominantly in the United States however we do have a significant number in Canada Europe and Austra lia The few companies remaining in the TRS 80 market have chosen not to adver tise in TMQ There may be many reasons Perhaps they look upon MISOSYS as a competitor and wish to support us They may also consider our rates too high I can t counter the former but to set aside the latter I am going to reduce advertis ing rates for the next issue Revised space rates are as follows Full page 125 Half page 75 Quarter page 50 Ninth page 20 Note the new ninth page ad layout I will be composing this so you have no artwork charge Just submit your text A sample ninth page is the last page of this issue We accept only black amp white ads how ever ads for our inside covers are printed in the same color as the cover TMQ alternates between PMS colors green 354 purple 266 blue 293 and red 199 If you would like to place your ad in THE MI SOSYS QUARTERLY give me a call PD Software Librarian Vic McClung has volunteered to be the librarian for the collection of TRS 80 public domain diskettes Hencefo
131. l use the standard DOS printer driver That wait s on a busy I can t imagine your printer being continuously busy to cause a timeout of the driver that s ten seconds How about noting some more details of the problem you are having MRAS Assembler PRO MRAS s SAID Fix Fm Daniel L Srebnick I noticed while installing MRAS and PRO MC that a fix MSD65 FIX had never been installed to the copy of SAID on my MRAS diskette I got it from you about two months ago Thought you would like to know Fm MISOSYS Inc Could be I ll check that out Looks like it isn t on the master PRO MRAS disk That patch dated back to 10 24 86 I just went and added it to the master I ll also reprint it here for those who may need it PRO WAM PRO WAM Application Manager Fm Pete Granzeau Roy I have the Pro WAM 2 0 installed and working well I am wondering about the Mr ED stuff I bought with Pronto How do I get them to run now Oram I going to have to buy a new Mr ED too Fm David Huelsmann Pete I use the original Mr ED stuff with no problems with PRO WAM 2 0 Fm Pete Granzeau David How It doesn t seem to want to run APP files Fm David Huelsmann Pete Since its been a long time since I crossed that hurdle and since I can t find any docs or notes in my files relating to it let me doa little more checking on just what is neces sary It s amazing what comes back to you whe
132. la AMI also has a chip but I have forgotten the number This of course boils down to the fact that I would be able to utilize my computer 000000000000001 of the time Letters to the Editor 11 Letters to the Editor Volume I iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii instead of the 00000001 that I cur renily use Naturally all of the new stuff is REALLY CHEAP HA Maybe I could get a GOVERNMENT GRANT In the Exhibitors Hall CDC was demon strating some of their new HARD DISKS Saw anice 790Mbyte 5 25 28ms or was that 19ms unit Great for YOU ROY now let see at 360K 720K per diskette that s 2000 1000 disks for backup Shouldn t take too long call me NEXT MONTH Icouldn t FILL it ANYWAY Another BIG item Sorry YOU MUST HAVE ME CONFUSED WITH SOME BODY ELSE With all of the new computers on their way it makes sense to GET ALL OF THE SOFTWARE THAT YOU MIGHT NEED BEFORE THE GOOD PROGRAMMERS MOVE ON That is unless you are going to move on also In that case PLL SEE YA AROUND cause Pm STAY IN HERE In an article in PC WORLD one of the writers discussed that most of the computer users use only 1 or 2 programs and that the NEW CHEAP computers have not made the great impact that the manufacturers had hoped for ie com panies are not rushing out to buy them The BATTLE between IBM s Micro channel and the other manufacturers Extended Bus EISA I thi
133. larification of conflicting statements in TMQ II iv 83 3 5 Drive More on 3 5inch drives II ii 26 3 5 Drive Using 3 5inch drives with LSDOS 6 3 II i 39 50 Tradein Clarification of policy II iv 8 80 MICRO Farewell by Roy Soltoff II iv 2 80 MICRO Just a few comments about Feldmanns 5 3 review II i 17 80 MICRO Letters to the Ed General feeling Good Riddance II ii 5 BANK Checking availability of memory banks II ii 26 EXMEM EXMEM revisited IDs a 35 EXMEM Block transfer can be less than 256 but not more II iii 29 EXMEM BUFDATA BAS by Edwin Ketola II ii 63 EXMEM On the EXMEM utility II i 10 EXMEM Q amp A II iii 29 Accounting Bedford Integr Accounting Softw for Small Bus II iii 32 AFLAG Adding AFLAGS to LDOS 5 3 by Martin Pollard II i 29 Alcor Difficulty with Alcor C support II iv 67 ALLWRITE PRO WAM and ALLWRITE Please read README II i 72 AlphaTech What board is best XLR8 or AlphaTech Megamem II iv 89 AlphaTech More on AlphaTechnology Patches II i 82 ASSEMBLY Getting started with assembly code It i 48 ASSEMBLY Just what is relocatable II i 49 ASSEMBLY Which assembler II ii 74 ASSEMBLY Why does MLINK abort II i 50 ASSEMBLY XREF What are acceptable file extension chars II i 50 ASSISTANCE REQD Reloc mach language modules to extra memory banks II ii 15 AST Premium 286 MS DOS 3 3 on AST Premium 286 II iii 31 AST Premium 286 Which PC Recommended AST Premium 286 II iii 33 BASIC BASIC
134. le I could be wrong but it could just be one bit in one chip that is corrupting a piece of code Then again this time of year with the furnace coming on amp off it could be a spike from the hot air blower motor FIXALL revisited Fm Gary Phillips Roy Yet another question sorry for which you may have an answer I ve been running my 4P with The Hardware Corner 52 The Hardware Corner Volume If iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume H1 iti XLR8er for two years without FIXALL I used the FIXBANKS provided with the board when I first ordered it I have never encountered any problems that I could blame on the absence of FIXALL or that looked like a bank switching error during interrupts My software usage is a lot of Superscripsit communications and some language development with F80 RATFOR and Alcor Pascal mainly After reading in TMQ about the dangers of leaving FIXALL out I tried to install Rex Basham s substitute It crashed when I loaded SAID Then in TMQ IL iv there were revisions to Correct this problem so I tried adding those It still crashes when I load SAID I have continued to operate with the original FIXBANKS and no FIXALL and normally run with the RAMDISK active No problems yet Now we have Michel Houde s code to replace the whole mess but I m reluctant to install this because 1 it patches BOOT SYS and would require me to rework my direct from the HD bootin
135. left hand margin For in stance I haveaC Itoh Model 1550 printer which uses the sequence ESC L n2n1n0 to set the left margin to the column desig nated by n2n1n0 The printout demon strating the error was missing the charac ters BOOT SYS it printed a glitch unknown value graphics character I suspect that something at the beginning of the line garbled to the printer and was DOS Subjects 99 DOS Subjects Volume II iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IT ii seen as the control sequence to set the left hand margin Check your printer manual for that operation Perhaps BOOT SYS has some value of characters which may establish the margin I also wonder if there would be a rare problem of the printer prematurely resetting its BUSY STATUS after a carriage return line feed sequence If it did that the computer would send the first character of the line the B which could get garbled to the start of the set left margin sequence Since the problem always happen when ithappens after a carriage return it could be because either 1 your printer only accepts such an escape sequence to set the left margin only immediately following a return or 2 it is a problem in BUSY STATUS timing on executing the car riage return line feed physically Your DOSTART JCL shows use of the FORMS filter Let s assume that you always use it The TRS 80 end of line conventi
136. leting and invoking files ZCAT for cata oging 6 3 diskettes All documentation has been revised and is printed in a convenient 5 5 by 8 5 format Order M 33 300 for 59 95 5 S amp H US Rent this space 20 Rent this space 20 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 den Oldies Viaintenance The GO MTC product is a collection of pro grams designed to provide maintenance sup port services for your computer operation The programs in this group have been rewrit ten for Model 4 LS DOS 6 3 You get DIRCHECK to perform an integrity check _jof your disk s directory and repair certain kinds of errors FIXGAT to re construct a corrupted Granule Allocation Table IOMON for trapping disk input errors MAPPER to check the granulization of files stored on your disk RAMTEST to perform an exhaustive test of all DRAM memory in your computer and UNREMOVE to restore a file inadver tently deleted All documentation has bee revised and is printed in aconvenient 5 5 by 8 5 format Order M 33 100 for 59 95 5 S amp H US Golden Oldies available from MISOSYS Inc PO Box 239 Sterling VA 22170 703 450 4181 Rent this space 20 Volume IT iti The GO SYS product is a collection of pro grams designed to provide additional fea tures to LS DOS 6 3 operation The programs in this group have been rewritten for Model 4 LS DOS 6 3 You get DOCONFIG for manipulating CONFIG SYS files DOEDI to pr
137. like MEMDISK displays a message Verify error in bank n at location x nnnn Well Ionly allowed one character for the faulty bank number Which means that banks 10 and up will be signaled as bank lt gt ABC The idea of displaying this message was taken from MEMDISK Although the verify function is handled rather differently some portions of code are identical because there aren t so many ways to perform some elementary jobs In the process of developing the program I became aware of the need to use 2 charac ters but then forgot about it as it was not very important If really needed there isa 50 bytes patch area starting at X 35FD The VERIFY parameter is intended as a rough checking not a comprehensive memory diagnostic program Now the final words The package I sent you last September was my last contribu tion to the TRS 80 world In October 88 I bought an AT compatible Singapore clone No TRS 80 word processor can do what Microsoft s WORD 4 does I am currently writing a thesis in Chemical Engineering and I really appreciate the outliner capabilities of Word and style sheets and Table of Contents building and so on The subject is Design and operation of a three phase fluidizised bed reactor Ap plication to the synthesis of organometal lic reagents I hope to be a Docteur something equivalent to your Ph D before my 42th anniversary i e before the 10th of October 1989
138. ll the XLR8er boards the same please If not which board can be used where I ask this as I am now contemplating taking the board from the 4P to be used on a Model 4 Gate array machine Again acceptable to read answers to this only in TMQ Letters to the Editor 14 Letters to the Editor Volume II ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii I note in TMQ IL iv page 5 under Market Research you have requested response of interest in hard drives Roy my feeling is that to import these to the U K would make the price prohibitive As a general rule we just change the Dollar sign for a Pound sign on any printed price Import duties delivery charges and Value Added Tax all push the price up But what I do write to ask as Editor of NATGUG News is that NATGUG to have some details of construction and to be able to obtain parts in the U K Misosys supplying those parts which may not be obtainable in the U K I have to leave details on parts open to yourself as I do not know what is entailed Could you please let me have parts required and prices I appreciate that your first thoughts may be that we are trying to cut Misosys out of earning the full amount of profit on each unit but as I know the imported price is going to be far to high I am making the above sug gestion so that at least Misosys has the opportunity of making some extra profit for all the work carried out Fm MISOSYS Inc There
139. m sure it would hold its own or even beat a MSDOS machine with hard drive LS DOS is howevera different matter On the old Four Lescript has to be run at less than full speed I 1 Visicalc is however OK at full speed On The 4P both go at full speed John Coyne s Fixbank6 which I need to use to operate DDUTY causes the keyboard to go haywire on the FOUR I have therefore been forced to use the 4P as my main machine which upsets me because my FOUR has four internal drives and is therefore the machine I want set up in my work station The 4P belongs in the boot trunk of my car I have not as yeT managed to acquire a working copy of HIBANKS so I do not know how that would work If you care to add a copy to the enclosed disk it would be appreciated A friend managed to type in the original code but we could not make head or tale of the modifications in the later issue I have been asked to request your help in providing an alternative to SUPERDRIVE for the ALpha board which obeys nor mal DOS convention I do have an alpha board myself but eventually came to the conclusion it was not compatible with the N C motherboard It is however possible that the problem was superdrive The system checks suggested by Anitek all passed muster but the machine would lock up fairly soon whatever it was being used for I do get this problem with the XL8er on both machine particularly if I leave the machine idle in the Dotwriter portion o
140. m MISOSYS Inc Hey see the letter which follows Maybe it will work in your Case Dear Roy and family I read with much interest in the last TMQ page 10 about speeding up an early 4 to run at the true 4 05 MHz speed since mine is about as old as they come Rev A It was running at 3 3 or so until I made the modification as you printed it but I wasn t content with that either I knew that the RS232 uses a5 MHz clock so I tapped that for the CPU clock It now ZIPS along at 5 0688 50 better than stock and only cost 2 25 First a word about my machine since it isn t stock It was a used 16K cassette 26 1067 when I got it I installed a Jameco 128K set 16 150ns 4164 s and an Aero comp floppy controller with a Teac 360K drive It now has two of them plus a Toshiba 3 5 720K drive all internal Whether the 150ns RAMs have anything to do with 5 MHz success I don t know RS used 200ns chips Here s how to get the 5 MHz speed Pull U3 and bend up pin 19 If you have bent up pin 7 to get 4 05 MHz attach it to a resistor 1K or so attached to 5V It s NECESSARY to prevent noise at the higher speed Install a 1 piece of tinned 22A WG wire old printer cable into the U3 SOCKET hole 19 Re install U3 Solder the loose end of the wire to U3 pin 17 RS232CLK Now pull U57 Z80A it may say Mostek 3880 and replace with a Z80B from Jameco BG Micro JDR Microdevices etc Presto a 5 0688 MHz M
141. mand or call for a non resident file all while a disk is in drive 4 ex 0 I get the same as with setup 1 But if drive 4 ex 0 is unlatched or doesn t contain a disk when I issue DEVICE the drive select lights go on in succession an un latched drive 1 2 or 3 is quickly bypassed and reported as NO DISK and things stall at diskless drive 4 ex 0 where the drive select light goes on noth ing happens there is no NO DISK state ment the drive times out the light goes off and the computer locks up and I can only get going again by rebooting The same lockup occurs on diskless drive 4 with a misspelled command or a call to a non resident file also with multidrive commands e g DIR or FREE Just in case SWAP CMD has anything to do with it the version I am using is your latest Nov 17 1988 Incidentally I get exactly the same prob lem as with setup 2 if I boot up with setup 1 and from DOS call ALTDISK as drive 4 backup system files to it and then SWAP 0 4 Somehow I have a sneaky feeling there s something I may be overlooking or doing wrong but however much I twist my brain around I just can t put my finger on it One of the beauties of the XLR8er is bundling system and program files up there in RAM and having four physical floppies available for data disks a great advantage to me as I work large data bases So the bootup disk gets removed from drive 4 ex 0 as soon as system setup is comple
142. memory board available from MISOSYS II i 19 XLR8 XLR8 amp 260 1067 s II iv 88 XLR8 XLR8 and Single Density II i 86 XLR8 XLR8 Installation II iii 71 XLR8 XLR8 PRO WAM and low memory squeeze II ii 98 XLR8 XLR8er RAMdrive speedup et al II iv 91 HARDWARE TO ENHANCE THE OPERATION M ISOSYS OF YOUR MODEL 4 XLR8er Hard Drive components TT512P 1200 bps modem for 4P fe 33 Memory expansion amp Sp eedup Upgrade your existing 5Meg drive or build Full AT command set Turn your Model 4 4D 4P into a speed ff anew Expand your PC toan XT with these j Speed up E w your demon By plugging in our XLR8er card_ 4 4 components Model ER 4P s with its Hitachi64180 processorand 256K J 1 seagate ST 225 drive 20 Megabyte commu os nica of expanded memory you get a much 225 5 lbs 7 50 10 50 S amp H tions ca BAY lt 4 pabili faster Model 4 with 8 more banks of 2 WD XTGEN hard drive controller ties with p d the memory Get a 320K RAM disk Or in J Sos OD S 008600SGH Il only full feature stall PRO WAM install a big RAM disk J ps for 1 full or 2 half height 30 07 Qh maser 1200 and still have memory banks available for 125 10 Ibs 13 00 18 00 S amp H baud in lg here i474 3X ternal editing buffers The XLR8er extends the 4 Items 1 amp 2 plus connecting cable set modem oo for your life of your computer and speeds your f 285 6 Ibs 8 50 11 50 S amp H 4P available from MISOSYS
143. n t able to duplicate the problem otherwise It turns out the problem is not just in this version of SWAP but existed in the old SWAP since the release of TRSDOS 6 2 way back in time LSI added a bit in the Drive Control Table which could be used to inhibit the CKDRYV routine that checks for the existence of a diskette Seems that since 6 2 LSI defaults the 0 drive to inhibit CKDRYV I guess because it has to have a disk in there anyway They revised the SYSTEM SYSTEM d library command to re engage the CKDRV test when drive 0 was swapped with another SWAP did not So what happened was when you SWAPped 0 and 4 drive 4 then had to have a disk in it have developed a patch to SWAP which fiddles with the DCT CKDRV bit Actually it didn t matter whether your machine had an XLR8er board or not the problem would always happen if you used SWAP to switch drives 0 and another The patch fixes up the problem I am providing you a paper copy of the patch the enclosed disk has the patch installed as well as includes a revised copy of PDS CMD I am putting your missing DEL CMD on that disk also By the way note from my response to John Coyne that the VERIFY of IFC has nothing to do with the VERIFY facility of the DOS other than having the same name IFC supports a full CRC error checking of the copied file to its source Little Brother Working with the LB beta 1 1 Fm Charles Harris Roy I have been fussi
144. n t realize that international mail is so slow The most recent inquiries came from Europe and Australia Their letters were dated just a week before I received them but each person said he just read the Spring issue of TMQ where my letter appeared The deal that I have offered model 1 owners 1s that they must send a disk and return postage with a mailer to receive a copy of the patches Alternatively they can send 10 and I will supply the disk mailer and postage within the USA Natu rally a combination of both alternatives is welcome In order to use the patches they need copies of LDOS 5 3 Model 3 LDOS 5 1 4 Model 1 and SOLE Another way to get the FIX files for LDOS 5 3 is to log on to one of the bulletin boards that carries TRS LINK magazine The patches are contained in the August and September issues During my recent home search I looked around Sterling among other places for a new home I was impressed with the neigh borhoods and people that I met It must be a wonderful place to live Unfortunately I could not find a home within my price range that would accommodate my fam ily of eight On ANSI and other bugs Charles A Ainsworth P 0 Box 2107 Woodbridge VA 22193 Dear Roy I read with boundless pleasure and the deepest interest Joe s and Jim s sage dissertation on computeristic ento mology in TMQ IIli pages 40 and 41 which greatly enriched my vast and widely acclaimed programming exper
145. n statement The program is written in Model 4 BA SIC I ve already DIMensioned two ar rays and I need to DIMension at least two more Halfway in the program I get an Outof string space statement Do have to free up more memory Would the CLEAR statement work Is there anyway to Un DIMension an array Any help would really be appreciated Fm Daniel L Srebnick Dave The out of string space message indicates that you do need to reserve more string memory using the clear statement Even if you dimension string arrays the space must also be cleared Fm Dave Spiceland Daniel How much room can I or should I clear I ve already got a statement CLEARing 10 000 Is that not enough Can you CLEAR too much Fm Frank Slinkman Dave I don t think it will allow you to clear more than 32767 bytes anyway And if that s not enough perhaps you could set up aRAMDISK file to store the data which would give you 50K Fm Adam Rubin Dave From Radio Shack s Disk System Owner s Manual Appendix E Item 11 You donotneedto allocate string space with the CLEAR statement In Model 4 BASIC all allowable memory is always available for string space so an Out of string space error means your program and your variables take up more memory than Model 4 BASIC can pro vide Here s a few quick suggestions that may help free up some memory 1 If you no longer need an array use the ERASE statement
146. n the disk So it hangs One thing that usually works for me is the following 1 Pull the offending disk out 2 Wait for drive to stoprunning 3 Insert known good disk formatted in appropriate OS format 4 Press SHIFT BREAK to re start the disk motors If the system hasn t crashed the motors will turn on the FDC will see something it can use and disk I O will occur soon after Fm Theodore Masterton Joe Thanks Ever since that 80286 moved into my life I have become so darn impatient HN etree amiamaeanenaiaetatasiel DOS Subjects 18 DOS Subjects Volume II iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume iii Fm Shane Dawalt Roy I thought the disk buffer was page addressed i e modulo 256 It couldn t possibly overflow Fm MISOSYS Inc On page 48 of The SOURCE Volume I I see an INI opera tion That increments the HL register pair Note that an I O buffer need not be on a page boundary but on any contiguous 256 bytes For most programming it is better to origin an I O buffer on a page boundary since buffers are 256 bytes in length and indexing into a buffer can be more easily read that shorter code implying faster done when itis ona page boundary If you look at thatcode you will see that the disk driver reads 256 bytes then loops until the FDC busy bitis dropped But busy doesn t drop if the sector size is greater than 256 If the driver made use of the NMI avail
147. n you read the manual PRO WAM expects its applications to be in WAMx APL and that is where it looks when you use universal Just move your APP s using WAMLIB to your library and they should work fine Alternatively once you install PRO WAM you canuse PRUN to invoke a single application like MED as follows PRUN MED A The A signifies that the application is a single file Fm MISOSYS Inc Pete Just add the APP files toa WAMLIB That will get all of those MrED applications available Fm Pete Granzeau David Light bulb I kept wondering why I couldn t get most of the applications to run They were all in WAMI1 APL I just erased WAMO APL renamed WAMI1 APL added the MrEd stuff and voila Thank you I hadn t figured that out yet Roy needs to draw pictures for people like me in the documentation e g Pro WAM Version 2 0runs applications from alibrary named WAMO APL instead of the individual MISOSYS Products Tidbits 45 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Mii APP files it formerly used possibly as the first sentence in the book Fm David Huelsmann Pete The bad thing is that I have been using PRO WAM for quite a while even upgraded from Pronto andI still couldn tremember that without going back to the manual Fm Pete Granzeau Roy you didn t draw a picture in the manual for dunderheads like me I hadn t figured
148. near the resistor bank R7 between the two chips it is tied to one end of all the resistors in the bank Make a new cable using 34 pin ribbon cable and five 34 pin card edge connec tors Pull no pins anywhere this is the same bus used on the IBM PC and other computers Use the stripe on the cable for pin 1 and read the numbers on the con nectors to match up pin 1 on the FDC board with pin 1 on each of the FD drives I used a 1 4 lb hammer and cardboard to tap the connectors together Tunercleaner on the card edges and in the connectors prevents intermittent problems later do this on ALL card edge connectors Good luck and keep us posted Memory amp HiRes Graphics Fm Timothy Sewell I have a older Non Gate Array Model 4 in which I have recently installed an Alpha Tech memory board that I received from Anitek for review purposes I also have a high reso lution board which I moved via about 5 inches of ribbon cable I have also in stalled a speed up kit from Anitek which brings the computer up to 5 Mhz I am now experiencing problems using the high resolution board Lines don t fill in properly causing painting to bleed all over spots and blotches appear at random when viewing and drawing pic tures Has anybody here encountered this prob lem and does anybody have experience in correcting it I would appreciate all re plies Fm Daniel L Srebnick Timothy I have installed my graphics board in much the
149. nfig response Warning drive con tains no system files User configuration built or once only Illegal drive num ber As it was the system drive that seemed a strange answer also for some reason the hard disc was accessed during the build Checking drive 0 I expected to see the newly created CFG file it was not there instead my config sys file seemed to have been changed The date and time corre sponded to when Doconfig was doing its bit My suspicion was confirmed when I booted the disc with the apparently changed config sys it crashed when the system tried to load the configuration 2 During the brief testing although there was not CFG file on disc I tried DOCONFIG filespec Doconfig response Program not found Internal error The system was now unpredictable and in both cases my config sys is corrupt and the system would crash after rebooting I hope you find this little bit of information some help If you require more detail please let me know and I will be happy to help By the time you receive this letter the festive season will have past but I hope you have had an enjoyable one Fm John Coyne Roy Further to my letter of the 28th December 1988 regard ing the problems with DOCONHIG I have had a look at the code and it appears the gremlins got into the program There appear to be two bugs both in the same area so once the first was found the second one di
150. ng as a beta user with LB and find that normally the PFL file defaults to drive 0 After defining the file format I can send that to any drive I want unless I am using disk DISK or an Alpha board Then every thing seems to default to drive 0 Then to add data I get a message that I must first have the database name and when I do that 1 I get a message data base file missing and then I go in circles The same sort of thing happens when I try to define a screen Hope this is helpful MISOSYS Products Tidbits 44 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume IM iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IT iti Fm MISOSYS Inc Charles This is in response to your letter of December 30th concerning LB 1 1 beta If you have an existing database already defined then just use menu command 14 view modify path settings Specify the drive numbers containing the database screen printer files and what drive you use for the temporary files such as those created as needed during sort select If you are defining a new file the Define file format command will prompt you for the drive numbers similar to the view modify command You will have a problem if you try to first specify command 14 without defining the data base file That s because the define module will then give you an efror mes sage because it thinks the file 1s existing but not available Follow this advise and you will have
151. ng the extra 256K strictly asa RAMDRIVE then you would have no problem because that 256K would never be switched in with interrupts ON But I do recommend moving over to _ Michel s fixes because they take up so much less low memory Also since less twiddling of 64180 ports are performed there would be a very slight improvement in switching speed probably not notice able But these days some folks try to tweak every last cycle out of a CPU Fm Frank Slinkman Gary None of my business but between the latest TMQ and the DiskNotes for same I d say Houde s work is rather well documented Do you have the disk notes disk One publication which will really let you understand what Houde has done is Hitachi s hd64180 Hardware Manual different from the Users boot facility But then Yassume that you Manual which really goes into detail on the really fantastic features of the chip Fm Gary Phillips Frank I have the Hitachi manual and the DiskNotes disk I m still not satisfied with the explana tions and comments which are pretty and have patched my system accordingly Hopefully when the Soltoff Special fi nally becomes a reality the drivers etc for it will be compatible with the Houde code hey that rhymes Fm Roy ios Gary First off you probably didnot utilize the corrected HIBANKS or did not make correc tiong properly The revised HIBANKS do s indeed work gee Also if you obtain the
152. ng the extra 256K strictly as a RAMDRIVE then you would have no problem because that 256K would tiever be switched in with interrupts ON Pa Pa But I do recommend Moving over to Michel s fixes because they take up so I can conveniently dump do disk I look much less low m mory Also since less at what Houde has done as something he did for himself and then did us all the favor of sharing with us Therefore I don t expect the docs and explanations to be the same as if I had paid real for the product I pretty much understand what he s done and why he did it although I have no trouble running at 1 1 80 instead of 1 1 40 twiddling of 64180 ports are performed there wouldbe a very slight improvernent in switching speed probably not notice able But these days some folks try to tweak every last cycle out of a CPU The Hardware Corner 53 The Hardware Corner Volume III iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii EXMEM amp ERAMDISK Fm David Huelsmann Roy I have been trying to install Michael Houde s ERAM DISK software to utilize with my Al phTech 1 meg board and find a problem I can t explain The software installs fine and I can write to the ramdisk OK When I purge or kill a file from the ramdisk a DIR shows all kind of problems showing up A little exploration reveals that the directory HIT sector was written back twice to the
153. ngratula tions by the way First off TMQ I do have some things I am working on or have already fin ished for TMQ They are BANKRES CMD same concept as ALTRES but can load to any bank between 1 127 VDISK DCT an enhanced RAM disk driver that works through EXMEM and allows very flexible configuration and patches to LS DOS 6 3 to integrate XLR8er support eliminating the need for FIXALL and FIXBANK or HIBANKS plus adding your MUL8 MULI6 patches and a few other goodies Also I can under stand you being a bit rushed to get TMQ out the door but the perfect binding on TMQ III i fell a little short of being per fect as the glue is giving out and pages are falling out Do not get the impression that this is a flame I d just like to know if things really were that rushed in June July August Finally you mentioned that TMQ may become TMR What s TMR Secondly I agree with your position re garding LS DOS 6 3 In fact I was hoping that you would put your response into TMQ in the first place for all to see and finally know one way or another Soft ware wise there are no changes other than the enhancements and the serial amp customer service numbers checking which I have no problem with that could amount to hidden code Plus given the various disk formats that 6 3 can be transferred to hardware checking sounds more and more implausible all the time and Model 4 s are no
154. nk makes me happy to have remained a TRS 80 user On another NOTE TANDY has installed MS DOS in ROM chips for some of their new machines That OUGHT to make PATCHING the OPERATING SYSTEM easy Of course AS LIMITED AS THAT SUCKER IS WHO CARES I guess MICROSOFT is MOVIN on to the NEW STUFF Aren t you all glad that ol ROY is still here along with the contributors to the TMQ Recently I purchased another HI RES graphic card and ALL of the associated HI RES software from MICRO LABS Much of the really neat HI RES software is provided on a disk that contains RAPID DOS RAPID DOS is NOT compatible with the XLR8ER card causes COM PUTER LOCKUP and doesn t support MEMDISK in addition to being a VERY WEAK OPERATING SYSTEM Need less to say I only use RAPID DOS for those programs requiring that OP SYS Fortunately I have several make that 6 model 4p s in various configurations so other that the inconvenience of have to use a different machine I can still run the programs The programs which require RAPID DOS are Tournament Chess Backgammon 3D Tic Tac Toe Fractals Reversi 3D Plot Math Plot Life Experi menter Surface Plot and Slide Show m not sure that I have listed them all but you get the idea I suspect that RAPID DOS doesn t use standard calls in order to speed up the computer NO I WON T TRADE MY XLR8ER CARD THANK YOU ANYWAY Now to the good stuff You ll notice that this letter is
155. now how your particular modification works You ll need to write your own version of BANK A copy of The Source would be invaluable for this as it contains the complete commented source code to the current version of BANK along with almostail the rest of TRSDOS 6 2 for the Model 4 You can get a copy from MISOSYS 703 450 4181 Cheap at twice the current price and a lot of copies were sold at a lot more than the current asking price Give them a call to find out the current bargain price for more than eleven hundred pages of beautifully detailed and commented source code Fm Peter Van Caeseele I have written an BANK patch to access the extra memory on the 80 Micro Memory board 256K via port 0 All the tests that I have run pass but I am unable to use any bank higher than 2 standard in 128K for the DOS spooler According to The Source the spooler will support up to bank 7 as is Does anyone have the technical knowl edge to debug the software or have any ideas why it doesn t work I have tested all the BANK functions with my patch and they all work properly The spooler installs properly but leaves the bank requested to spool to resident on exit causing havoc with the high resident inter rupt routines Fm Shane Dawalt Peter Residency of the interrupt routines in bank 0 is gov erned not by what bank is selected but by the interrupt processor or system driver code Whenever these pieces of the DOS are e
156. nswer these questions in the next TMQ I dappreciate it First is itcompatible with my old non gate array Model 4P black and white screen no clustered arrow keys Second can it be mounted internally so I can keep using my Teletrends internal modem Third how much difficulty can I expect booting under LDOS 5 3 with XBOOT The ar ticle in TMQ II 1 suggests even with XBOOT there may still be problems with cold booting LDOS Is this true and if so how bad are the problems Also I often go from Model 4 mode to Model III mode and back Is it true that I should experi ence no trouble booting LDOS this way Finally I ve reviewed every TMQ article I could find about the XLR8er and am somewhat confused about the extent of problems incompatibilities need for patches to its software or to other pro grams etc If you or some other knowl edgeable individual could summarize pros and cons of using this board with a list of all known required patches you might do a great service for many of your readers I m particularly concerned about LE SCRIPT and PROFILE 4 I know these are not well behaved programs and I might be willing to give up LE SCRIPT to get the benefits of the XLR8er However I like PROFILE and want to keep using it It does everything I want very well and I have alotof data committed to it I would like to find the patch to EPC9 CMD mentioned on page 72 of TMQ II 1 If you or a TMQ reader can furnish this o
157. nt that the low level format be applied with the drive in its final resting place and conditions includ ing temperature for the same reasons had poor experiences with the Western Digital RLL controller I do use an Adaptec RLL on my Seagate ST277R with no problem however The Seagate drives are the most reliable around so perhaps the problem is in the controller Fm Daniel L Srebnick Joe do you really consider the WDs to be better than the Adaptec My experiences have been just the opposite In fact even the ROM low level formatting s w in the WD board is a lot flakier than the Adaptec The WD rom plays all kinds of games with the cyl counts to adjust for RLL whereas the Adaptec does not 7 Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo The WDs are only better than the original awful Adaptec I believe it was the 2070A or some such That controller combined with the Seagate ST238 did much damage to the reputation of RLL Newer Adaptec controllers are great like the 16bit 2372 for AT use and I believe the newer 8bit 2072 for XT use these are better and certainly more available than the equiva lent WD product for the AT at least the WD1006 RA2 The WD 27X sector trans lation can and should be disabled witha single jumper Fm Shane Dawalt Daniel They ve al ready swapped a controller board They even went so far as to place the board in different slots to check the edgecard con nectors Still the same problem persists H
158. ntage of the HD64180 s internal Programmable Re loadable Timer so those with stock M4 s will have to modify itby writing your own delay loops to wait the correct intervals between samples Other than that the concepts are very straightforward Fm Dave Spiceland Frank Glad to see someone is working on graphics for the Model 4 I m too busy working on my graduate program to do much with my computer but write papers By the way have you ever finished a GIF decoding program I think you said some time ago that you had been working on it Fm Frank Slinkman Dave After I fix up my SLOTMOD4 program so it ll ac commodate RS graphics boards which I have just learned run at about 40 of the speed of uLabs boards in this particular application the GIF decoder is the next project especially now that I have a source of graphics to want to transmit Fm Doug Mayfield Frank I also would The Hardware Corner 55 The Hardware Corner Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti be interested when you get a GIF decoder running There are a lot of great graphics out there that we just can t see on our poor model 4 s Fm Frank Slinkman It s on the list P1 brag about it on the forum if lt hopefully when gt I get one working Fm Joe Kyle DiPietraopola Ooh neat Those are sorta like the old drum style fax machines right Fm Frank Slinkman Right that s what
159. nyway as soon as I get it Lots of itis fascinating and much of it helpful Was reading about the Model 4 speedup Ihave one GATE ARRAY machine with Alpha Tech s now Anitek Megabyte of memory installed Have yet to actually measure the clock speed but expect it to be the usual 3 3 Mhz Have heard there is a way to jumper the clock to the RS 232 clock at 5 Mhz Don t have all the de tailed pin numbers yet but trying to find a schematic to figure it out I ve been told that it won t boot at that speed and won der why Just installed the Megabyte of memory in my other NON GATE ARRAY Model 4 along with their SMhz speedup kit new U3 PAL and anew ZOOB It runs at 4 6 MHz Tried lifting pin 7 of U3 PAL but still 4 6 MHz Understand the Model 4 doesn t need the WAIT states whatever they are Also read somewhere 1st article about speedup in TMQ that the newer PAL chip at U3 was designed around it Perhaps my new speedup PAL has been but why not the full 5 0 MHz yet By the way while trying to go to 128K from 64K I had great problems with garbage every time I put RAM in the 2nd row of sockets Finally traced it to an unsoldered resistor joint way down in the comer under the RAM sockets at R210 and 211 A touch of solder and it works great Those joints were never soldered Might pass this Along for others having problems with RAM installations Can I get some Clarification on the speedup picture F
160. o Shack Model 4 Fortran they might as well not bother trying to get one from Tandy I have called Express Order and was told it is no longer avail able I think the only way to getitnow will be to try and buy a used copy of it I noticed you are now selling the Tele Trends modem for the 4P This is a super product I ve had mine for a little over a year and really like it A little word of warning for your readers who after reading your article in TMQ The Hardware Corner 50 The Hardware Corner Volume II iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume I 111 VIII 11 on adding drives to a Model 4 are ready to use an 80 track drive as drive 0 If they use an 80 track drive for drive 0 any self booting disks they have such as Super Utility Copy Cat or many games disks will be unusable in this computer As far as your hard disk project goes I was glad to hear you are proceeding with it I already have a Radio Shack 5 meg drive with a 10 meg bubble installed but there is a definite possibility I will be interested in purchasing one of yours While on the issue of hard drives do you or any of your readers know if the Bi Tech Multiplexor is compatible with the Radio Shack hard drive Will your hard drive be compatible with the Multiplexor If you know of anyone who wants to use a Radio Shack Hard Drive with a Model 1 they can try to order a Model 1 Hard Disk Adapter catalog number 26 1132 39 95
161. o floppy action on power up Probably these points would not trouble an experi enced hardware hacker for a moment but they cause confusion to the rest of us Finally another suggestion for a product I would be willing to buy It came to my mind when I read about your hard disk package using an adapter that makes it possible to connect an IBM PC controller and hard disk drive to a TRS 80 Could the same system be used to bring color graphics to the TRS 80 by means of an adapter to any of the IBM graphic cards CGA EGA Fm MISOSYS Inc Hans I had been advised by some folks that the 74LS245 chip was not socketed in the 4P mother board thus we stopped supplying the replacement chip to save the cost when the slower chip couldn t be removed Apparently that is not the case with all 4P boards It may be far simpler to just get the chip locally as it only costs about 1 I don t think there is anything special between the MicroLabs graphics board and the Tandy board But they both do cover up the Z80 chip You re right about the 4P instructions though I may have to work up an addendum to clearly address all of the disassembly issues of the 4P But I don t think that screw with the ground ing strap needs to be removed it doesn t hold down the clam assembly You only have 4 screws on each side But you do have to unscrew the top plate and remove it The instructions omitted that part The Hardware Corner
162. o on Since I assume there s no extra charge for wishes grin here is another wish That IFC be able to handle SYS SYS files in addition to invisible ones accessible from the command Or perhaps the No No on COPYing system files rules out such a possibility Fm Charles A Ainsworth Supplement ing my previous letter re problems with drive 4 ex 0 acting up and freezing the computer I have managed to make a few additional tests You will recall that the problem originates when drives zero and 4 are interchanged with SWAP CMD I tried all setups by avoiding SWAP and using instead SYSTEM SYSTEMS 4 and things worked as they should and drive 4 ex 0 operated correctly and was recognized by the system either with a disk or without and without freezing the computer This might indicate some bug in SWAP Of course avoiding SWAP forces one to interchange drive designations as the very last item of a JCL which aborts after a changeover with SYSTEM SYSTEM n so the use of SWAP has many advantages for me which I would dislike to lose Fm MISOSYS Inc Charles This is in response to your letters of December 16th with the follow up dated the 20th that s the one that gave me the real insight I have a solution to the first problem After duplicating your startup scenario on my 4P without the hard drive I experi enced the same problem as you did Note that no machine here operates without a hard drive so I was
163. odel 4 Model 5 I know there are other Rev A boards out there craving to run faster and this might just be the ticket since I understand the XLR8 won t goon a Rev A It s certainly cheaper but you don t get a 256K ram disk Now for three questions note SASE 1 Where can I get instructions for adding Radio Shack s SmartWatch to my 4 In TMQ III i page 70 Dave Krebs mentions he has done it If you could put me in touch with him I would appreciate it 2 What BBS do you get the TMQ material from and how can I subscribe 3 Where can I get the Alpha memory board with patches for 6 3 I have only seen refer ences to it but no advertisements Fm MISOSYS Inc SmartWatch infor mation is on our LDOS forum on Com puServe PCS 49 I believe that Duane Saylor originally developed the installa tion procedure as well as the software interface which is shareware The Alpha Technology memory board is available from Anitek publisher of LeScript patches are available from us in Disk Notes 6 10 S amp H And the XLR8er will work in some old Rev A Model 4s It s just that we cannot say that it will work in every one gt Can A IID Is it Spring yet The Hardware Corner 59 The Hardware Corner Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iii 3 5 Drive 3 5 Floppy Drive for Model 4 II iii 81 3 5 Drive 3 5 floppy drives on MS DOS Ir iv 35 3 5 Drive C
164. odel 4 into a sophisticated business or personal machine rivaling the best of them Because easily installed PRO WAM comes with 1 many useful and powerful menu driven time savers and work organizers PRO WAM is accessed with a single keystroke its export and import functions allow you to move data across windows between programs Address CARDS LABELS and new HEADINGS for display and export Improved BRINGUP tickler file new PRINTING and sorting Improved CALENDAR flags BRINGUP items visually on screen Ten 3 x 5 CARD files with FORMS and FIELDS using reverse video New virtual PHRASE access for export New TODO list manager with who does it Plus many other vital applications YOUR TRS 80 MODEL 4 MISOSYS has been supplying the TRS 80 community with profes sional quality software since 1978 that s over nine years of experi ence captured in a host of other software products ranging from language compilers and assem blers fine crafted utilities other application software and operat ing systems We also publish a magazine THE MISOSYS QUAR TERLY which is available on a subscription basis for just 25 per year in the U S Call or write us for a catalog of our complete product line Vv AN LB L 50 510 Now activate PRO WAM from newly compiled LB beta release hardware restrictions apply M C and VISA accepted LB Data Manager A flexible data manager LB is easily used by anyone for
165. olume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume M i Do it Again You can reuse the routine in lines 14 17 in the same program Line 18 would reset US 9 to 11 or however many elements after US 8 need to be changed For example let s find the routine FLASH Line 18 would be US 9 19526 US 10 21313 US 11 72 I terminated FLASH With a 00 fol lowed by X VARPTR US 0 CALL X X FLASH X You can do it as many times as you need in the same program And since you can wipe out arrays in BASIC under LDOS TRSDOS 6 X you can ERASE US when you re done to reclaim its space and have the addresses of your routines in the integers INK Y4 and FLASH and whatever else Be sure to put x VARPTR US Q be fore each CALL X BASIC moves things around dynamically and the address of US O might change between calls to X And be absolutely certain that X is an integer I can promise you from experi ence that you will not like the results if X is not an integer That s all there is to it Simply MERGE lines 14 17 with your BASIC program then remove the last three integers and replace them with the name of the high memory routine you are looking for ay r e Look at those listings Applications for the User 37 Applications for the User Volume ITI ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II iti DiskDISK diskDISK hard drive parti tioning Fm R H Holl
166. om BASIC or from ALLWRITE I fully realize that this may be quite a toughie to run down to earth I have thought that perhaps somewhere something is getting into RAM that shouldn t be there For years I have been using a power strip that powers up the computer my four all external floppy drives and the printer The computer is powered from the strip outlet marked CPU and the printer from one marked Peripherals I am also wondering whether there may be any possibility of inductive kickbacks between printer and computer at the moment of powering up After all the sage advice in hardware suppliers manuals one is left guessing as to just what s right and what s wrong Many perhaps Tandy them selves may tell you to power up peripher als first and then the computer but then they cheerfully sell a power strip for switch ing everything on together Ah well I never had this problem with 4s running in their native 4 MHz mode but only on 4s equipped with the XLR8er My main purpose in writing is to ask you if you know or have heard of such a thing and if so if you could point me in the right direction Meanwhile I am experiment ing along the lines of my suspected kick backs between printer and computer at power up I plan to doit the following way which has just occurred to me At power down leave the printer and drives on cut the computer at its own power switch then cut offat the power strip m
167. on is a carriage return this assumes that the printer will automatically perform a line feed on carriage return FORMS sends a CR when a CR is PUT unless the line counter is zero at which time it sends a LF That works the same even if you didn t have FORMS installed I don t suspect RAM as the problem Ido suspect corruption of the data So check your printer manual for left margin program mability That s a start Also check your printouts for any other garble espe cially after a carriage return N eed tor SYSTEM SMOOTH Fm Elain Hewitt I am writing to you as I don t know who else to turn to I have purchased a copy of LS DOS 06 03 00 for my Model 4 computer Everything was working fine with LS DOS and my Model 4 until one of my disk drives died I replaced it with a Tandon TM100 2A so that I could have a double sided drive 1 also replaced the drive connector as the original connector would not let me ac cess both sides of the drive After I installed the new drive as Drive 1 I noticed that frequently when I want to access Drive 1 the computer would hang up for several seconds sometimes up to 30 seconds or longer The drive light would stay on and the head would not jerk but just sit there Thinking there must be something wrong with my new drive I took it to a technician who checked it over and said it was in excellent shape I then noticed that if I used the command SYSTEM SMOOTH the problem
168. oppies to the control ler thereby gaining a slot The board is also used to power and control an external tape drive The Jumbo easily converts from an internal unit to an external unit with an available drive housing When the new 300 foot DC2000 cartridge is available the capacity jumps to 60 Meg It s 1989 floppies are out tape drives are in DJ10 Jumbo 5S amp H R TD D10 295 AB10 Tape Adaptor R TD A10 75 3S amp H DC2000 cartridge R DC 02K 22 50 2S amp H AB 25 Switchbox I don t normally carry the DB25 type _ switchbox but I made a small purchase at a special price We have a small handful of these boxes in stock that can be used to switch your serial port between two de vices The box terminates in female DB 25 connectors 25 4 50 S amp H gets you one Family Update by Roy I cannot close without saying a few words about the family I ll keep itto aminimum because I am once again going to try printing some scanned photos of the kids Aside from the bout of flu we re all coming along nicely The three little ones who are no longer little are growing fast Benjamin is crawling standing while holding on to objects and moving about theroom and just started climbing steps He s going to take after Stacey when it comes fo steps Stacey broke 50 pounds not too long ago But she still has not yet decided what hand is to be her dominant hand Brenda and I are now st
169. or M4 just can t keep up with the rate data is trans mitted on TV Fortunately about the same time as I threw in the towel on TRS 80 TV I fell heir to an old Xerox Telecopier which was about to be thrown out Since this machine only scans 26 25 per sec ond the data rate is a bit more manage able to say the least The Telecopier serves reasonably well as a scanner The horizontal 8 5 dimen sion sample rate and therefore resolu tion can be just about anything you want it to be The vertical resolution for these machines is either 64 or 96 lines per inch I ve found that 240 x 96 dpi resolution gives very readable character images of all but the smallest type faces so the next challenge is to teach my Mod 4 to read For those who are interested I have uploaded CATBUG RLE to the LDOS Compuserve Forum PCS49 a scanned image of one of my 8 year old daughter s drawings It not only shows what a super cheap scanner about 20 worth of parts for the board can do but displays the work of a very talented young artist You ll need an RLE decoder such as GUTIL CMD which you can find in one of this SIG s libraries or M4RLE CMD and PM4RLE CMD which you can find in the Encoder Decoder library over in the graphics forum GO PICS If any of you can scrounge up an old Telecopier I will be happy to supply you with a schematic of the board and some assembly language software to make it work My software takes adva
170. ording to this manual I must replace it by the 74HCT245 chip provided with the XLR er kit but I cannot find this chip except on the XLR8er board itself Is the manual wrong here or was this chip missing from the kit Do you sell any documentation about the HD64180 instruction set like the Techni cal Data Book mentioned in the installa tion manual I would like to construct some macros for EDAS MRAS to use the new instructions My model 4P is equipped with a Radio Shack high resolution board Although an appendix of the installation manual is called Use with Graphics Boards it only discusses the Micro Labs board Is there anything special I should do Ihave found some points where the instal lation manual is not clear maybe some thing for TMQ When I had my 4P open I could not find the Z80 until I found it hidden by what I assume to be the graph ics board connected to the J7 connector According to the disassembly instructions for the 4P in the installation manual 4 screws on each side of the pan assembly must be removed in order to install it I discovered that on one side also a screw connecting a grounding strap from the keyboard had to be removed before the pan assembly could be pried open I dis covered also that it is very easy to discon nect the dark brown power connectors at the comer below the power switch by accident when the pan assembly isopened or closed The symptoms blank screen n
171. orth in two days ata maximum Having developed the code I can simply use it There is no need for me to know how the Multi Tasking is being performed This information is hidden To do the same in C would require a savage re write of the C base program This could take up to several months if itis a good C system A final note on this is a recommendation of a good book for anyone wishing to learn FORTH my suggestion is Starting Forth by Leo Brodie Prentice Hall 1981 I would also suggest contacting FIG Forth Interest Group Since writing this I have received a copy of Pro HartFORTH This is a Forth pack age for the Model 4 HartFORTH is a Model I II version From first impres sion this appears to be a good healthy Forth package There are however three things wrong with it in my view a it is a 79 standard system I would have liked it to be an 83 standard b I would like to have some form of multi tasking and easy access to the extra memory and c the lack of an assembler will make fine tuning very difficult maybe to a state that I won t bother These are three faults that are fixable Indeed I might even give them a go myself However all in all this is a very good Forth package Now we come on to the interesting bit I am currently involved with developing an Object Oriented system in Forth This can be a relatively simple problem or a difficult one dependent on how you view objects and what
172. ovide command editing MEMDIR to get amemory directory PaDS for the provi sion of Partitioned Data Sets PARMDIR to obtain parameterized directory informatio for listings and Job Control Language processing SWAP to switch drive assign ments WC for wild card command invoca tion and ZSHELL to provide command ling I O redirection piping and multiple com mands on a line All documentation has bee revised and is printed in a convenient 5 5 b 8 5 format Order M 33 200 for 59 95 Rent this space 20 Rent this space 20 The Marketplace 70 The Marketplace MISOSYS Inc YN PO Box 239 Jam Sterling VA 22170 0239 Contents Printed Matter Attention Postmaster Address Correction Requested Forwarding and Return Postage Guaranteed BULK RATE U S POSTAGE PAID Sterling VA PERMIT NO 74
173. port Must be that the darn disk was formatted MSDOS instead of TRSDOS I got alotof M word disks around these days Anyway drive 1 spun and spun and sweat beaded up on my brow I snapped open the drive door to try to geta LSDOS disk in the drive no luck It timed out and I could not get the machine to do anything At last I just turned it off and then home The request went in late The new Unix 80386 multi user system may be nought but a fleeting fantasy This is something I have lived with be fore the problem has never by so dra matic in effect What happened What should I have done to assure that no lock up occurred Is this perhaps a patchable problem Fm MISOSYS Inc MS DOS disks use 512 byte sectors The LS DOS disk driver is designed to not time out on an ything past 256 byte sectors The system would generally crash anyway if it did read it since the 256 byte buffer would be over written Your best bet would be to make sure all of your disks are labeled As another method consider using a particu lar COLOR of diskette for one environ ment That s a good reason to consider Centa Technology diskettes in a rainbow of colors available Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Theodore What you did wrong is to yank the disk out If you have left it you would have eventually gotten control back with a disk error Fm Shane Dawalt Theodore Sometimes the floppy disk controller chip gets screwed up by certain patterns o
174. r 1988 89 Volume IT i11 Multiplan recalculation Fm Gary Phillips Using Multiplan on a model 4 has generated a couple of ques tions for me The program comes up by default with the automatic recalculation option setto YES Since recalculation can take a lot of time it s a nuisance to forget to reset this option to NO before loading a spreadsheet to revise a few figures Has anyone figured out a zap to cause this option to default to NO Probably a one byte change but finding the spot would be the drag Also with version 1 07 which uses the alternate 64K memory for larger spread sheets everything runs much SLOWER Since I don t need that extra space I use BANKER or turn the spooler on before starting MP to force it to stay in the base 64K of memory Interestingly enough I ve noticed that even though MP reports that the extra memory is not available it will put a reserve on any bank that is not in use It leaves this reserve active even after it exits Now that qualifies as a lt bug gt in my opinion If allowed to use both banks then MP does release them when it ends If I need those banks later for use with SAID for instance I have to use BANKER to free them up Anyone else notice this Maybe I should be using version 1 06 to avoid these problems Left Margin Printer problems Roy I am sending you three printouts Number one is the directory of my distri bution XLR8er disk updated by you re cen
175. r help me find it I d appreciate it Perhaps you could print this request in TMQ Thanks for your help and for continuing to support the TRS 80 Fm MISOSYS Inc The LDOS software interface disk available with the XLR8er provides a program to allow easy booting of a Model III disk when up in Model 4 mode That probably is 100 reliable as it does the loading of the BOOT ROM image file So going back and forth would be relatively painless I think it would be rather difficult to Summarize the pros and cons of the XLR8er as the only problems appear in machines that the XLR8er has not worked in Since that doesn tinclude any particular model its best to just try it out if you have the interest As with all add ons it is always best to operate on areplaceable set of data until you can assure the reliability of the equipment after making a major change such as an XLR8er addition The XLR amp 8er should work with your 4P Check out the next letter concerning the use of it with a TeleTrends TT512P modem installed note that MISOSYS has taken over that modem and is manufacturing it now Fm Scott Toenniessen Roy I would like to personally thank Michel Houde for supplying the XLR8er software interface which was printed in the TMQ VHL ii I am not yet using this interface but am eagerly waiting for interface disk upgrade you offered to arrive For your readers who use a 4P and an XLR amp er like myself it is possible
176. r hits your hard drive Curtis Clip TMQ Giveaway Forget about every other copy holder you have ever seen The new Curtis Clip is it This low cost 6 95 list device easily attaches to either side of your monitor with a Velcro fastening strip included with the clip When you re not using it you just swing it back against the side of the monitor Works just dandy with a Model 4 case I have about 100 of these clips to give away as the TMQ coupon special Here s the deal The TMQ coupon in this issue returned along with an order for MISOSYS product in excess of 50 gets you a free Curtis Clip while supplies last Replacement ROMC I received an inquiry from a party associ ated with the TRS 80 concerning the availability of areplacement ROMC Let me know if you are interested in a re placement ROMC for your desktop Model The Blurb 2 The Blurb nn mt nn rn a re te es Be Volume II in THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume III iti 4 or 4D which would among other small features permit booting directly off of a Tandy hard drive and would permit re placement of the firmware driven CRT controller with a fully programmable one Let me know interest and what you would be willing to pay The ROM is already available The degree of interest is needed before I can commit to handling it Input please BBS and Clubs As reported in my last issue I d like to set aside some space in TMQ as
177. r with how to get around them when they occur Perhaps the per fect program should have sufficient ON ERROR GOTO traps to cover them all Volume I1 ii The problem is that it isn t always easy to foresee all possible errors and that even if one did the program would perhaps be come so cluttered with error traps it would be hard to read or revise I tried it once and on a 300 line program had to add about 80 lines of error trapping But there is an easy way the wideawake interpretive Basic programmer operator can use when an error doesn t have a trap When Basic jumps out of a program due to an error one can pull out a hard copy of the program and after a little pondering issue instructions to Basic from the key board to solve the problem For instance in the case of one of those data bases if the program is saving to drive 1 and there is an error such as a floppy drive left inadvertently unlatched or a disk fault when the program stops and reports an error the operator can take stock of the situation if the drive was left unlatched it s a simple matter to latch it and tell Basic to GOTO a certain line where the save to that drive begins If it was an I O error perhaps due to a bad disk the opera tor may decide to bypass the save to drive 1 and tell Basic to close the file and GOTO the line for initiating the save to drive 2 then terminate the run normally and backup as necessary to get the mate rial onto the
178. rce code I had available a public domain listing of GREP from DECUS DEC users group anda 16 bit CCITT Cyclic Redun dancy Check algorithm used in Kermit To create the CRC program I deleted the kernel from the GREP source leaving me with a shell to process switches display usage information and handle filename arguments The Kermit CRC algorithm was put in this shell of course adjusted from 7 bit to 8 bit characters The result ran almost at once The check sum was calculated and displayed but the Applications for the User Applications for the User Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 switches behaved strangely A hint for everyone who compiles public domain C source code with MC if the program does not run properly try to relink using MLINK s initialize to zero switch If that solves the problem you must look for uninitialized variables In this case the switches were not properly initialized When this problem was solved I added some improvements an option to count bytes and to display the CRC value also in hexadecimal Thanks to the wildcard option in MC it was easy to add support for wildcard filenames The current version of CRC will compile with MC without problems The initial ize to zero switch is no longer necessary with MLINK The special options for the MC compiler are enclosed in an ifdef MISOSYS block so do not forget to define MISOSYS when you recompile
179. re the DI is processed So if you try to read that MS DOS 512 byte sector the driver will experience infinite retry Thus even if it is possible that the data transfer READ request is completed by the lost data error and drop of the busy bit the disk driver will just blindly go and issue that same read request again There is no way to recover from that If this is a problem with you what you can do is alter the disk driver to not timeout on lost data errors But you best not have drives too closely aligned to 300 rpm or you will be subject to a great deal of lost data errors Perhaps in that case turning SMOOTH on would be the salvation I still think the best overall solution is to color code your disks from alien sys tems to avoid mixing them in with your Model 4 disks Then you can get the best performance from your DOS If you want it to be fail safe against all alien media then it will take a larger floppy driver less available user space and a slower overall system As a for instance if the floppy driver always tested the media by issuing a read header FDC function it could then check the sector header data read to ensure that the sector size was 256 bytes Convert 4 to 3 Fm Dayton Sumner The documentation that came with my Model 4 D told how Trs Dos 6 2 could convert a Mod 4 file to Mod 3 by formatting a 35 track pseudo Mod 1 disk and then using the Mod 3 CONVERT utility to translate it I ve
180. rmat and backup in drive 0 Fm Joe Kyle DiPietraopola Peter The tech doesn t know what they are doing Keep taking it back and have them re do it for no charge For labor anyway they may try to charge you for any parts they didn t replace the first time around you shouldn t pay if they are admit to re placing the same part more than once Most likely cause is the head load pad or load pad compliance is bad fixable followed by low head amplitude not fix able or at least cheaper to get a new drive It is not an alignment problem though the alignment should be checked after the actual problem is fixed Fm Shane Dawalt Peter I had the same problem a year ago Drive 1 too After the 3rd return trip they were ready to make me pay the 100 for a new drive That s when I quit taking the entire ma chine to RS repair I opened the drive up to take a looksee and found the head bearings were warped Never have gotten it fixed Actually it needs to be replaced 4P boot problem Fm Mark Honeycutt I have a 4P that will only boot in Model 3 mode which works fine If the machine is booted under 6 x or CP M drive 0 runs for about two seconds and then stops I had a similar problem with a4 a few years ago that was from what I could pry from the service tech a minor adjustment and possibly a bad chip This cost me around one hundred bucks and if possible I would like to fix this one myself I have a decent sol
181. rth all requests and contributions be directed directly to him at DISK NOTES 3 3 Each issue of THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY contains program listings patch listings and other references to files we have placed onto a disk DISK NOTES 3 3 corresponds to this issue of TMQ If you want to obtain all of the patches and all of the listings you may conveniently pur chase a copy DISK NOTES is priced at 10 Plus S amp H The S amp H charges are 2 for US Canada and Mexico 3 elsewhere If you pur chase DISK NOTES 3 2 with the coupon which accompanies this TMQ issue you can save 2 50 the cost then being only 7 50 S amp H Out of print TMQ s available For out of print issues we are providing back issues of THE MISOSYS QUAR TERLY via copier reprint The price is 12 50 plus 2 75 S amp H in the U S and CANADA For foreign zone D the S amp H rate is 5 50 zone E is 6 50 The price for regular back issues still in print is 10 S amp H We are currently out of print on all issues except Iiii IHi and Il ii Here s a synopsis of past issues Volume See the index in issue H i Volume II See the index in issue IfL iti this issue OLi Reading NEWDOS 80 disks An LB archival utility Popup Application Window XMODEM in C Getting into computer math part I TMQ Volume I index Mii Getting into computer math Part 2 Writing interactive RATFOR FORTRAN programs PRO EnhComp a review Desktop pub lishing and
182. rts to conjure up Perhaps the Sorcerer s Apprentice at the NATGUG wizards meeting place TMQ IIL ii page 64 the one located in a remote realm beyond parsecs of Atlantic billows may pity us and care to contribute some helpful and valuable assistance oreven perhaps plead imploringly on our behalf with the great and powerful Sorcerer himself for po tions spells charms talismans amulets or other forms of potent magic to rid long suffering programmers of such an obnox ious scourge Words from Michel Houd Fm Michel Houde Dear Roy I was very proud to see my name printed so many times in the latest TMQ I am really pleased to know that I have been able to bring help to a few people As you probably already know there are two errors in the XLBOOTA FIX patch as printed page 80 As it is mandatory to use O N when applying the patch I did not notice it The find lines were in cluded as documentation and are not necessary The origin of the error is the offset between sector numbering and memory pages as I mentioned I used FED APP to generate hex pairs Now I would like to make things clear about French arithmetics 512 divided by 32 equals 16 not 8 as I wrote page 78 2nd column 2nd paragraph I actually meant 256 divided by 32 equals 8 as everyone guessed I must confess that there is a minor cos metic bugin ERAMDISK When optional parameter VERIFY is invoked and a memory error is found ERAMDISK
183. ryover And yes I guess that f06 d6 should be a f04 d6 P11 double check the source Fm Fred Oberding Roy Ref XLB OOTA FIX in TMQ 3 2 there appears to be a couple of oddities In the second line the d04 c9 patch appears to be arewrite of the first line of the MLT1 FIX in TMQ 2 3 is that correct In the fourth line there is a period in front of the d04 d6 patch implying an optional patch but I can t find any expla nation in the text In the fifth line the find line for the above patch starts out as f06 d6 It should be f04 d6 but there is no such hex string anywhere in BOOT SYS However if f04 d6 7b c9 is substituted for f06 d6 30 03 the rest of the find line would be correct at least for my version of BOOT SYS I thought I would try out these new patches but since I m running withoutany glitches using Rex Basham s revised HIBANKS from TMQ 2 4 at 0 1 80 I will wait for your reply before trying them By the way since I have a gate array 4 amp R S Hires board my XLR8er is mounted on standoffs behind the main logic board amp I have routed the cable to the left instead of over the top as the instructions state Makes a neater installation and the cable can be cut down an inch or so Fm MISOSYS Inc Remove the period Change the 06 to a f04 The MLT patches are part of the fixes Thanks for the info on the re routed location of the XLR8er in a gat
184. s A Ainsworth Special characters Tape recorder access What board is best XLR8 or Alpha Tech Megamem Keyboard External Floppy A Model I 5 3 by T J Hodges LDOS 5 1 4 DATEFIX LDOS problems with date and some history of DOS Model I drive speed Model I Harddisk Speedup ref LDOS Quarterly Vol 2 1 Jan 1 Daas The last word on Model I LDOS 5 3 What do we do after 31st December 1987 HEADLINE DVR by Hans de Wolf Special Character Mode Update on 50Hz FDC Alignment Some choices Magnavox vs Sony RADIX doesn t work as expected DS defined space Fix a longstanding bug in FIXUP CMD MLINK and IRL libraries MRAS and PRO WAM APPs 65 Volume IIL iii II i II iv IL 1i TL AL It i II i II iv II iv II iv II iv II i1i IL 21 II iii II i II i IL A II iv II iv II iv IL 2 II iii It iii IIT ii1 Pie 2 II i II i II i II iii II i II iii II iii pO ae Ba eB IIT iii II iv II iv II iv II iv II iv II iv II iv II iii II 1 II i Ir iii II iii II i II ii II iii II iv II i II i Ir iii II iii II ii II iii IL A II ii II iii 58 a Index to Volume IT Volume iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 MRAS MRAS MRAS MRAS MRAS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS DOS MS
185. s out of the original HI Tech docs If only all your products came documented in this format I hadn t heard of your hard drive project until I got TMQ 3 1 Just letting you know I d be first in line to buy one or two IF I could stuff it inside my 4Ds If any of your other readers are looking for ideas for new LSDOS hacking proj ects I have two that are beyond my pro gramming capabilities 1 A DoubleDuty like program that is capable of using multiple banks of the XLR8er Asa bonus it might even use less high memory than DoubleDuty Am I dreaming or what 2 A new HELP CMD that runs in the _ library overlay region Such a HELP could be invoked inside an application via PRO WAM I get by for now by using Dou bleDuty to do this but it takes up high mem and an entire external bank of RAM Using the overlay region seems a more elegant approach if it would fit the bank Update on Model I LDOS 5 3 Fm T J Hodges Roy Please change my address in your files I am moving to a new home in mid December 1988 My new address is For your information I ve included my current address label I am the person that wrote to you about Model 1 modifications for LDOS 5 3 To date I have received about two dozen requests for my FIX files Since I am moving I would appreciate itif you would put my address in the next issue of TMQ Only the people I ve dealt with recently are aware of the address change I did
186. s terminal and or hideously DOS Subjects 20 DOS Subjects Volume IIL iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume II 1ii expensive and screwed it all back to gether and gave it back to me It has worked perfectly ever since My bet is that the folks who gently insisted that the cable connections were the problem were probably right Anyway since then purchased my 80286 and started a slow and loving migration of applications to MSDOS I still use the 4p 15meg for about 1 4 of my work During this transition I have been noticing not how fast the 80286 was but how SLOW the 4p seemed to become For weeks I have been chuckling about Subjective Experience of Performance and Relative Time until finally last night I decided the disk access on the 4p 15meg was Just Too Slow So out with the stopwatch and some floppies Sun of a Gun Using Monte Micro CP M several of my favorite applications are taking 10 more time to draw files of floppies than off the Hard Disk The drive just seems lazy nota bit erratic and there are NO errors and no inconsistencies Just a BEEP BEEP pausepause pause pause BEEP BEEP etc kind of read Any thoughts Could it be as simple as needing a Defragment Or is this again the Voice of Hardware Doom whispering to me on a cold December Night Fm Bernie Skoch Theodore If it were me ld do a reformat and see what hap pens Help DOS error Fm Michael Dauphin I Hav
187. sited CL access from C A rename function in C A word about MC Release 1 6 BAD BLOCK in PRO MC compiled programs Beware of function library organisation Bug in M80 H header file C has no NULL expressions C vs BASIC floating point data Checking input availability Class conversions in C dfix revisited Does DFIX need fixing Here s CTERM A simple Terminal Program in C Here s more on opening the PR device Here s some more on extern d identifiers Hi Res Graphics for MC with a GRPLIB Interface Is an MC86 in the works Keyboard echo Making smaller object files MC and portability of C source MCOPT optimiser Memory space and MC MV Library update Obtaining raw mode On converting doubles to ints 64 Volume I i IT iii IIT iii IT 434 IIT iv II iii II iii II ii II iii II iii II iii TIo ai IL 25 II iii IIl 121 TI iv IIs IT 2i Ir ii II iv II iii II ii II i II iv ITIL 111 II ii II i II iii Ir iii II iv II iv Ir 1 IL Il 2 Ti i TI i II iii Lis 2i II ii II iv IIT i II iv IZ iii TT II iv IT iii II i II i iL 2 TI A1 IL 11 II iii TL 3 Trn a II iii IIT ii Lo 14 II iv IIL ii Index to Volume II Volume IIL iti MC MC MC MC MC MED Micro Labs Microsoft WORD MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS MISOSYS Model Model Model
188. source to Michel s fixes availabl on either the appropriate DISK NOTES or I believe the revised Mod4 interface disk you will observe with clarity what Michel s patches are doing It would help to have a copy of THE SOURCE as that is the bible for Michael did in patching the DOS His patches were also modeled after those that I publish d quite some time ago for the Alpha Technology memory board at least as far as interfacing to add additional memory banks a SS Yes you would have to redo your driver understand those patches with the clarity you find missing from the new XLR8er lt software interface A Running FIXBANKS without FIXALL will cause problems with things such as runing the SPOOLER in on of the weak by my own standards And I really XLR8er banks or swapping text banks am a system programmer with years of experience In any case it still wouldn t 3 10 while in SAID or any background operation with the extended memory banks Ny a NS Mea ws IN A resolve the problem that Houde s patches when interrupts are not disabled by the a conflict with those I already have in place to allow me to boot directly from the hard disk Fm Frank Slinkman Gary Sorry I for got about the hard disk aspect I m still waiting for the Soltoff Special living with the fact that I ve got more core than application or module switching the banks If you are usi
189. t BREAK gt work then I placed a MSDOS formatted disk in my M4 I requested a directory I heard the head be moved to the alleged directory track then moved back to track 0 and back to the directory track which was a reseek from track 00 Finally I heard the head go back to track 00 which should have been LSDOS attempting to read the boot sector for the directory track info That s where everything hung up Do you sup pose it never actually GOT to the sector read in code Perhaps the FDC got stuck when it was searching for track 00 I don t see any interrupt disable commands in the track seeker in The Source Then again this is also a wild hair too Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Shane The interrupts are not turned back on until the FDC goes not busy If the FDC always stays busy you re stuck WD says that we ll get a lost data bit set when we don t get the 257th byte but doesn t explicitly say when busy gets cleared Fm Shane Dawalt Joe It s been a while since I read the WD specs and even longer since I played with that data but it seemed when error info was gathered the FDC automatically released BUSY to notify the external processor it was fin ished so the processor could test the error bits Fm MISOSYS Inc Another point to be made Shane is that the floppy disk driver does NOT count down its retries on lost data errors because it assumes they are experienced due to interrupted data trans fer befo
190. t problem with the M4 power supply Seems the solder joints develop hairline cracks and the first symptom is video flickering I ve got an article on it somewhere if you re interested Fm Fred Oberding Frank I would be interested in seeing a copy of the article on hairline cracks developing in the sol der joints of M4 power supplies Fm Joe Kyle DiPietraopola Gary The video board is a good possibility check the big power resistors for signs of immi nent failure Another possibility is just a plain ol dirty or worn contrast or bright ness pot Try ashot of the red can Radio Shack B amp W TV Tuner and Control cleaner in each Loose dirty connections to the pot leads is also a possibility I think they used cheap slide on connectors as Radio Shack is wanttodo Won t they ever learn to spend the few extra cents for good connectors That s been haunting then since Model 1 days Fm Frank Slinkman Fred I have just uploaded to the LDOS Forum on Com puserve PCS49 the article on hairline cracks developing in Model 4 power supplies to LIB O under the name M4SLDR TXT It was taken from the 12 88 NCTUG Journal who picked it up from the 1 88 SMUG Newsletter so you may have already seen it VS 100 speech synthesizer Fm Dave Spiceland I ve got a VS 100 speech synthesizer and have a problem which I hope someone can help me with I put a speed up chip in my Model 4 one of the older non gate array non green
191. t that different from each other I would hate to think that a well known and respected company such as Logical Systems Incorporated was lying to its Customers in its attempt to cut down software piracy and increase their profits On the other hand if it s all true then LS DOS 6 3 will go down in history as the first copy protected microcomputer disk operating system a dubious honor at best Thirdly and on your advice I have sent my XLR8er to H I Techto see if they can do anything with it Since it has a 1 year warranty I shouldn t worry too much right As soon as I get it back Ill be testing those XLR8er patches and Ill send them right off to you Fourthly the missing pages from THE SOURCE Volume III are 271 through 286 detailing pages 2 through 17 of the listing for PATCH CMD Frankly I wasn t sure I would be able to get those pages since I purchased THE SOURCE so long ago Also I knew that the listings for BASIC and HELP were not included I didn t expect them to be My question wasn t a flame or an implication of wrong doing simply my out of control sense of humor Fifthly I have discovered a tiny bug in EXMEM As you know double buffer ing is performed through DIRBUF at 2300H which also happens to be the buffer used by GATRD and GATWR The problem popped up when I was test ing VDISK DCT I could create read from and write to the RAM disk but when I would REMOVE a
192. ta disks On line HELP facility for DOS and BASIC 117 screens of help LIBRARY Enhancements DOS Enhancements New FORMS lets you change printer files parameters e New SETCOM lets you change RS 232 parameters Improvements to LiST add paged displays full screen hex mode and flexible tab expansion e MEMORY displays directory of terminate and stay resident modules e SYSTEM lets you direct the SYSGEN to any drive adds a flexibie drive swap subcommand SMOOTH for faster disk throughput e DIRectory display enhanced with time stamps file EOF and more We ve also improved AUTO COPY CREATE DEBUG DEVICE DO FREE KILL and ROUTE and added CLS and TOF commands UTILITY Enhancements We ve added TED a full screen text editor for ASCII files e LCOMM now gives you access to LDOS library commands e PATCH supports D amp F patch lines with REMOVE capabilities DATECONV converts older disks to the new date convention BASIC Enhancements e Editing now includes line COPY and MOVE Very flexible INPUT added for screen fielded input e We ve added a CMD V to dump a list of active variables with values including arrays For 34 95 S amp H the LDOS 5 3 upgrade kit includes a DOS disk and documentation covering the enhancements Specify Model 3 4 or MAX 80 If you don t already own LDOS 5 1 4 get our USER manual for 33 additional MISOSYS Inc PO Box 239 Sterling VA 22170 0239
193. te But that drive if left empty is a trap waiting to catch me and freeze up the computer Admittedly I don t use DEVICE or non drive specific commands such as DIR or FREE all that much but my fingers all thumbs attimes may misspell commands or file names Justin case Ihaven t made myself clear in anything regarding my setup the follow ing is an excerpt from my notes for crea tion of my XLR8er system disk Copy backup LSDOS system files from distribution disk also utility program and XLR8er files Michel Houde ver sion PATCH using XLR8er distribution disk patches disk updated 12 88 by MISOSYS SYSO XLSYSOA FIX BOOT SYS XLBOOTA FIX SYS2 XLR8S2 FIX SYS12 XLR8S12 FIX BACKUP XLR8BU FIX MISOSYS Products Tidbits 43 MISOSYS Products Tidbits Volume I iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii Configure system disk as follows SYSTEM DRIVE 2 ENABLE SYSTEM DRIVE 3 ENABLE SYSTEM DELAY CAPS key in upper case VERIFY PEXMEM SYSGEN AUTO DO DOSTART JCL Text below Text of DOSTART JCL DOSTART JCL for setting up SYSTEM disk for XLR8 BOARD ERAMDISK D 4 T 5 B 1 S 10 Patched 0C 59 to name of system disk to allow mirror image backup BACKUP 0 4 Mirror image System disk is single sided 71 track DIR 1 SWAP 0 4 SETX M 0 I 1 R 80 REMOVE SYSO0 SYS LSIDOS 0 REMOVE ERAMDISK CMD 0 REMOVE PEXMEM CMD 0 REMOVE SETX CMD 0
194. te field of the Dir if this bit is set This was true for 5 1 4 but not 5 3 As far as I can tell TRSDOS 6 x x has never used the sign in the date field One of our club members has written a short basic program to check this bit reset it and date the file with the current date if necessary He is using a SVC in a packed string for a dir write and it works fine I have found no other way of turning this bit off other than killing the file and rewriting it I will be able to find the affected files with 5 1 4 and correct them with the basic program but it would be a lot nicer if the sign in the dir worked If there is a simple way to do this please let me know If 6 4 and 5 4 ever see the light of day this is my wish list for new features 1 Make the sign work 2 Add a REDATE library command to redate and flip the bit It should work on disk level as well as by files 3 Add UNKILL as a library com mand 4 Add the LIST scroll no scroll to Mod 4 5 Add a SYSTEM SWAP for the Mod 4 Thank you for two fine DOS s and keep up the good work I can t help but wonder how good they would have been if TANDY had turned you loose to do as you saw fit Fm MISOSYS Inc Lloyd the problem you stumbled into concerning bit 4 of DIR 1 has nothing to do with its use asa flag for indicating the date is not cur rent Under LDOS that bit behaved as you described When LS DOS 6 0 was developed the date not curr
195. th programmer will have finished and gone home while the C programmer is still wadding through the edit compiler link load run cycle It allows me to tailor the language to my own requirements If that means defining a operation that will draw a line on the screen then I just write the code for it and call it say LINE I can even add a CASE statement to the com piler if I wish or anything else The thing that really separates FORTH from any other language is that itis inter active This means that if I want to test an operation say move a robot arm up 10 mm then I can simply type the command at the keyboard 10 UP as opposed to C in which I would have to create a test environment and indeed a test program for each and every routine This is of MISOSYS Products Tidbits course not forgetting the other interactive languages such as Basic Lisp Prolog etc However it is the only language that lets you develop your code and ideas in such a free and easy way and use the code in a sensible manner afterwards I find Forth particularly useful for devel opment of ideas as I can see how to im plement an idea in Forth that would take simply ages to workout in C In many ways it is similar to Machine Code At least it helps if you can think in Machine code terms However Forth allows a grate deal of abstraction that M C does not As a for instance I can implement from scratch a Multi Tasking system in F
196. they are If you can find any they should be VERY cheap if not free And they work great with the M4 4P Video question Fm Gary Phillips Joe or Jim Beard if you re listening one of my 4P s seems to be developing a flaky video The bright ness occasionally jumps up and down at random though nothing else may be going on at the time The picture doesn t shrink or shift just varies in intensity My first thought was that it was the infamous power supply defect R15 opening up but that doesn t seem to be the problem My guess is it s something flaking out on the video board This sounds vaguely famil iar haven t there been discussions about brightness problems with model 4 4P machines here before What was the reso lution I better look through my TMQ back issues and see if it got in there Fm Fred Oberding Gary I believe you stated in a previous message that you do get the TMQ If so check page 75 of the latest volume IL ii Roy reprinted a message from me to a Steve Lorenz on his problem with a 4P video Since you say the problem occurs only in 80 charac ter mode you have a video phase lock loop circuit problem The TMQ re write explains how to fix it If you haven t gotten the latest TMQ I ll re upload it for you Fm Gary Phillips Fred Sounds like you ve got the cure I need Fred Thanks Going straight to that issue of TMQ from here Fm Frank Slinkman Gary There s an other frequen
197. think you received the issue by the time you sent your letter This whole issue may be after the fact by now But that was the problem Incidentally the 9999 program line you referenced is something we usually add to a program during development It makes it easy to save a copy by typing RUN 9999 rather than the more elaborate SAVE com mand It just got left in there no harm On to the HARD DRIVES question comment Let meclear up one item There is no such thing as a hard drive being particular to a computer other than the latest card drives But then they are not just a hard drive You may confuse a hard drive package with the drive itself In order to work with a computer as an external drive you need a hard drive controller case power supply host adap tor where necessary connecting cables Some computer systems have a hard disk controller internally thus they wouldn t need an external controller All systems provide software to format a hard drive they never come formatted from the manufacturer In order to make our hard drive package inexpensive I am planning to use compo nents designed for PC clones Those components are cheaper because there s millions of them and lots of competition That brings into play the economics of large scale production The hard drive itself is relatively inexpensive One of the most popular drives around is the Seagate ST225 This has a capacity o
198. tinued Whether the practice is resumed albeit with more preparation and prudence is probably dependent on a determination of the degree of the effect of cowf s on the atmosphere Unburned hydrocarbons tend to break down in the stratosphere and generate smog and the molecular weight of methane is 16 as compared with the mean atomic weight of air at about 28 8 or SO A more likely solution is installation of appliances on the cows which capture and burn off the methane similarly to the gas flues you see burning off excess gas at oil refineries Remember when the horseless carriage first appeared it was widely accepted because it provided an alternative to the pollution given off by horses A horse ate like well a horse An Olds would run on cleaning fluid at 10c a gallon or even on bad whiskey in an emergency Fm jeff brenton Jim Another thing to consider animal farts aren t a recent discovery they were doing it long before we domesticated cows and other animals So if the effects are so dire to the future of the planet why weren t they seen back in the days when MILLIONS of buffalo roamed the wilder ness s f To say the least concern over animal flatulence is little more than an ill wind Fm Jim Beard jeff Yeah you said it Finding out that 20 saccharin in the bloodstream of a rat will give it blad der cancer didn t correlate with any known problem either Fallout has
199. tise I had often wondered about the taxonomic clas sification of those nasty pests The illus trations prepared so painstakingly are of great value to the serious researcher and the artists are most worthy of commenda tion 7 Letters to the Editor 15 Letters to the Editor Volume IU iti THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii However I note that Joe probably due to an involuntary oversight employed an expression sometimes used by the non programming hoi polloi but seldom if ever by the wizards who eschew plebe ian language by stating the number ofa specimen s legs in a quaint and mostly forgotten numbering system referred to in ancient scrolls as decimal I beg leave to suggest that Joe s statement No go bugs gotta have six legs would have been more elegant and more in keeping with approved modern usage if stated thus No go bugs gotta have X 06 legs Now in all fairness I must add he did get it correct in the calendar he sent you same issue page 11 which I am in formed you intend to include in PRO WAM Joe also atoned for his lapse in great measure by describing the species with the fiendishly menacing pincers so skill fully portrayed by Jim By a remarkable coincidence that s precisely the variety that at times sees fit to be my unwelcome visitor which prompted me to pore and ponder many long hours deep into the night over entomological
200. tly Note the dates on this Looks like someone is going in for time travel grin Number two is the directory of your dis tribution disk for GO MTC Note that DCT CMD is missing although included in the manual This confirms my phone call some time early December Number three is a toughie It is a printout of the same directory as number two but which was afflicted by something I have been encountering lately unexpected and totally erratic margin changes in printout I get this on amodel 4D under LSDOS 6 3 equipped with an XLR8er board Inciden tally this is similar to the problem de scribed in my writeup The mystery of the meandering margin or keep your printer clean and oiled I sent you with my letter of November 29 last However _ the writeup described the problem caused by a slack printer drive belt but the at tached has nothing to do with that and the problem occurs on two different DMP430 printers which have been tested thoroughly and satisfactorily on other computers and setups As you will see from attachment number three the margin changes suddenly to wards the right It always does this after execution of a carrier return I don t know whether the character at the beginning of the displaced line just to the left of SIP may have anything to do with it but it does show the presence of a spurious character generated somewhere Itoccurs when printing out from DOS such as the attached fr
201. tor Now depending on how things time out would depend on whether SHIFT BREAK would be able to recover Itcan t always Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Shane In most of the cases that I ve run into if the FDC and disk driver get so confused as to let the drive time out before returning an error then lt shift gt lt break gt won t bring it back either In any case yanking the disk while it is still selected is generally going to get you nowhere you are right that if you are going to try swapping you should gener ally wait until the drive times out Fm Shane Dawalt Roy Yeah INI does read only one byte So sorry INI loads location HL with an input from the port defined by reg C Then HL is automati cally incremented and B is decremented When B hits zero zero the Z flag is set Now let me find The Source so I won t sound like such an egghead I found it and I humbly disagree with ya Roy Certainly INI will read B bytes from the media The read loop then falls through to the code which tests the BUSY status until BUSY becomes inactive If the motor times out everything hangs up Noextra code is read in In the worst case the motor will simply time out In the bestcase BUSY will be released before a time out and the error detection code will test the FDC which should have the DATA LOST error set as the last 256 bytes of an MSDOS sector were never read These 256 bytes were being read by
202. treatises in order to learn more My main source of refer ence was the famous work by the noted Dr Gofly Akite Professor Emeritus Summa cum Laude of the university of Getl Ost Krankistan I located the species under the nomencla tural denomination in Latin asis usual in these disciplines of bugus programus terribilis It is described as having a marked tendency to infest environments abounding in silicon semiconductors and magnetic oxides contrary to many pres ent day biota varieties it is not an endan gered species but proliferates astonish ingly well The description of the jaws impressed me as it agrees substantially with the one proposed by Joe and Jim It is further stated that this creature s formi dable mandibular configuration enables it to inflict most painful virulent and _ toxic bytes I could not refrain from smiling weakly sadly and wanly at a footnote added by Dr Akite As the program is test run the bugus programus Becomes alarmingly busy Like a torrent it rushes rampages and gushes At a pace that makes everyone dizzy Still according to the treatise many ef forts have been made to extirpate this pest and some workers in sheer despair have even attempted with varying meas ures of success to exorcise it with spells of magic one of which is known as DEBUG but which requires elaborate incantations in arcane languages thus necessitating assiduous and arduous ef fo
203. ts Tidbits lll LL A Volume IILiii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume Ill iii Fm MISOSYS Inc Thanks for the re port and a double thanks for the investi gatory work done to cure the problem I checked the code and don t know how that happened because I specifically tested the operation of DOCONFIG having uncovered a problem in invoking it from a running BASIC program and correct ing that I took your suggested patch and melded it into the NOP d area reserved for patches Here s my official patch to cure the prob lem Golden Oldies PDS PURGE Fm Mike Harro Roy there seems to be a problem with PDS PURGE It appears to be trashing the member directory The APPEND command will fail after a PURGE giving the error Reading PDS MEMBER directory End of file encountered The squeeze function works alright though SO after a file kill I ve been using SQUEEZE as mentioned in the GO SYS manual I couldn t find anything in back issues Of TMQ s to indicate this was the case with previous versions of PaDS The purge function could probably be elimi nated altogether since SQUEEZE is just as effective Purge is mentioned in the manual so you may get other reports of this problem if you haven t already Fm MISOSYS Inc Looks like you are absolutely correct I introduced the bug into the new version Seems like the old mind just got a little foggy There is a big difference between
204. ts that whisper purr growl rumble grumble or grind and that seem to take from now to the end of eternity to load a few KB of file while seemingly meander ing all over the disk with fitful starts and stops to find and read it while I while away the time serenely munching tran quilizer pills to stop me going into orbit through the ceiling Yes I know don t tell me I should get a hard drive but that means a bundle of shekels i Fm MISOSYS Inc Charles you just described one of the major reasons for installing an UPS or standby power sys tem Anyone who is as concerned over data loss due to power failure as you are should keep that machine powered through an UPS or SBS That was a major concern of mine Our location seemed to be hit be unplanned short power outages which became a problem when the invoicing program was being run An outage prior to closing out the program required the re entry of all invoices that were keyed in during that session That s why I have an SBS on my 386 machine and on the 286 machine used for accounting invoicing and which houses our customer and 6 3 data bases On the other hand I don t necessarily agree with your perspective as to what an OPERATOR my emphasis can do to recover from some unforseen problem I could never expect an operator to dig out a listing and start GOTOing all over the place to circumvent a program abort I would expect that of a programmer though But I th
205. tware switches the board to higher speed That should not present a problem with self booting software But you will probably observe the effect All software interfacing that is needed is provided I recommend you use the interface provided by Michel Houde in TMQ and provided on the DOS 6 software interface disk Other considerations are that you will need to open up your machine if under a service contract that may void your war ranty Why Tandy continues to utilize a ridiculous paper tab over one of the screws sealing the case is beyond me With no interfacing software installed your machine will not be able to take advantage of the extra memory You will be able to alter the speed of the CPU without adding to memory Fm Michael Dauphin I was just about to pop the hood on my 4d to check for 150ns RAMs before I order the XLR8er I no ticed Item 6 under TYPE 2 MOTHER BOARDS on page 72 of TMQ IL iii which States Check the 74LS245P chip and replace with 74HCT245 if necessary My question What do I check the 74LS245P for The Hardware Corner 47 The Hardware Corner Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume III 1ii Fm MISOSYS Inc Don t even worry about that The 74HCT245 is alittle faster than the 74LS245 and helps to eliminate keyboard problems on most machines We automatically supply a 74HCT245 chip to replace the 74LS245 chip used as the buffer on the keyboard matr
206. ues tions about this program I find PG moreconvenient for its intended purpose than the DOS command LIST having to press lt SH gt lt gt to stop scroll ing then any character to continue is a nuisance not to mention it s hard to stop at just the right point Applications for the User 34 Applications for the User Volume Iii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii Note The following is a reprint from the LSI Journal April 1984 A short while after my Mod 4 came roll ing in I got the tech manual and turned to the SVC section to find out how to con vert my Mod 3 subroutines One of the first SVCs I looked for was the one to get USTORS the LDOS 8 byte storage area allocated to the user I store the addresses of my subroutines there so that I can find them from LBASIC Unfortunately never found the SVC because there isn t one So I plunged in to find out how to locate my routines LSI has adopted a convention for a header to precede high memory routines Using this header allows an SVC to locate the routine for you Listing 1 demonstrates the technique by fetching the address of INK Y4 DE is loaded with the address of the name of the routine you want to find and A with the number of the SVC in this case 83 The name must be in UPPER CASE char acters and terminated with a character whose code is in the range 0 31 After executing the SVC with RST 28H the startin
207. vel of complica tions associated with a DOS upgrade impact considerably on my temperament and render such a venture too costly You want an UNKILL It s available as an UNREMOVE in our GO MTC pack age A paged LIST is available in this TMQ issue A SWAP is available in DOS Subjects 17 DOS Subjects Volume ITI 1i1 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii GO SYS along with quite a few DOS enhancements Memory Bank switching Fm Peter Van Caeseele I read in one of Hardin Brothers articles that an unpatched version of TRSDOS LSDOS can support up to 7 banks of memory Can you elabo rate on this I installed the 256K upgrade published in 80 Micro and it works with out a hitch The only real thing I use it for is a ramdisk I am writing a hi res graphics editor for my hires board and epson compatible and would like to use the additional banks as storage I can access all the banks myself but would like to do it through DOS as well I m also stumped on how to take a DIRec tory in TRSDOS 1 3 andcopy it intoaram buffer I typed in a program from 80 Micro and it didn t work isn t that sur prising The program used a RST 28H in TRSDOS 1 3 to copy the directory to a buffer Unfortunately my computer crashes when it gets to that instruction Fm Joe Kyle DiPietropaolo Peter TRSDOS 6 supports mapping of lots of additional ram but the built in BANK code doesn t k
208. with my hard drive initialized Can not initialize ProWam nor Ramdisk w o lockup or scrolling error messages Also a MEMDIR does not show the 121 byte XLR8 module However if I boot my initialization floppy with The Hardware Corner 51 The Hardware Corner Volume Iliji THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IIL iii lt CLEAR gt lt ENTER gt held down prevent ing initialization of the HD I can use the extra memory Also while in floppy mode MEMDIR does show the 121 byte XLR8 module amp ProWam as well as Ramdisk work as advertised The HD drive 0 and floppy have the identical patches installed It appears that on initialization of the HD the system forgets that it has the extra memory although it will pass a memory test Ok Boy that s a lot of initializa tions Roy do I have my head up and locked again or have I stumbled onto a bug Everything worked fine with Rex Basham s revised Hibanks but Michel Houde s patches seem like the best way to go Fm MISOSYS Inc What you have neglected to do is to re install your hard drive after the patches have been applied If you already have a configuration file with low memory used you have to re do anything you had installed I pointed this out on the revised disk but I don t think I highlighted that as an issue in the TMQ The patches add code immediately fol lowing the floppy driver That s why you have to rebuild your low memory con
209. xecuted bank Q is automatically enabled After interrupt processing and or driver execution has concluded the system restores the original bank being accessed Didn t the 80 Micro article say that RAM upgrade was to be used for storage only and not to be executed in The spooler stores code in the bank it occupies and runs that code when needed There was a thread about this a while back Unlike your problem the person had placed new RAMs in the 2nd bank on the motherboard Even though he could run MEMDISK and such he couldn t run the spooler It was traced down to the spooler running code in those banks A PAL chip which distributes the critical timing signals to the RAMs couldn t handle the CPU timing during op code fetches Fm MISOSYS Inc Peter You probably haven t interfaced your memory board with the interrupt handler and the ENADIS_VIDEORAM routine The DOS has to do its own hardware memory management at three points in the system If you only patched into BANK then your patch is not complete Best you check out the code in either my AT patches old TMQ or Michel Houde s patches for the XLR8er board His ASM file in DISK NOTES 3 2 is fully commented Wrong Disk Timeout Fm Theodore Masterton Just got be trayed by my trusty 4p and favorite DOS I was working on a very last minute fund ing request for my agency put on the last touches grabbed a disk and pushed it into drive 1 and tried to save my re
210. y still operates in Australia Some stores still have Model III and 4 software but basi cally only what is left on the shelf Own ers in Australia who happen to be trav elling about should check stores in smaller cities and towns as youcan still occasion ally find old III 4 software at bargain prices Also this year the service center in Melbourne did a good Job on servicing my drives realigning the video display and replacing the on off switch However Tandy Australia never imported the Model 4D and ran out the Model 4 line in September 1986 I registered my copy of 6 2 with Software Registration in Fort Worth I got no notification of 6 3 from them I only knew about it from 80 Micro If you could get hold of all those 6 2 registration cards from Australia and probably elsewhere that Tandy never fol lowed up you could tap into a new source of customers Back to the hard drives I hate buying anything that doesn t quite work I under stand that your hard drive project will protect us diehard Model 4 users who don t want a hard time upgrading to a hard disk system What I propose is the follow ing and it should be of interest to all your customers in Australia 1 Purchase a SEAGATE 20MB drive controller and power supply local ly 2 Purchase the host adaptor cabling and software from Misosys Can you tell me exactly which model SEAGATE drive and controller are suit able for use with your kit Next w
211. yed to fit the drive and male centronics printer connec tor on the other end out ae Peel Male Cy EECA Type I see no way of connecting these toa TRS 80 and am wondering if he was sent the wrong cables Enclosed is a crude draw ing of the front and back of the drive I hope this helps I have a 5mb drive that came from Total Access according to the box it resembles the drives that Aerocomp sells It came with Montezuma Micro drivers I have this set up as drives 0 3 with only LS DOS 6 3 on the disk I am looking to purchase a larger drive but have read that if you save many small files you waste much of the drive space because of the allocation scheme used to format the disk Are there better drivers and do you carry any kind of hard disk test program I have 1 final question I have an AT memory board installed in my 4P and want to know if there are any drivers or programs other than LeScript that work with it I have the Superdrive program Keg Te 7 wies that allows it to be used as a memdisk Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon Fm MISOSYS Inc I am not familiar with that Corvus drive there was one a long time ago that worked only under NEWDOSS80 Corvus drives generally worked in a network they also had a Suv Fedes nee a r NS ar A ee E A P TMD SUR ai ar ae g or ty Proce 3sS R Ea maRivt a eee f V4 PN mele fiugs backup device which was based on a vi
212. you certainly sound like you have been busy By now you re aware of the overlapping contribu tions from Michel Houde in the area of the XLR amp er patches but your BANKRES is certainly new there are many TMQ read ers who could profit from that When I comment on rushing TMQ I m not talking about the printing I certainly do not do that in house I utilize a large printing company The printing collat ing and binding is all an automated proc ess Perhaps the glue machine had a momentary clog And I was considering a new name for TMQ The TMR logo was an acronym for The MISOSYS Record Now here s the big IF If TMQ were to go to a bi monthly publication cycle the name THE MISOSYS QUAR TERLY would be in conflict So we were thinking in advance for a new name As you see I have decided to publish your previous letter sans the product order to address your second issue The point I have to make is that MISOSYS does not OWN the LS DOS 6 3 product we have obtained the right to distribute and serv ice the DOS We can also make changes read as enhancements But it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the issue you have requested Suffice it to say that the DOS is protected by Copyright Also the first DOS to my knowledge that did have a sophisticated embedded backup protection scheme was VTOS 3 0 devel oped by Randy Cook That scheme was in my estimation the only reason VTOS 3 0 did not be
213. zed and then as sembled under EDAS For those who do not program in assembler there are also HEX files and BASIC programs to create the necessary CMD files from them The documentation was originally in NROFF format the UNIX formatter but we converted it to Allwrite source code consistent with both Model 3 and Model 4 Allwrite Finally on the third documen tation disk I included a vanilla Ascii version of the documentation by ZSHELLING to disk from within the Allwrite formatter DOS Subjects 23 DOS Subjects Volume IIL ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii For those who do not know Kermit it is a very powerful terminal and file transfer utility We customarily use Omniterm here at Marquette with XMODEM proto col for file transfer Kermit s native proto cols seem to be faster and are noticeably faster at 9600 baud we have eight Model 4 systems directly connected to the cen tral VAX system via multiplexor at 9600 baud Kermit also supports full batch and wildcard transfer of multiple files which is not implemented for XMODEM The default terminal emulation for both LSDOS6 and LDOSS is VT52 which is not a full ANSI standard but appears to work well enough on our VAX It proba bly would not be difficult to modify the assembler code for VT100 emulation I have found no bugs at all in the LSDOS6 version but have not had time to try the LDOS version I hope that this
214. zero and place a target system disk that contains MODELII A in drive one Execute the file by entering FIXMA3 from the DOS ready prompt The source code for FLIXMA3 CMD is provided in two forms Listing 1 is a BASIC program that will create FIXM3A CMD Listing 2 is the Assembly source code for those who wish to use an assem bler Hope this is of help The files are LISTING1 BAS ASCII saved BASIC LISTING2 ASM ASM file Applications for the User 33 Applications for the User Volume Mii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1988 89 Volume IM iii PG S is the source code for a tool used for browsing through text files I use it often for browsing source files To use the program type pg file at the DOS prompt PG reads the named file and displays it on the terminal one screen full at a time waiting for a re sponse after each screen before continu ing Typing a space displays the next screen full pressing ENTER displays the next line of the file the BREAK key or ctl c exits the program early if the end of the file has not yet been reached If the file contains tabs the tab stops are normally set to every four columns but this can be changed to every eight columns by using an optional switch type pg t8 file at the DOS prompt PG S is written in Microsoft MACRO 8 amp 0 3 44 M80 for the TRS 80 model 4 run ning under TRSDOS 6 2 or LS DOS 6 3 I welcome anyone s comments or q

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