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TMQ Vol V.ii - tim

1. else me N T c o T gt ER RORS CCC T end end end 1 O assign EXT OPT Optimize N ASM T to N OPT T mcopt N ASM T else assign EXT ASM end 1 A 4 LIST assign LOPT nm ne nc we else assign LOPT nl1 end i NOMAIN Assemble N EXT T to N REL T without main func tion mras N EXT T LOPT else Assemble N EXT T to N REL T mras mc i gt N EXT TH o N T LOPTH end end AE L 1 N1 amp N2 amp N3 mlink a y N T n D e else 1 N3 Inside TMQ Volume Vii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii mlink ary NH PTR FNLHE HTH NOH HTH NSH PTH n D e else 1 N2 mlink a y N T ENLH ATH N2 TH n D e else if N1 mlink a y N T NL T n D e end end end end end i f K if P remove N TOK ETF end if C remove N ASM STE end if A remove N REL STE end 31 O remove N OPT T 1991 calendar year s ription Inside TMQ 43 Inside TMQ ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE TUTOR VOLUME X REFERENCE by Chris Fara NEW Hot cakes New from Chris Fara Manual of reference to all Z 80 op code instructions For use in assembly programming on any Z 80 computer including TRS 80 Models I II III and 4 It complements assembler pack
2. only takes 72 bytes to hold the data for a line Thus the largest positive number you will see is 47H and the lowest nega tive will be 0B9H MacPaint image data like TRS 80 image data is packed 8 horizontal pixels per byte with the left most pixel in bit 7 and the right most in bit 0 The only differ ence is that I black and 0 white which indicates to me that the data is intended for output to a printer rather than to a monitor screen The code from DCOD010 to DCOD060 expands the compressed data into a 216 3 72 byte field labeled CODEBUF The three instructions starting at DCOD060 manage a counter named BYTECTR which is pointed to by IX which tells the program when 216 bytes of data have been read The remaining code in this section un packs each pixel luminence into one byte per pixel which data is stored in the three 576 byte fields starting at label LINE1 Think of this data as being arranged in three rows and 576 columns The code at VRTSCAL does the vertical scaling by adding the three values in each column and writing the result to the top byte in that column Now the data from each column of 3 pixels has been com bined into a single byte with a luminence in the range 0 black to 3 white The code at HRZSCAL does the horizon tal scaling Each set of three pixels must be converted to two This is done as follows Original set 1 2 3 New set 1 R where the value in original 2 is divided equal
3. i BSORT high speed array sort for BASIC 10 47 2S amp H 5 25 360K 1 2 height 75 4 S amp H l DSM high speed disk virtual sorting utility 41 97 2S amp H 3 5 720K in 5 25 1 2 height frame 85 3 S amp H l DSMBLR Disassemble CMD files to disk 17 47 2S amp H 2SV5 drive case amp P S 60 5 S amp H EDAS Macro assembler and full screen editor 31 47 4S amp H Single drive host cable 10 i EnhComp BASIC compiler with in line assembler 41 97 4S amp H Dual floppy extender cable 15 i HartFORTH 79Standard FORTH runs under DOS 34 97 3S amp H Our Model 2SV5 dual vertical external floppy disk i MC A complete K amp R C compiler requires MRAS 55 97 5S amp H drive case will hold two 5 25 half height disk drives MRAS Advanced relocatable object code assembler 41 97 4S amp H races amp re ace nt er deg i RATFOR M4 only Converts RATFOR to FORTRAN 41 97 4S amp H round to continental U S 4 E UNREL convert REL object modules to ASM 20 97 2S amp H MISOSYS can also provide internal FDC to floppy i Specify Model I III or Model 4 ribbon cables for 4 4D 4P computers N hes me mm me ee m e e eS Se gig the Contents Printed Matter BULK RATE YN Sterling VA 22170 0239 U S POSTAGE JA U S A cn Sterling VA PERMIT NO 74 Attention Postmaster Address Correction Requested Forwarding and retum postage guaranteed
4. lishing and the Model 4 A batter TERM APP adding floppy drives and a new XLR8er interface MHLH The CRC program PG a page display program Locating high memory routines FIXMA3 Jumbo rae backup for PC clones New style for TMQ using Pagemaker and an Index to Volume II The Blurb 5 The Blurb nem mar ans d araia o A il RN A a a aaa Ur rm aaa manos 2 ana pes re I TT rt err ET eA NAF san n Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii MlLiv Checking for a file from Model 4 BASIC Surviving the Hard Disk crash An interview with Niklaus Wirth Keep your printer clean and oiled On line HELP with PRO WAM MISOSYS announces availa bility of Hard Drives Logic in the C language IVi Cataloging files with a word processor Page display PRO WAM application File undating with FUNDATE Array load routine for BASIC XLR8er and the GT 180 graphics board LV Printing from BASIC without cutting words LOAD 100 for Model 100 Generating date time stamp Favorite recipes Some BA SIC routines IV iii Fast in memory sort using XLR8er RAM Using XLR8er RAM as graphics video RAM Up grade your 4P with external floppy drives Doubling of files solved SuperScripsit document file format FELSWOOP PRO WAM export util ity IVY y Five Twelve K A bet ter way Multi Command Touch ccc Fixes for LS DOS 6 3 1 DoubleDuty Version 2 6 0 released Vi 300 Dots on the TRS 80
5. 12 609 536 bytes used 20 393 984 bytes available 2 20 1 compression ratio Logical Disk Allocation _ 38 670 336 maximum vol capacity 18 806 511 projected vol capacity 8 763 392 bytes used Physical Disk Allocation 5 877 248 bytes used 6 732 800 bytes available 1 49 1 compression ratio Among the three partitions of my 80 megabyte drive the Expanz board turned the drive into almost a 150 megabyte drive At close to presstime Infochip Systems forwarded me their version 1 2 release which was supposed to fix a few things One thing it was supposed to do was have the ability of being loaded into high memory by QEMM 386 That would be a plus for me however installing every other driver into high memory using QEMM 386 has given me no further memory conflicts For those without a 386 machine or the ability for some 286 machines to load drivers into high memory certain 286 chipsets can do just that with appropriate software like QEMM 386 you would need to make do with about 44K less low memory to consider an installation of the Expanz board That s about the only drawback I ve seen and for me it s no longer a drawback Although I haven t done timing tests before and after instal lation I have not perceived any degrada tion in disk I O Note also that you can also expand floppy disk drives and RAM disks It s not a bad idea to compress floppies if that s your only backup me dium In short if you are runnin
6. 24 Inside TMQ 25 Image processing on the TRS 80 Model 4 by J F R Slinkman 25 Nedw XLR8er patches for LS DOS 6 3 1 by David Goben 33 FORTH A language for every application by Bill Brandon 36 A MAKE utility for MC by Masa aki Kitajima 40 List of Advertisors Computer News 80 44 Javna Management Company 32 MISOSYS Inc IFC 45 48 IRC RC Pacific Computer Exchange 39 TRSTimes magazine 43 List of Patches in this Issue Fix to PRO EnhComp to correct FIELD error checking 13 Fix to EnhComp to correct FIELD error checking 14 The Blurb 1 The Blurb Volume V 1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Points to Ponder Metric update Normally The Blurb is entirely my column a soap box so to speak letters to the editor are usually relegated to our Letters section How ever Lawrence Rossiter from Victoria BC Canada sent me the following piece which I felt merited placement herein Here s what Lawrence had to report con cerning metrics Dear Roy With reference to the item in your Blurb in the Fall issue of TMQ headed Metric update and prediction that Americans will be buying gasoline meas ured in liters by the turn of the century here is a quote from an editorial in Loco motive Engineering for April 1896 con cerning the same subject For the last thirty years the advocates of the French system of weights andmeasures have been laboring unceasingly to make
7. DISK as a system disk How do I go about this to make a JCL run upon boot and can boot and sys0 be put in ERAMDISK and then loaded to memory with Houde s patches or will I have to patch them in memory with XLR8SET OR can my hard drives boot be patched lt sigh gt Hope someone can help P S I sure wish all M4 s and users used the same hardware software lt sigh gt I guess that is where the word incompatible comes in eh Fm Roy Soltoff Mark The fix to MAP PER GMAPO1 FIX was in TMQ IV iv MAPPER is atool which displays in what file by name is allocated to each granule of a disk When it is working correctly the string ERROR displayed in a granule field indicates that the Granule Allocation Table GAT shows that gran ule as allocated but no directory entry is found with a file using that granule Another error condition shows up as an arrow that s where more than one file is allo cated to the same granule The bug in MAPPER was that it incorrectly calcu lated the length of the directory when the DIR SYS file was 34 records long MAPPER didn t examine the last two sectors Therefore any file with an entry in those two sectors would not show up in Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii the map causing the granules allocated to those files to be reflected as an ER ROR You mention that you had experienced the problem in DI
8. Tandy 16 6000 Hard Disk Drives NXWAM PRO WAM application A review of M A D s XROM PD Software Librarian Vic McClung has volunteered to be the librarian for the collection of TRS 80 public domain diskettes Henceforth all requests and contributions be directed directly to him at Note thatif you upload a public domain file to our CompuServe forum PCS 49 and want it to receive general distribu tion please also mail a copy on disk to Vic There is no legal provision for down loading files from Compuserve and re distributing them unless you were the uploader Some of our readers who do not have access to our forum have an interest in those submissions So if you want to help out the most numbers of fellow us ers don t limit your submissions to just one source TMQ 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 Current space rates are as follows Icompose the ninth page ad layout so you have no artwork charge Just submit your text 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 MISOSYS Forum MISOSYS sponsors afo
9. To execute a program you simply invoke the word which is the Inside TMQ 37 Inside TMQ 6 waa tes ner mr ii ag ge ea De Volume V ii Inside TMQ THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii program There are no line numbers GOTO statements or subroutine CALLS just words Here is a fairly typical FORTH word definition TURN RIGHT CORNERING SPEED DECELERATE DEG CLOCKWISE TURN SAFE SPEED ACCELERATE This is taken from a lexicon or task specific vocabulary that contains words to control the movement of a device It appears almost like a description in Eng lish of the steps in the task The word being defined is TURN RIGHT The FORTH word begins the definition and the word ends it All the words used to define TURN RIGHT DECEL ERATE TURN and so on have already been defined using lower level words TURN RIGHT uses three values namely CORNERING SPEED DEG how far to tum and SAFE SPEED Notice the values appear before the words that use them Also notice how much information is hidden from the program the computer and the user The values are hidden from TURN RIGHT until they are needed The nature of the device is unknown and makes no difference to the program It could be a bulldozer a submarine a Porsche or a graphic on a video screen Details of the connection to the device s steering and speed control are hidden as well Asa result this word can be test
10. black That s the difference Cosmetic problem for you To shed new light I m not sure we dis cussed adding one floppy say a 3 5 to your hard drivecase A floppy cable could be provided to connect to it in addition to the hard drive cable The floppy could be powered from the HD power supply Turning to your next letter I m including copies of patches applied subsequent to 2 23 87 toLDOS 5 3 Youcan get your disk refreshed for 10 2S amp H Drive Qis very noisy because you haven t changed the step rate from the default of 30ms to 6ms Simply issue SYSTEM STEP 0 SYSGEN to change the step rate Don t forget that LDOS is for Model IIIs and some old machines can t handle a faster step rate on the floppy drives When a fast drive is stepped slowly it makes an irritating grinding noise Both FORMAT from LDOS 5 3 and SDFORMS should construct a proper directory for extended dating what s the problem Give me an example Cursor movement in SCRIPSIT is con trolled by the program not the DOS Changing blinking at the DOS level does nothing to SCRIPSIT you ll have to ei ther live with that or find a patch to SCRIPSIT SCRIPSIT also does its own paging control and expects no external paging filter This has nothing to do with the LDOS environment or the patch ap plied to SCRIPSIT Fm Henry A Blumenthal Dear Mr Soltoff No you had not mentioned that your hard drive case could handlea floppy
11. is not the case At the entry to a program register HL points to the first non blank Character which follows the command name In this case the name is DO Whoever coded this believed that the decrement was backing up to the D however it really decrements the pointer to the O at most In fact entering the DO command with two or more spaces after the DO further compounds the prob lem The best solution would be to alter the module so that it saves the contents of register BC the pointer to the start of the input buffer and forget about the incor rect decrement which would then be unnecessary A LD nn BC takes four bytes thus an in line patch could not be done On the other hand getting rid of the two decrements saves two bytes One could correct the problem by a monstrous patch repositioning 108 bytes of code A re assembly would be easier for the next release Alternatively one could document the bug In the best case one could ensure that subsequent com mand lines are only 78 characters in length with one more for the terminating lt ENTER gt That should be bug free if only one space followed the DO To force a limit of 78 characters instead of 79 characters one could change the KEYIN limit on page 177 What do my readers want A monstrous patch Or just knowledge of the bug azlong with a workaround By the way the crash would occur with a continued command line of 79 characters beca
12. or running word processing software e Fax mail merge Fax Mail Merge lets you fax cus tomized letters to several people with their own name address or company information merged into a form letter The names companies addresses or other information is pulled from the phone book database which is a dBase format You can create a com prehensive database with dBase and use the data for the Fax Mail Merge Doing so will save you time and get impressive results from your recipients e Broadcast and distribution list management BitFaX lets you send a message to several people selected from the phone book You can also assign names into groups and just send to the selected groups without having to key in or select their numbers each time you send For example you can put all the people in the sales department into a group and just send to the group rather than fax to each individual name each time you fax e Optional BitPaint for editing With an optional BitPaint program you can view a received fax image cut it change it edit it or write your own reply and fax it back to the senders Features and Benefits e Integrated data modem and send receive Fax capability on a single board e Auto answer the modem will detect whether it s data or fax e Supports Multiple File Formats You can send any of these file types directly from your PC to any Group II Fax machine ASCII text PCX pc Paintbrush IMG GEM Artli
13. you won t be able to send them with a fax board The bottom line is to evaluate your requirements for faxing And if you don t already have a 2400 baud modem now is the time to plan for this implementation If you are looking for a very low priced fax modem board for your PC I think you should consider the Zoltrix ZOFAX 96 24 fax modem board All you need is a free 8 bit slot And I now have a quantity of these boards in stock just waiting for your order My regular price is 250 6 S amp H U S but I have them on sale until January 31st at 225 S amp H Frecom advertises its 199 priced 9600 baud S R fax as the lowest that s easily matched by an additional 51 for this board which incorporates a complete 2400 baud mo dem And to think I paid 400 or more for my Smartmodem 1200 some years ago The Blurb EE do The Blurb Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1i Duplication bug in some 6 3 1H Fm Walter Klasson Dear Roy Since I spoke to you earlier this afternoon I have ascertained that I have real problems with my copy of 6 3 1 I have now tried both a verified duplicate copy as well as the original disk in two different Mod 4 s and gotten the same results Basically something is screwy with error reporting and recovery and it also affects direct operations of at least the COPY command Before each test I have booted a non configured 6 3 1 disk no SYSG
14. 832 979 projected vol capacity 34 144 256 used Physical Disk Allocation 19 746 304 bytes used 13 275 648 bytes available 1 72 1 compression ratio Based on this data one can intuit the sleight of hand used to accomplish ran dom access of compressed files When you ICONVERT a partition you specify a compression factor the default is three It certainly appears to me that the Ex panz driver then reconstructs the drive The Blurb Volume V 1 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii with a logical sector size one third the original sector size If it can compress each original sector to one third then it still retains a one to one relationship in file sector access Those that it can t are probably linked to another logical sector known to the Expanz software The maximum volume capacity shown above is the original drive partition size multi plied by the chosen compression factor The projected volume capacity is the expected capacity which would be real ized if the additional files added to the drive were at the same mix of compressi bility as the existing files in this case the mix is 1 72 1 on my C drive But this partition contains a lot of EXE files which are poor candidates for compression IDISK statistics for my other two E and F par titions are Logical Disk Allocation 100 311 040 maximum vol capacity 72 765 440 projected vol capacity 27 754 496 bytes used Physical Disk Allocation
15. DOS 3 3 DOS buffers mouse driver and scanner driver 4 I didn t have sufficient memory left Nor was I able to run my scanner program out of WINDOWS since there was insuffi cient buffer memory left I eventually solved my memory problem by acquiring QEMM386 5 1 release This memory manager provides the ability for 386 systems to load device drivers buff ers and a few other odds and ends into the high memory space between 640K and 1 024K I heartily recommend Quarter deck s Expanded Memory Manager 386 QEMM386 to any 386 owner In fact Id probably start carrying the product at a reasonable discount if my customer base expressed an interest QEMM386 also comes with Manifest a utility which beautifully presents the memory utiliza tion of your system Getting back to the Expanz board let me show you an illustration of what you can achieve in expanded disk capacity My E drive is the second 32 megabyte partition on my 80 megabyte drive The before and after statistics are as follows Before After Files 496 496 Bytes 24 195 072 10 807 808 Free 9 123 840 22 195 712 Total 33 435 648 76 072 960 The Expanz board includes an IDISK utility which replaces CHKDSK This tool provides similar recovery functions and also provides additional information on the compression in effect For instance after compressing my C drive IDISK provided this display Logical Disk Allocation 100 311 040 Maximum vol capacity 56
16. III Scripsit patched with your LSI Fix Disk II utility If the forms filter with ffhard is in place then Scripsit keeps forwarding the printer long beyond the perforation Also even if I set the system to SLOW by the way cursor movement in Scripsit is too fast Did the Fix Disk not go far enough in patching Scripsit to run in an LDOS environment Fm MISOSYS Inc Dear Henry The Radio Shack external floppy drives you are referring to are not directly usable with a TRS 80 To begin with the norm for external PC drives is that they are powered from the host computer Thus the drive case contains no power supply generates much less heat because of that absence and can then be much smaller The cable is usually supplied It generally plugs into a 37 pin D sub miniature con nector For you to use that drive you would have to get a power supply or attempt to manufacture a cabling arrange ment to power it from the TRS 80 while probably having to add another power supply to your desktop TRS 80 Inciden tally you couldn t use my cable with Tandy s drive because of the different connectors involved and the power prob lem as noted Getting back to my drives Mounting a 3 5 and 5 25 both half height in one case will certainly be cosmetically neu tral other than the fact that I usually cannot get 5 25 black faceplates sup plied on the 3 5 drive the faceplates are gray The faceplate on the 5 25 drive is 15
17. Low Memory Directory Module Start Address KI X 08F0 DO X 0B88 X 0E01 X 0E3D X OFF4 X 106D High X FEDI Low X 2FFF 32K Banks avail 11 11 In use Low Memory Directory Module Start Address KI X 08p0 DO X 0B88 PR X 0E01 FD X 0E3D MSCO X 1015 Start X 08F0 Start X 08F0 THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 For TMQ readers here s some before and after MEMORY command display data dumps so that you can see the effects of Goben s XLR8er interface versus the Houd interface lt gt Length 2244 End Address Length X 0B87 664 X 0E00 633 X 0E3C 60 X OFF3 439 X 106C 121 X 11B3 327 lt gt Length 2156 End Address Length X 0B87 664 X 0E00 633 X 0E3C 60 X 1014 472 X 115B 327 Volume V ii Copyright 1990 Second Serial Rights Bill Brandon 534 Via Corona Mesquite TX 75150 Originally published in slightly different form in Science Software Vol 4 No 3 1988 Many professional programmers have a curious even antagonistic attitude about FORTH On the other hand contact with a FORTH enthusiast will quickly remind you that fan is short for fanatic This is a curious state of affairs and might cause some speculation about its origin As it turns out both sets of opinions about FORTH are probably justifiable This article summarizes some of what I have learned
18. PowerMail for all the different kinds of lists they need to pull from Each record has 24 user definable flags to allow total customization for your exact needs Text Merge Form Letter Module Create customized form letters and Labels with PowerMAIL 15 00 This optional module for PowerMail allows you to create customized form letters or custom labels lists etc with PowerMail Plus and any word processor that saves g text in ASCII format Very easy to use and really gets the effect you want Allows completely definable report generating from your PowerMail data PowerDraw animated TRS 80 screen graphics Easy to use Great for kids or adults 19 95 INFOWORLD 80 MICRO and 80 US magazines really loved this program when they reviewed it It does many things and is funto use as well First PowerDRAW allows you to create graphics mixed with text if desired and save them to disk It also allows you to create up to 33 frames of animation and play them like a movie It also allows you to save the graphics in several modes including BASIC listings CMD file format and others These can then be merged into your own programs etc either in BASIC or machine language Many of PowerSoft s opening screens were created with PowerDraw In fact it even creates animated opening screens like we I use in Super Utility PowerTool etc to really pep up the program It also allows you to print the screens on Epson type
19. Technologies IIT makes CMOS coprocessors compatible with Intel s 80x87 instruction set these processors use less power great for lap top application execute faster support 4 x 4 matrix transformation have thirty two 80 bit numeric registers come witha factory 5 year warranty and cost less My 386 20 AST now sports an IT 3C87 20 If you use your MS DOS machine for numeric work spreadsheets desktop publishing CAD etc and don t have a coprocessor installed consider an IIT coprocessor from MISOSYS Here s the skinny on pricing IT 2C87 100 IT 2C87 125 IT 2C87 200 IT 3CS7 20 10 Mhz AT 12 5 Mhz AT 20 Mhz AT 20 Mhz 386 IT 3C87 25 25 Mhz 386 IT 3C87 33 33 Mhz 386 IT 3C87SX 16 16 Mhz SX IT 3C87SX 20 20 Mhz SX 2C87 parts are for AT class machines using an 80286 processor 3C87 parts are for 386 machines using an 80386 proces sor 3C87SX parts are for machines using an 80386SX processor S amp His 5 in U S If you want genuine Intel coprocessors I can obtain them for about 30 more But why pay more for less ZOLTRIX FAX Modem Those of you who have been following my product line may be aware that I have been looking for a reasonably priced PC FAX board Recognizing that Group IH fax is astandard and noting that the entire protocol has been fabricated into a single chip I was waiting for advanced technol ogy to bring the price down from the 700 1000 price fax boards sold but a year ago My re
20. about FORTH and may help you decide whether it should be the primary language for your applications You can solve any problem with FORTH often more quickly than with other languages As you will see FORTH also presents some interesting challenges Most people don t realize how long FORTH has been around The language was in vented in the 1960 s originating as a set of software development tools Since that time FORTH has found a solid niche ina number of settings mostly associated with process control and productivity but with some surprising uses too The chances are good that you have seen or used items produced or controlled with the aid of FORTH The baggage handling equipment used in some airports and sort ing machinery in canneries were two early uses The camera system that produced the spectacular effects in Star Wars was programmed entirely in FORTH You Inside TMQ 36 Inside TMQ Volume Vii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii and your children play video games pro grammed in FORTH Standalone FORTH programs control heart monitors and many kinds of hospital laboratory equipment At least one large scale expert system is written in FORTH while artificial intelli gence researchers use FORTH to emulate LISP and PROLOG So why should a busy person like yourself consider FORTH Well FORTH is able to support such a wide range of applica tions because it is a fully structure
21. about the language However if you would like additional information I would recommend the following sources as a Start Kelly M and Spies N FORTH PC Tech Journal September and October 1986 A very thorough look at the architecture and Character of the language Brodie L Thinking FORTH Englewood Cliffs NJ Prentice Hall 1984 An ex cellent book on problem solving the FORTH way The author assumes you have some knowledge of and facility in FORTH however Toppen D FORTH An applications approach New York McGraw Hill 1985 This is an incredibly practical book written specifically to facilitate the introduction of FORTH into the environments of sci entific and engineering applications pro gramming It may be the most accessible book on this list even though the system used in the examples is the DEC PDP 11 Winfield A The Complete FORTH New York John Wiley amp Sons 1983 Also a very accessible text written with a dis tinctly British accent About the author Bill Brandon is the Manager Em ployee Development for Atmos En ergy Corp and one of two SYSOPs for the Computer Training Forum on CompuServe He endeavors to learn FORTH while playing guitar and rais ing his kids in Mesquite Texas x EN RADIO SHACK TANDY OWNERS Find the computer equipment that TANDY no longer sells PACIFIC COMPUTER EXCHANGE buys and sells used TANDY TRSDOS XENIX MSDOS COMPUTERS
22. amp PERIPHERALS We sell everything from Model 3 s and 4 s to Tandy 6000 s 1000 s to 5000 s Laptops and all the printers and hard disks to go with them If we don t have it in stock we will do our best to find it for you We have the largest data base of used Radio Shack equipment to draw from All equipment comes with warranty PACIFIC COMPUTER EXCHANGE The One Source For Used Tandy Computers 1031 S E Mill Suite B Portland Oregon 97214 503 236 2949 Inside TMQ 39 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Masa aki Kitajima Yamashou Haitsu C 1 1 3 3 1 Namiki Tsukuba 305 JAPAN For a long time BASIC was my major tool for program development but now MC has come to be my favorite because of its well considered portability across different models of computers The com prehensive standard functions in the MC library greatly encourages me to develop various programs because they could be recompiled with minimal changes in dif ferent computers in my company s office I appreciate the several supporting utili ties of MC and MRAS such as MC JCL MLIB CMD and XREF CMD which made MC more useful as the comprehensive tool for program development And one more such utility MAKE would also be useful but unfortunately it is not con tained in the current MC package Recently I tried to write a MAKE for MC system Included is the result of my
23. around in old issues of 80 Micro for some references 12 To record voice on disk you need to convert its analog signal to digital If you have the equipment it is possible I am not aware of any such peripheral plugging into the TRS 80 Speech is an analog waveform Perhaps one of the boards which Alpha Products makes deals with this process To store its information in a computer you need to convert it to a digital format This is done by an analog to digital con verter There is a theorem in information theory which states that it is only neces sary to sample a waveform at twice its highest frequency to accurately record its information This theorem is applied to virtually all digital communication trans missions today Somewhere the analog signal of speech gets converted to digital form If you want to limit the speech frequency to that of telephone use 300Hz to 3000K Hz I believe you would need to sample the signal at a 6000K Hz rate You would then need to record its amplitudeas a binary value With an 8 bit value you can have 256 different steps of amplitude This conversion process is best done by integrated circuits designed for the job There are some ICs which perform 12 bit A D conversion at 25MHz The playback of a digitally recorded signal is achieved with achip of the opposite characteristics one that converts digital to analog 13 amp 14 Our 720K drives are 3 5 yet I do not know what the interf
24. be deleted during the Pack process of PSORT I looked at the file and found out that only bit 4 of byte 0 will be reset when the record has been deleted all other fields remain untouched Because the Byte 0 is not part of the sort key even if it were since the bit is reset the deleted records would remain at the start of the file the deleted records re main in the middie of the file during pack and will not be wiped out of the file Do you have a patch for this Or have I missed something in TMQ ProWAM manual Please let me know Fm MISOSYS Inc No one has ever raised that issue however the answer is straightforward but probably not what you are looking for The packing facility in PRO WAM s PSORT utility relies on the appearance of an X FF value in the first byte position of arecord to recognize it as deleted You have correctly ascertained the manner in which TODO designates an active inac tive record which does not rely on this character format scheme I would be unable to come up with a patch to alter the behavior of TODO APP on the other hand it would not take too complicated a program to create a new file using the active records in the current file All one would need to do is to open the TODO DAT file with a record size of 32 read and copy the first 16 records which are the header pieces copy the remaining active records then update the number of records field in the first r
25. bps Bell 212A 1200 bps CCITT V 22 2400 bps CCITT V 22 e Compatibility Facsimile Send and receive Fax from CCITT Group II fax Machines Fax format compatible with CCITT T 30 and T 4 Group III Fax 9600 bps CCITT V 29 ter with fall back to 7200 4800 2400 CCITT V 27 ter CCITT V 21 Synchronous e Command language AT command set compatible with extensions provided for fax operations e Data format Asynchronous operation supports 7 or 8 data bits plus start stop and parity bits e Operations Full or half duplex with pulse and tone dialing Dial up or leased phone mode with auto answer mode e Audio Monitor On board monitoring with software speed control e Line equalization transmit Adaptive equalization for PSK QAM mode e Test and diagnostics Install and Test program Self Diagnostics e Modular phone jacks Two RJ11C phone connectors for phone and line e Approval FCC part 15 Class B FCC part 68 e Warranty year warranty Are you still fussing with floppies for BACKUP Our QIC40 DJ10 JUMBO tape drive from CMS is your solution The Colorado Memory Systems JUMBO tape drive is one drive that fits all computers It comes ready for intemal use in AT s XT s and PC s and connects to your floppy disk controller An adaptor board can be used to connect a DJ10 when all FDC connectors are in use Kits are available for XT AT or PS 2 machines which convert Jumbo to extemal use In abo
26. creation of what are called dithering artifacts lines and shapes in the image rendition which were not in the original which are caused by the sudden dumping of accumulated er rors If all error dispursion up to seven errors being added to each pixel is made to the actual data instead of the accumulated errors being added to the pixel all at once Strange things can happen For example suppose you have a large area which is nearly but not quite white Say allits pixels have a luminence of 253 255ths If you divide up and apply the 2 255ths error to the neighboring pixels you pull their luminences down very slowly All pixels will display white until you reach the point where a whole line has virtually all its pixels just below 128 255ths the threshold for displaying white When this happens you will get a line across the screen which will have roughly Inside TMQ 29 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 every other pixel black This will appear as a dotted line a line which was not in the original image a dithering artifact The use of the error accumulation buffers causes the accumulated errors to be dis played more quickly In the case of a large area with 253 255ths luminence the first line would have every 506th or 507th pixel black and each subsequent line would have every 126th or 127th pixel black This faster use of the error information almo
27. format The com mand is usually DO MC but other commands including DOS library com mands are permitted except the DO command other than DO MC MAKE data file can contain any number of blocks This version of MAKE checks all the file time stamps in the every first lines of the blocks before executing CC JCL CC JCL MAKE writes a Job Control Language file as its output Suppose a MAKE data file of the following exists MYPROG CMD MYPROG CCC DO MC N MYPROG C A T 0 HISPROG CMD HISPROG CCC DO MC N HISPROG LIST The resulting CC JCL generated by MAKE should look like the following job stream set C set A assign N MYPROG assign T 0 include MMC xeset C reset A xeset N ceset T set LIST assign N HISPROG include MMC reset LIST xeset N MMC JCL Some modification is desired on MC JCL MMC JCL has the modification of P preprocess only C compile only without pre processing default is drive 0 N source file which contains main N1 N2 N3 separate source files which do not contain mainQ NOMAIN indicates that the file of the subject does not contain main LY Inside TMQ 40 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume Vi Examples for usage of MAKE Compilation of a single source file MAKE data file should look like PROG TOK PROG CCC DO MC N PROG P PROG CMD PROG TOK DO MC N PROG
28. it then SYSGEN to update the default YFLAG After that is done any new re boot will have the associated drive s flag value default to new so that a subsequent new style subdisk attachment will be treated as the new style without the need for a DIR or LOG Finally it s good to catch this prior to bringing out 5 3 1 were itis mostpractical to correct the problem in BACKUP Program exit conditions Fm Hans de Wolf Dear Roy I want to report a problem which may be related to a bug in LS DOS release 6 3 1 I encoun tered the problem with Mr Slinkman s GIFMOD4 program which displays GIF formatted graphics files on the TRS 80 hires board This program creates in some cases a temporary file by means of the DOS command CREATE INTRLACE TMP irl This command is given from within the GIFMOD4 CMD pro gram via the CMNDR SVC 13 hex This worked fine under LS DOS 6 3 0 but under LS DOS 6 3 1 the program aborts with a No error message I have been able to fix the problem in the following way I extracted the create module from SYS7 SYS of LS DOS 6 3 0 with PROCESS CMD and called this MK CMD I changed the create text in GIFMOD4 CMD to run MK This solved the problem I think that this indicates that the problem is related to the exit condi tion of the new create module in LS DOS 6 3 1 The strange behavior would Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Wint
29. mentation on the IDE interface came in here s what I found The AT Interface Manual presented the IDE pinout listed in Table I The TL 2 Tech Manual doesn t provide an easy to read table showing its IDE bus but rather provides a difficult to read pinout in the schematic Nevertheless what I was able to discern there is listed in Table H I thought it s IDE interface was an indus try standard hard drive interface Here s what the 1000 TL 2 manual has to say about the TL 2 s hard drive interface Intelligent hard disk drives include logic circuitry compatible with the computer s built in IDE simply plug the hard drive s cable into the on board IDE connector Now I know an industry standard when I see one and IDE was supposed to be a standard No where in the manuals which come with the TL 2 does it mention that it s IDE interface is different from the industry standard The Radio Shack 1990 catalog on the TL 2 does not provide any clue Butitis a fact that the 1000 TL 2 has an 8 bit IDE interface So let that be a lesson to anyone with a 1000 TL 2 it doesn t have an industry standard IDE interface At this point I don t know of any other manufacturer of PCs which is using IDE as a nomenclature for any thing but the standard AT compatible interface Of course since Tandy doesn t manufacture their own drives some company should have the Tandy drive available In any event I wound up installi
30. other hand the compiler evaluates T amp F T as TRUE but F amp T T as FALSE I don t necessarily agree that is how one would assume the logic to evaluate both of these expressions should be logically equivalent But don tforget that the evalu ation of an arithmetic expression such as 3 2 4 would result in either 20 or 11 depending on the assumption of operator precedence Now for the first question You statedLS DOS 6 3 so PIL assume that you don t mean 6 3 1 Itis true that the DO compiler library module re uses the first 80 bytes starting at address 2400H as an internal line buffer But I don t believe the prob lem you had with long subsequent com mand line inputs was caused by overflow ing this buffer causing an overwrite of the subsequent code I would surmise that very few folks make use of the line con tinuation capability of the JCL command line that of terminating the line with a semicolon following a closing parenthe sis That could be why no one previously reported the bug I m not sure when the library module was restructured but if one examines page 176 of THE SOURCE Volume 2 to TRSDOS 6 2 one will detect that a pointer to the start of the command line text following the DO is saved Subsequently on page 177 at the label INBUF that pointer is picked up and decremented by two to seemingly adjust the pointer so that it points to the beginning of the 80 char acter inputbuffer But unfortunately such
31. size fits all Optional accessories provide the external box The KE10 goes for 110 That includes adap tor board case with a miniature fan connecting cable and new 3 5 faceplate The drive is powered from the host ma chine The kit also includes a power Y cable and other interconnecting ribbon cables You just insert the DJ10 into the external case and connect everything together For an external installation you need the DJ10 and external kit along with tapes CMS warrants the drives for one year The transfer rate is 500 KHz same as for a hi capacity floppy Using compression the effective transfer rate varies with the speed of the machine Incremental back ups are easily done but you can t just write over an old copy of a file you can erase the tape or quick erase it which just nulls the directory The TAPE program allows you to selectively backup to tape as well as selectively restore from tape Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Everything is menu driven Background archiving is done with a scheduler TSR As I said if you are going to archive on a delayed schedule does it matter how fast it does it If you really need speed get a DAT drive for about 10 times the cost Em Shane Dawalt Wait a minute let me get this straight The adaptor card plugs into the FDC board I thought this adap tor card was a self contained card i e
32. struggle around MC and MC JCL I hope it is helpful for MC users _MAKE is of course you know a famous utility which checks the file date time stamp and recompiles the program if there is found any revision of source files For tunately LS DOS supports file time stamps and then it is now possible to know whether the source file is younger than the object file or not That is the DOS environment is welcoming a MAKE I suppose Fol lowing is the explanation about my ver sion of MAKE Invoking MAKE Under LSDOS Ready prompt type MAKE filespec e ENTER where filespec is the name of MAKE data file MAK file and it must have neither extension nor drivespec e is an op tional parameter If itis specified MAKE writes a necessary JCL file but does not execute it MAKE automatically executes it if the parameter is not specified MAKE data file MAKE reads a MAKE data file which has an extension of MAK to get to necessary information to follow A MAKE data file has the format as follows FILE A FILE B FILE 4Z COMMAND FILE a FILE b FILE z COMMAND MAKE data file is consisted on two line block configuration The first line of a block is a list of files A maximum of ten files are permitted MAKE checks the files date time stamps and if the first file in the line is not the newest of all MAKE writes the command in the second line to a JCL file CC JCL with necessary modification in the
33. the BANK SVC due to the fact that the computer s operating system must always be resi dent Of the original Houd patches the al terations to SYSO SYS are relatively unchanged from his code except for an additional initialization routine to set up our new BUR mask I found no need to change tasker patches or math enhance ments By default the code is set up to 1 memory wait state 1 I O wait state and the interval of refresh cycle set to 40 However I have mine boot up with an interval of refresh cycle of 80 and have experienced no problems at all I am using it on a Model 4D with an RS HiRes board Thus I must use a 6 ribbon for the XLR8er and have shielded the ribbon with kitchen aluminum foil and masking tape otherwise the XLR8er would ref use to run without locking up I have also tested it on 2 of my other Model 4 s and my Model 4P If you want to change the patch for a refresh interval of 80 all you need to do is change the 02 in the line within the XLSYSOB1 FIX file begin ning with D10 34 to 03 12th data item from the left The most obvious difference comes in the patches to BOOT SYS Mainly the bulk of my patches center on relative sector 6 over writing the old BANK routine code THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 The 33 bytes of needed extended code deal basically with 12 bytes to finish up the new BANK routine and the re maining 21 bytes being the new VDCTL setup as writte
34. the time to get your own copy E Super Utility has over 65 functions and features Too many to describel A fantastic buy Does not work on hard disks Our ToolBox or ToolBelt has similar features I for hard drive use as well as floppy SU does not support Newdos 80 double sided disks I Specify Model I II or Model 4 4D 4P 4 S amp H 34 95 LDOS ToolBox Hard Disk Check Repair Modify much more Like a SU for hard disk 24 95 f Ifyou own a hard disk anduse LDOS this is the perfect insurance policy foryour data The LDOS TOOLBOX is like a Super Utility for hard disks Features Disk Check i and Disk Repair Sector Modification plus many many other useful utilities that makes using a hard drive even easier Each program contains a builtin help command so many times you don t even need to look things up in the manual just press lt Enter gt for help A very wise buy for hard disk users Model 4 Tool Belt same for Model 4 DOS 6 use OK for 6 3 Like a SU for hard disk 24 95 This is similar to the LDOS TOOLBOX except it is for the Model 4 TRSDOS 6 operating system all versions Back Rest Super Fast Hard Disk Backup and Restore Saves hoursof time For L IM or 4 34 95 BACK REST has proven to be a great time saver for thousands of TRS 80 hard drive users When reviewed by 80 MICRO they gave it FIVE STARS perfect It saves hours of time and is very easy to use BACK REST can back up 10 megabytes in about 10 minut
35. their hardware Fm Alan Varga Roy I don t expect you to work on anybody else s problems I just thought that since you were so familiar with LS DOS that there might have been a Single value in the boot up routine that I could have twiddled on my own if you could only tell me where I ll check back with Anitek and see if they re willing to work up something If not PIL have to bend up their chip and do a little solder ing Fm MISOSYS Inc Alan I pointed you into the right direction We have sold THE SOURCE for many years and cop ies of the three volume set are still avail able at 40 set There is no reason on earth why someone who produces an add on hardware product which needs soft ware support cannot simply obtain acopy of THE SOURCE and do their stuff rather than leaving it to the brunt of their cus tomers who invariably wind up calling on my assistance THE SOURCE makes it easy to find where changes need to occur Fm Alan Varga Roy I didn t stop to consider that they might have the re sources THE SOURCE tocreate a patch to 6 3 1 readily available I ll give them a call and let you know what they have to say if anything Thanks for the sugges tion Letters to MISOSYS Fm Ralf Folkerts Roy I have a little problem with ProW AM s TODO DAT I can t pack it I just looked at a few back issues of TMQ but haven t found a patch for this When I delete a record by Done it will not
36. there was a register pair on the stack when a RET was performed by the error handler The following patch should correctly handie the TYPE MISMATCH error generation PATCH BC D25 9C C4 F25 9C C2 This is for the Model 4 version That changes the JP NZ to CALL NZ which picks up the correct code sequence to exit from FIELD compiling An equivalent patch designated BC56 FIX for the Model LH version of BC CMD would be the Letters to MISOSYS LO UA A LL mata Volume V 1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii following PATCH BC D25 89 C4 F25 89 C2 I have no patches to CED to force BLH and ELS DO bugs Fm Adam Rubin I m back Anyway I think I ve found two previously undis covered bugs in 6 3 s DO command At least the second also seems to be in 5 x On the second or subsequent lines of parameters if the parameters typed take up the entire length of the input line or even one character less the system crashes The init code at X 2400 intentionally gets reused as a line buffer but a long parameter line also overwrites a few bytes of code following this According to the manual logical opera tors are evaluated strictly left to right So if T is a logical true and F is a logical false then F amp T T would be evaluated as F amp T T and F amp T is false so we get F T and the entire expression would be considered true Also T F amp F would be evaluated as T F
37. version It has some bells amp whistles that would really make LB a real extra fine winner more so than it is now Also what does the CHR 27 and CHR 26 do to the AUTO JOB key strokes Do they take the place of F3 to save Looking up the character codes CHR 27 gives a SHIFT up Arrow or CTRL and CHR 26 gives a SHIFT down Arrow or CTRL Z which CTRL Z is the way to end a JOB file Fm MISOSYS Inc Glad to see that you were easily successful with the task of combining the two data bases Your pro gram is another illustration for which other LB users may find some hints As far as the special character values all you need to do is just think about what keystrokes you manually strike to cause 22 Volume V ii Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii an ADD of a record From the MAIN MENU you enter a 2 for the ADD command That s where your first 2 comes from You correctly noted that your LB data base must have a default screen assigned if not then the next query from LB would be for you to enter that screen number By having it as a default established via menu command 11 you don t need it in the AUTO file After 2 invokes the ADD command the next input is a selection from the Add mode scan menu Your A designates the Add option From that point on each field is entered for the record to be added But
38. x 2 This means each TRS 80 pixel must contain the informa tion from 4 1 2 MacPaint pixels Since we are combining 4 5 Mac pixels into one TRS 80 pixel we no longer have a simple monochrome image MAC2HR converts the values to ten greyscales ranging from 0 which represents black to 9 which represents white Since the Model 4 can display only two greyscales a technique called dither ing is used to display the luminence information another way specifically by substituting spacial resolution for lu minence MAC2HR uses the latestand best method of dithering called error disbursion dith ering The errors to be disbursed are the difference between what is supposed to be displayed and what is actually dis played For example say we need to display a pixel which has a luminence of 100 255ths of maximum white Yetthe TRS 80 can only display 0 255ths and 255 25Sths Since 100 is closer to O than itis to 255 we will display 0 255ths black and the error is 100 255ths Another pixel has a lu minence of 240 25Sths so we display 255 255ths white and the error is 15 255ths This error is disbursed to neighboring currently undisplayed pixels in a set manner determined by a filter MAC2HR uses the Slinkman Filter which was designed for the TRS 80 s 1 2 aspect ratio pixels Filters are based on the fact that light intensity diminishes in propor tion to the square of the distance from t
39. 00 307 00 IT 3C87 20 349 00 IT 3C87 25 447 00 IT 3C87 33 545 00 IT 3C87SX 16 354 00 IT 3C87SX 20 385 00 IIT s CMOS coprocessors use less power execute faster support 4 x 4 matrix transformation have thirty two 80 bit numeric registers come with a factory 5 year warranty and cost less If you use your machine for spreadsheets desktop publishing CAD etc consider an IIT coprocessor For XT s or AT s with a math coprocessor socket Installation instructions included S amp H is 5 EXPANZ Disk Expander Card With the new EXPANZ data compression card you can boost hard disk capacity up to three times EXPANZ plugs into any open slot and i intercepts calls to and from the disk controllers Compresses and decompresses in real time Requires PC XT AT or compatible running DOS 3 x Just 179 10 6S amp H 6 3 1 has something for Za LS DQS X DATE SVC now support a date range of 32 years from January 1 1980 through December 31 2011 i generation with SYSTEM PRTIME ON OFF tt mand to display 12 hr or 24 hr clock time with SYS TEM AMPM ON OFF vx Both ASCII and hexadecimal display output from the LIST command is paged a screen at a time Or run it l MEMORY displays or prints the status of switchable memory banks known to the DOS as well as a map of modules resident in I O driver system memory and Specify SYSTEM DRIVE d1 SWAP d2 to switch drive d1 for d2 Eith
40. 2nds weight table When the A register is copied to the Inside TMQ Volume V ii Inside TMQ Volume Vii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume Vi E register DE points to the precalculated weight which is roughly equal to 10 32nds of the error This value is then added to the byte in CUMERRI which corresponds to the pixel one to the right of the source pixel Incrementing D makes DE point to the appropriate weight in the 6 32nds table This value is picked up and added to the appropriate bytes in CUMERRI and CUMERR2 This process is repeated to disburse the 3 32nds and 2 32nds weights in similar fashion After the line is dithered CUMERR2 is copied to CUMERRI where this accu mulated error data will be used to modify the next line and CUMERR 2 is cleared to hold fresh next line data from the next line to be dithered Next at COMPRES the high order bits of the 384 dithered luminences are packed into 48 bytes for writing to the hi res board This reflects the fact that 128 is the threshold for white Now you know why we converted from 9ths to 255ths back at CONVERT At DISPLAY the graphics board s X and Y registers are set up for the proper row and column numbers and the 48 bytes are written to the hi res board via an OTIR instruction The board was set up for auto clock X on write at the end of CLRGFX remember Now the line counter is popped off the stack and examined to determine whet
41. 4 Ground 15 SOI 16 Ground 17 SOO 18 Ground 19 Ground 20 Key 21 AEN ata 2 data 1 data 0 Unused pin clipped Host address latch ena blereserved 22 Ground 23 HIOW 24 Ground 25 HIOR 26 Ground 27 DACK3 28 NC 29 DRQ3 30 Ground 31 HDIRQ Host I O write strobe Host I O read strobe Interrupt request drive to host 32 NC 33 SA1 34 NC 35 SAO 36 NC 37 HDCS 38 NC 39 NC 40 Ground Host I O address line Host I O address line 0 Host 1 O chip select acronym for at least two different state ments Integrated Drive Electronics and Intelligent Drive Electronics I popped a 40 megabyte IDE Seagate ST157A drive into the 3 5 slot I could not get it to work I called Tandy support in Fort Worth and they were unable to offer assistance because the ST157A wasn t their drive I called Seagate customer support who had no experience with the Tandy 1000 TL 2 So I proceeded to investigate the situation on my own behalf I ordered the Tech manual for the 1000 TL 2 from Tandy National Parts and talked Seagate out of 3 an AT Interface Manual which documents the IDE interface While waiting for the manuals I acquired an AT compatible IDE host adaptor a Seagate STO7A I then replaced the hard drive and MFM controller in my 386 machine with the IDE host adaptor and ST157A hard drive The drive formatted partitioned and worked correctly so I knew nothing was wrong with the hardware When the docu
42. 80 PO Box 680 Casper WY 82602 PowerSoft Products from MISOSYS Inc i SUPER UTILITY PLUS The greatest utility ever written for the TRS 80 Every TRS 80 magazine has said so Five Star Excellent Reviews in 80 MICRO 80 US INFOWORLD POPULAR ELECTRONICS FAMILY COMPUTING Creative Computing amp more If you use a TRS 80 with disk drives then this is a must have program that you will wonder how you did without for so long Super Utility has won numerous awards E has received many 5 Star reviews and this could be your last chance to purchase a copy at this unheard of price Super Utility does so many things you will never use E its full potential but it isn t that hard to use since it is completely menu driven with the most common defaults built right in It is configurable for all the popular TRS I I 80 operating systems and will even allow you to set one drive for one system and another drive for a different operating system and copy files easily between the two E Even between Model I and III or 4 regardless of density track number number of sides or system used We have thousands of letters in our files over the years about how Super Utility has saved the user from various problems Super Utility removes or decodes passwords strips them right off a disk in one pass reformats a disk without g erasing the data fixes problems backs up most protected disks etc This was the very best utility ever written for the TRS 80 and now is
43. ATTRIB command Cer tainly patches can be applied to BOOT SYS formatted by MSCSIF6 but a pro gram which uses LSIDOS as a pass word needs to be corrected or you can change the password of BOOT SYS back to LSIDOS see ATTRIB You can also patch MSCSIF6 using the fixes printed in TMQ V i to change MSCSIF6 s setting of the password to SYSTEM6 from LSIDOS such that thenext time you use it to format a partition the password will be the S YSTEM6 password used in LS DOS 6 3 1 Letters to MISOSYS My understanding of XLR8SET is that it replaces the BOOT SYS and DIR SYS patches of the Houd software interface The use of XLR8SET should not inhibit the use of ERAMDISK If you want to create a ram drive as the system drive that can be done from a JCL file To make a JCL run upon BOOT use an AUTO command of the form AUTO DO STARTUP JCL Then the JCL file contains whatever commands you want to have invoked in the job stream If you are using M A D s XLRSSET command you can pass that auto JCL in the same command line or invoke XLR8SET as the first command of the job stream See XLR8SET s documentation Finally to expect all us ers to use the same hardware and software would be extremely unrealistic and ex tremely dull Variety is the spice of life Besides it keeps all of us on our toes DOS Directory structure Fm Carl Berger Dear Roy I have two more challenges for you or your r
44. C A 1 MAKE data file should look like MAIN REL MAIN CCC DO MC N MAIN P C A MODULE REL MODULE CCC DO MC N MODULE P C A NOMAIN MAIN CMD MAIN REL MODULE REL DO MC N MAIN N1 MODULE L Revision of libraries MAKE data file should look like PROG CMD LIBC REL DO MC N PROG CAUTION Because MC is fairly a large system it is recommended that a hard disk or a RAM disk is used for both the system drive and the drive for the tempo rary files Because MAKE requires files on such drives to have the time stamps all the drives should have DOS 6 format Especially a RAM disk should be DATE CONV ed before use except for Michel Houd s ERAMDISK which is my fa vorite Thank you Michel Sample MAKE data file to make MAKE CMD make cmd make ccc o mc n make t 0 k Inside TMQ 41 Inside TMQ est rere em sa Volume V ii Inside TMG THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii 42 MC JCL A revised version 11 23 88 by Masa aki Kitajima if P amp C amp A amp L set P _ set C aet A set L end 1 N ERROR Must specify N progname qait end 1 D assign D 1 end if T assign T 0 end 4 P Preprocess N CCC D to N TOK T mep N D o T gt ERRORS ccc ET end 1 C if mp mel N T mc2 N T o T else 1 CC mc NH T e to T gt ER RORS CCC T
45. EE oe ee e a a Volume V ii Help with Monty Plays Monopoly Fm Irwin B Burton 4156 S Pagosa Ct Aurora CO 80013 Dear Roy I wanted to include just a quick note with my order for GO SYS Through the years I have become a proud owner of several MISOSYS products I have also had the opportunity of writing to you with questions and you have al ways been most helpful I want to thank you for your support of what I consider to be a fine machine I want to congratulate you on another year of The MISOSYS Quarterly I devour every issue Of this publication from cover to cover then go back and re read all the old issues while I wait for the new one Keep up the good work I also want to congratulate you on your acquisitions of the LS DOS DoubleDuty and other 8 bit products I have wondered for some time if I should just follow the crowd and jump on the MS DOS caravan But my 4P with 512K of AT memory and now 2TEAC double sided 40 track drives does about all I need to do And with the continued support of people like you I think PLL hang on to my 4 P for a little longer So from a person still into LS DOS computing THANKS I do have a question that maybe if you do not have the answer could be shared with other readers of TMQ Has anyone been successful in converting the Monty Plays Monopoly program to the LDOS environ ment It comes on TRSDOS 1 3 which was OK for a Model III with 48K of Ram But I nearly drool
46. EN into a standard 2 floppy drive configuration I enter the date and push lt ENTER gt at the time prompt The easiest test is to do a DIR 7 The result I keep getting is Error 22H whichis both the wrong code and wrong type of mes Letters to MISOSYS sage I enclose a copy of printout of some operations directly following a boot as per above The Error 22H in the DE VICE command is not constant which is worrying I also get very weird results if I have an erroneous drive or parameter in FOR MAT usually starting with an Error 22H and then a sequence of extended error messages followed by a system hang With a legal command such as COPY Filename Ext Bak which works with a 6 3 0 floppy I also geta variety of differ ent results and the system usually hangs I haven t tried other commands but it seems clear enough that I have at least 1 clobbered system file somewhere or something else is very wrong Accordingly I return my master disk I d appreciate a refreshed disk which doesn t do these things Please let me know if you Bs need any further information Thank you for your continued support Fm MISOSYS Inc Walter Attached is a copy Of a letter I sent on September 20 1990 along with a replacement 6 3 1 diskette to LS DOS 6 3 1 Level 1H re cipients We have discovered that a small corrup tion of two system files occurred in the creation of the master disk used to gener ate
47. FORTH far better efficiency than other languages As you may have noticed in TURN RIGHT FORTH uses Reverse Polish Notation RPN That is a value to be operated on appears before the operator In other words to add two plus two in FORTH the expression is written 2 2 like the old HP calculators This is done for the sake of speed in arithmetic computations and for ease of execution Getting usedto RPN is mostly a matter of time and discipline Third and more serious for the new user of FORTH there is almost no built in error handling Depending on the nature of the mistake you may get off with a simple or Stack empty message Other errors have more disastrous results FORTH may crash orit may go off to La La Land and take your data with it It seems to be very easy to accidentally overwrite or erase vital system informa tion You have to build in your own error traps and messages FORTH will not protect you The absence of run time error Checking keeps FORTH simple and flexible and gives you absolute control of all parts of your system at all times In deed FORTH makes you totally respon sible for the efficiency and proper func tioning of the system The experienced programmer avoids problems by using FORTH s structure each word is tested as it 1S built so when the application is finished debugging is complete Until you achieve this level of skill think of your confusion and system crashes as ma
48. I replace the PAL chip U3 Ican t get past the 6 3 x logo without locking up I called Anitek and they had two suggestions First there is a one line program which can be run in Model III BASIC after booting with lt SHIFT gt lt BREAK gt It is 10 POKE 16912 40 PRINT PEEK 16912 POKE 16912 104 PRINT PEEK 16912 GOTO 10 This program runs fine at 6 7 mHz so they are sure that all of my chips are OK Their other suggestion was that my DOS has a timing problem during the booting process Anitek isrunning DOSPLUS 3 5 on a hard disk but I want to run 6 3 1 from floppy They think that LS DOS isn t waiting long enough for a response back from the drive controller before trying to read whatever comes after the bootstrap routines Is there a patch I can make to verify this Em Roy Soltoff Alan What makes you Letters to MISOSYS 12 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii think that Tam going to work up apatch PRO WAiW s TODO DAT EnhComp FIELD bug In this day and age when a vendor of hardware add ons to a Model 4 doesn t and PSORT even support the standard DOS for the machine I don t think that is very wise For Anitek to claim they don t know of the problem because they use DOSPLUS on the Model 4 is ridiculous I am not going to spend my precious time running down a problem with someone s speedup kit Let them work it out if they want to sell
49. If you don t already own it maybe now is to time to think about acquiring DoubleDuty it turns a 128K or greater machine into two partitions with a third able to invoke DOS library commands This lets you run two programs concurrently switching between either at the flick of a function key It doesn t support multi tasking so only the foreground application receives CPU time But DoubleDuty does let you run two programs such as Multi plan and Superscripsit without having two terminate one to run the other DoubleDuty is 49 95 2 S amp H U S rttrr r rrFr ern MISOSYS 20 or 40 MB Hard v a e 20 Megabyte kit 475 Drives for your Model III or 4 uns H i Our 15 5 x 7 x 5 25 LWH beige drive case has space for two half height drives 115V q Joystick option 20 j 230V 60 watt power supply and fan hard disk controller HDC host adaptor and a 50 pin LDOS software interface 30 x SCSI female connector for the host interface Our host adaptor sports a hardware real time e Piece Parts k clock With its internal battery lifetime in excess of 10 years never enter date and time again 20 Meg drive KL320 200 i A joystick port option adds a Kraft MAZEMASTER joystick with a port interface identical a san 40 Meg drive ST 251 1 320 I j to the old Alpha Products joystick thus any software which operated from that joystick will sc aca ds Doves tung 125 j i operate from thi
50. LS DOS 6 3 1 Level 1H The level string appears only when you start up your system The twocorrupted files were SYS6 SYS and SYS4 SYS A corrupt 6 3 1 1H would have a file date of August 30th 1990 for the SYS6 SYS file The problem has been corrected by gener ating a new master disk It is believed that you may have been the recipient of the corrupted version as your order was shipped subsequent to August 30th and prior to the detection of the problem The disk enclosed with this letter is a correct version of 6 3 1 1H Please trans fer your serial number from the corrupt version to this disk and destroy the cor rupt version All copies of the master which you have made need tobe updated You may do this by simply copying the two corrected files from this new diskette to any of your copies Do this with the two commands COPY SYS4 SYS SYSTEM6 S D COPY SYS6 SYS SYSTEME6 S D The strings S and D refer to your source and destination drive numbers Note I m human In the letter which was sent even the patch line had a mistype both lines referenced S YS6 Incidentally I believe that I sent a replacement disk to all affected parties If you still have this kind of problem get in touch with me Letters to MISOSYS Volume V 1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V H BASIC s CMD Fluke Fm Ted Williams This message goes out to all who may have ideas havingrun into the same pr
51. Last January I purchased the POWER SOFT PowerDot II program from MI SOSYS The program is still shrink wrapped since I was winding up my work in prepa ration for retirement at the time I have only recently noticed that it was marked for EPSON amp compatible printers Is this the correct version to work with my TANDY 2120 printer Itisa 24 pin printer having IBM 2 character set mode TANDY character set mode and graphics mode from old advertisements it appears to be derived from the FUJITSU DL DLC 2400 printer I would appreciate your com ment Congratulations on your MS DOS utili ties advertisement in the September 1990 issue of PCM magazine hope it isa sign of longevity for MISOSYS Let me know if your DED86 program would be com patible with my MS DOS computer It is a TANDY 2000 that is not 100 IBM PC compatible The principal difference appears to be video addressing and proc essing The CPU chip is 80186 Directly addressable memory is 896K via a cus tom modification of IO SYS It has TANDY s machine specific high resolu tion circuit board with machine specific color chips TANDY s CM 1 RGB color monitor in graphics mode has a high resolution of 640 horizontal pixels by 400 vertical pixels anda low resolution of 320 horizontal pixels by 200 vertical pixels Total colors are 16 including black In high resolution mode the border is black one color is background and six colors are available for foreground in
52. RCHECK noted in TMQ IV i however you claim that you solved the problem by reformatting using 153 cylinder partitions except that eight granules of cylinder 77 showed up as an error That was exactly the problem Without the corrective patch applied DIRCHECK would show an error for the entire cylinder of the hard drive directory For you to let DIRCHECK fix it was the worst thing you could do That probably de allocated the directory cylinder in the granule allocation table GAT At some future point in time some other file will get assigned to that cylinder and over write the directory A word to the wise for using any repair utility know what it is doing or why it is reflecting an error before attempting automated corrective action I suggest that you check the actual GAT of that directory to make sure the directory cylinder is allocated and not to any file other than DIR SYS You should be able to use MAPPER DIRCHECK and FREE to check up on that Inciden tally I do not know what DISKOP CMD is I am not aware of any disk optimizer de fragger available for the TRS 80 But then that doesn t mean such a tool does not exist When you format a disk itis the formatter which sets up the information in the direc tory for the BOOT SYS and DIR SYS files When files are backed up to that disk other than a mirror image backup the password entries for those files remain unchanged But they are easily changed by use of the
53. SYS file to 16 sectors containing file structures 128 file capacity and two more for other data As two sided disk drives were developed the DOS employed the concept of a cylinder coupling like numbered tracks on each head to a cylin der of the same number Another thing ofinterestin the DOS stems from the ability of the floppy disk control ler FDC to encode a particular address mark in the header information of each sector cn the diskette The floppy disk drive was first designed by IBM Their design introduced the concept of two types of sectors a standard data sector and a deleted data sector These flags if you will were encoded in the header record of each sector Intuitively the deleted data sector flag indicated that that particular sector was not in use When Western _ Digital developed their 1771 FDC they allowed for four distinct data address marks Our TRS 80 DOS made use of two of these marks one was used to indicate a data sector the other was used to indicate a directory sector When a read sector command is completed by the FDC it provides the state of the address mark in the completion status The DOS makes use Of this information such that if it thinks it is reading the directory but gets the wrong address mark it will assume that it wasn t reading the right location Conversely if the DOS reads what it expects to be a standard data sector but gets the address mark indicating a direc tory sect
54. Straightforward With backups in hand you have to de install any expanded memory managers Then you have to run CHKDS Kon the drive partitions you wish to compress to ensure that no cross links are found You then run the install pro gram This process creates for you a SAFETY disk and an ICONVERT disk Infochip Systems even provides preprinted labels to apply to your disks The SAFETY disk is used if you ever develop a problem with the Expanz card it emulates the decompression in software to provide a means for data recovery The ICONVERT disk is used when you want to compress a disk partition you can also run ICON VERT from your hard disk Using release 1 0 of the provided soft ware I eventually found out that I was unable to boot after compressing drive C my boot partition This problem was quickly resolved by the release of version 1 1 of the software The SAFETY disk and my tape backups provided for a fault less recovery The Expanz card implementation is not without its demerits its driver took up 44384 bytes of low memory memory in the 640K region It s memory needs are based on the number of DOS buffers specified in your CONFIG SYS file multi plied by the largest sector size in use on your drive After installing the board and its driver I had two programs I could no longer run ReadRight from OCR sys tems needs about 570 kbytes of free memory Taking the 44k away from what was left after loading MS
55. THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY A In this issue Image processing on the TRS 80 Model 4 by J F R Frank Slinkman New XLR8er patches for LS DOS 6 3 1 by David Goben FORTH A language for every application by Bill Brandon A MAKE utility for MC by Masa aki Kitajima t Plus our normal Letters to MISOSYS information on Infochip System s Expanz board and Zol trix s ZOFAX 96 24 now available from MISOSYS MISOSYS will be closed December 22nd through January 2nd Volume V ii 10 Winter 1990 1991 It s BOUNCEOIDS Utilizing your newly issued class 4 annihilator you must reduce the massive BOUNCEOID BOULDERS to cosmic dust BEWARE They bounce off of walls like giant pool balls and the smallest touch means instant death And as an added complication terrible shaking bugs come slithering out of null space to crunch you into bug lunch If you can prove yourself worthy you will be challenged by the mysterious alien invaders in a nerve grinding test of incredible coordination and tar se geting skills Will you survive Just 7 48 until March 31st Become a Crazy Painter and create a master piece 1 JOW can A mischievous puppy snakes and poisonous turpentine buckets force changes in your painting In higher skill levels paint eaters start chewing up your work Sud denly everyone s a critic Can you overcome them And on top of it all in the Exclusive Challenge Mode you have to catch an arm
56. ace is on the 102 or the 600 thus I can t provide an affirmative 15 amp 16 The 720K 3 5 drives could be the primary drives if you so desire Just replace the ones internal if you want to BOOT off of them Or use the SYSTEM command of LDOS to switch the external drive with the internal drive number Two drives can be connected external to a Model 4 4D or 3 a 4P needs hardware modifications to add an external floppy port 17 LDOS TOOL BOX is not the same as Super Utility Plus it is a collection of programs that have features similar to some of the features in SU The TOOL BOX will work on hard drives SU will not 18 PowerMAIL has a label printing command single or multi across 19 If you got attempt to load read only Letters to MISOSYS 18 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii memory when trying to invoke a pro gram under LDOS 5 3 most likely you were trying to invoke a Model 4 program It is not wise to have a hard drive inter faced to two DOS versions with both versions having access to alternate DOS executable programs Isolate the execut ables to system partitions known only to its respective owner 20 I believe that MicroLabs sells a black jack program 21 amp 22 Both PowerDraw and Power Dot are Model III version programs which work under LDOS PowerDRAW is used to create screen images which can be merged with
57. act file being read it s job is only to translate drive cylinder sector information to what is necessary to communicate with the controller If a normal file was stored in the cylinder space unused by the direc tory any attempt to read one of its sectors would return an error 6 So it is necessary to allocate the entire cylinder of a hard drive where the directory is stored A hard drive could have up to 256 sectors per cylinder so it could conceivably waste 222 sectors of space Now we get to the point where problems in ERN get serious Early hard drive for matters overlooked entering the correct ERN for the DIR SYS file in the ERN field when the drive was formatted This caused no problems when the drive parti tion being formatted contained only 32 sectors it was correct If it contained 64 sectors programs which read DIR SYS until EOF read past the last directory record That s wrong Ifa drive contained 256 sectors per cylinder the ERN was erroneously entered as zero That s be cause the calculation for cylinder size only used an 8 bit register which over flows to zero for an exact valucof 256 An attempt to read that DIR SYS file gets one an EOF for the first sector These prob lems were soon fixed but programs still exist which incorrectly calculate the length of the directory Now then let s look at file size First a question What do you really want to find out when asking the size of a file Are you inte
58. active on either of the DoubleDuty Version 2 6 0 Have extended memory my to the DOS The SPOOL command now permits the BANK parameter entry to range from 0 30 instead of 0 7 Alter the logical record length ofa file with RESET filespec LRL n Specify RESET filespec DATE OFF to restore a file s directory entry to the old style dating of pre 6 3 release Specify RESET filespec DATE ON to es tablish a file s directory date as that of the current system date and time Felt uncomfortable with the alleged protection scheme of 6 3 LS DOS 6 3 1 has no anti piracy protec tion MISOSYS trusts its customers to honor our copyrights Best of all a 6 3 1 diskette is available as a replace ment for your 6 3 0 diskette for 15 plus 2 S amp H in US There s no need to return your current master The 6 3 1 diskette comes with a 30 day warranty written customer support is available for 30 days from the purchase date Versions for the Model 4 and Model II 12 are available If you do not already have an LS DOS 6 3 0 order the 6 3 1 Upgrade Kit with 90 days of customer support for 39 95 2 S amp H bleDuty master disk to MISOSYS for a disk refresh the fee is 10 plus S amp H 2 in U S amp Canada 3 elsewhere It doesn t matter if your DoubleDuty was purchased from Radio Shack or direct from MISOS YS I ll take it either way and convert it into a 2 6 0 expanded memory literate version
59. ages which don t explain Z 80 op code most of them don t and replaces unwieldy explanations in Tandy packages Presented in Chris famous common sense style neatly printed with bold headings and intelligent page layout for quick and easy reference A must for all programmers and students of assembly language Includes A Detailed descriptions of all instructions their operands sizes timing and effect on ags Technical notes on all registers flags addressing modes execution timing plus many other interesting details Complete alpha numeric cross reference listings of all mnemonics operands and the corresponding machine codes and the clever Chris Own Quick Reference Table 62 pages bibliography only 12 95 Add 3 S amp H US 4 Canada AK HI PR APO FPO 6 Overseas PUBLISHED AND DISTRIBUTED BY COMPUTER NEWS 80 PO BOX 680 CASPER WY 82602 FREE DISKS WITH YOUR SUBSCRIPTION ORDER TO Computer News amp 0 Subscribe to Computer News 80 for one year 12 Monthly issues and we will send you a white box of 10 premium 5 1 4 double single sided double density disks with sleeves and labels A 7 90 value absolutely FREE with your first issue Subscription rates are 24 in US for 12 issues 35 50 in Canada 36 all other Offer expires October 31 1990 so hurry Write FREE DISKS on your order Send Check or Money Order Sorry no credit card orders to Computer News
60. amp F T amp F false In that case why does TEST JCL set T reset F if F amp T T F amp T T is TRUE else F amp T T is FALSE end if T F amp F T F amp F is TRUE else T F amp F is FALSE end get compiled to TEST JCL F amp T T is FALSE T F amp F is TRUE It looks like the code a considers a line to be false as soon as it encounters false and and b effectively puts parenthe ses around all values ANDed together Am I misinterpreting the manual some where Or are these indeed bugs Thanks for any comments or suggestions Fm MISOSYS Inc Let me respond to your second query first since it is easier to explain Correctness is a term which when applied to logic requires some fundamental premises It is true that both the Job Control Language logical evalu ation in both LDOS and LS DOS pro ceeds strictly on a left to right basis with no hierarchy of operators But it is also true that in its evaluation symbol AND string will be treated as logically false if symbol is FALSE If symbol is TRUE then the expression analyzer continues to examine the value of the next symbol in string This is how the compiler has been implemented since day one thus without any knowledge to the contrary itisneces sary to only improve the documentation In the evaluation of any compound expression the expression will be FALSE 1f the left hand symbol of an AND is false On the
61. and several other type of printers Lastly E i PowerDraw has the ability to load in many types of TRS 80 graphic s and convert them to BASIC listings like a BASIC program generator PowerDOT 2 0 for printers Mix text with graphics no problem Buildnewfonts 3S amp H 19 95 I This program is similar to PowerDraw but quite different It allows you to create hi res type screen graphics combined with text and allows you to create drawings much larger than your screen The screen is a window to a much larger drawing area and you use the arrow keys to move about the drawing In a way it is similar E i to Macpaint for the Macintosh computer It also allows you to create custom fonts for ads etc Many of our early ads were created with PowerDot It creates the hi res effect due to each TRS 80 block pixel being printed as a single dot Please specify if EPSON Okidata Prowriter or Radio Shack printer l PowerDriver Plus for SuperSCRIPSIT and SCRIPSIT PRO and Epson printers 17 95 Allows EPSON or compatible printers to be fully utilized with SuperScripsit This is a replacement driver for the ones you got with SuperScripsit It fully supports the various Epson and Epson compatible printers to the limits of their capabilities Model I III or 4 is supported in the same package Easy to install Once installed works without any extra thinking Thousands of happy customers Unless otherwise noted include 2S amp H per program pa
62. at space the Error changed to Empty then it was back again a few commands later Also some of the files are not displayed when mapper is run Is mapper just a program that dis plays where the files are saved on disk Concerning the problem with DIRCHECK d H also from GO MTC I read about the problem in TMQ IV ii p 55 and had the same thing happen to me I was only having the problem with drive partitions above 153 Cyl so I re formatted using 153 Cyl and that prob 9 lem was solved Except for 8 Granules of Cyl 77 old DIR used this space allocated but not used Which I let DIRCHECK fix and it did I guess when using 154 Cyl the space per Cyl was not enough for the 32k DIR SYS file Are there any programs that do maintenance on hard drives And what will a disk optimizer do for my hard drive I have a file called DISKOP CMD On another subject my BOOT SYS amp DIR SYS files were created by MSCSIF6 the high level formatter for MISOSYS s hard drive Can patches to BOOT SYS be applied to this version of BOOT SYS Note this version has PW of LSIDOS but the DIR SYS is SYSTEM6E I ask because I use M A D Software s HD auto boot track and would like to install Houde s patches to BOOT SYS M A D has XLR8SET CMD which installs their patches to boot and sysO once they are in memory BUT that wont work if I want to create a ERAMDISK to be used as a system disk will it Would like to create an ERAM
63. be selected as drive 2 and adding an inter face cable which I m sure you sell The Model 4 hard disk kit is a real pleasure to use and with the XLR8er itis an awesome machine I finally got around to using the DUAL parameter in the HD20INIT JCL hard disk initialization file Wow hiding LDOS 5 3 away sure helps me maintain filename sanity adding 6 and 5 to them was driving me crazy Anyway the reason I am writing is be cause I have managed to re write the LS DOS 6 3 1 versions of Monsieur Michel Houd s XLRSer patches so that they take up only 33 bytes of low RAM as opposed to the original 121 This represents a ing the computer to do double duty on the BANK routines by the fact of providing two separate routines for similar func tions one set for the the standard 128K configuration and another for the 256K mounted on the XLR8er board In later reflection upon this I wondered why we could not do both with a set of common routines After all retrieving the cur rently active bank testing reserving and releasing banks did not actually access the bank switching code as selecting a bank did So why use different code T ee O ee eee ee eee eee eee TH A ee eee SELECT BANK SETUP ROUTINE PRECEDES THIS CODE Also when selecting a bank there is much common code between setting up for and following the actual bank selec tion For example following is a sample of the actual bank switching code needed to support
64. both the 128K standard mem ory extension and the additional 256K provided on the XLR8er By maintaining this routine set as the only diverse portion of the bank switching code and setting up a 2 byte 16 bit BUR table Bank Use RAM so that all 10 LD AND LD SUB JR RLCA RLCA RLCA ADD A C get the desired bank 7FH drop bit 7 B A save 7 bit code in case banks 0 2 3 set XLR8er offset or Carry if 0 2 C SELLO was banks 0 1 or 2 smult by 8 for 4K unit offsets A 56 add base offset for start of addressing DB 0EDH 39H 38H OUTO 38H A call in bank from 256K SELLO CALL r SELECT BANKS 3 10 FROM 256K ON XLR8ER C SEL012 select banks 0 1 2 if Carry set 7 COMMON FINISH UP TO GO HERE SELECT BANKS 0 1 2 SEIL012 XOR A disable 256K memory on XLR8er DB OEDH 39H 38H OUTO 38H A savings of 88 precious additional free OR B ERRA ng vi ng gi if nag 0 A JR Z SE B was 80 skip next instruction bytes ha ana ee Tin INC A else make 1 10 binary or 2 11 binary anyone s may do a double S RLCA shift result over to bits 5 and 4 posn size difference almost 1 4 the original I RICA think that if anyone really sat down and RLCA examined exactly what M Houd s ex aios O Rui Eca E 8ave mas cellentcoding involved they would agree LD HL 78H point to OPREG in FLAG table that there was certainly
65. cal for you Let me know of your decision as Iam holding up the processing of your 6 3 0 disk until your reply As far as the 1 2 height 5 25 floppy drives I sell they would fit into a 4P however they are not a drop in re placement You would need to drill new mounting holes because the Fujitsu drive has a thicker front bezel which would cause the drive to be inserted farther into the drive mounting as the bezel presses against the cabinet front All mounting holes on drives are in a standard location But that location is measured relative to the drive casing Given a thicker bezel and given that the drive bezel itself dic tates its mounting location drives with differing thickness of bezels would need slightly different mounting holes You also need to modify the cable connecting the floppy disk controller FDC to the drives Stock Tandy cables have the side select pins pulled If you choose to re place the cable I can supply that as well for 15 S amp H You may also want to consider the 4P modification which adds a port for two external floppy drives This was repub lished in TMQ IV 1H the article origi nally was published in 80 Microcomputing To change out desktop Model 4 drives with our Fujitsu 1 2 height drives you would be left with a gap in the front equivalent to the remaining half of the faceplate Some folks put two 1 2 height drives into the area reserved for one full size drive then th
66. ckage in US Canada is US 1 Note Technical support of these i products is not included at these I prices Foreign is US 3 COD is 3 50 additional Virginia residents add 4 5 sales tax VISA MC accepted Ee mh cd ata ma a a ra Ee a OFAX 96 Send and receive fax 9600 bps 2400 bps Data Modem The ZOFAX 96 24 Fax Modem gives you the best value at an affordable price It s a 2400 bps fully Hayes compatible modem with an inte grated 9600 bps send receive fax that is compatible with any Group II fax machine Now you can turn your PC into a fax machine with the ZOFAX 96 24 Fax Modem Products available from MISOSYS Inc Solely For Tomorrow s Technologies AN A Advanced Features e Automatically receives and prints incoming fax messages Working like your regular fax machine BitFax prints incoming fax messages directly to the printer and then saves it onto the disk e Flips rotates incoming fax pictures If the sender sends a page upside down BitFax lets you flip the page so you can see it on the screen If the page is sent sideways you can rotate the page 90 so you can view it on the screen e Time scheduled transmission You can schedule to send a fax at night or any time when the phone charges are less expensive e Background receiving While receiving a fax message BitFax lets you run other programs such as copying a file viewing a file directory
67. cripsit 4 Your Ldos quarterly is a magazine which comes out 4 times a year for the cost of 25 Right 5 What are TMQ s Are these maga zines at the cost of 12 each 6 Z80 DSMBLR Will this disassemble 5 1 4 5 3 Ldos and TrsDos 1 3 7 I have a lot of programs from TrsDos that I tried to convert to Ldos I have had little success I don t know if they have any different machine language codes or anything about the memory Is there anything published on the differences between TrsDos and Ldos 8 Is there any program made to convert other dos machine programs to Ldos 9 Is there any communication program for 5 3 Ldos which can send and receive either Xmodem or ASCII files 10 As far as I know basic programs are processed and converted into bits which the computer understands It is slower because of the conversation time It would seem that after a basic program was writ ten and debugged that it could be proc essed and instead of sending the binary bits into the program these bit patterns could be saved to a disk file and then the program was ready to use instead of basic pure 0100100110 machine language would be used with no conversion neces sary Is there a program that does this 11 In school we have been working with sound generators Is there any program or any method of sending a voice through a mike to the registers altering the pitch of that voice and sending it back out the Cassette por
68. d 9 14 89 See enclosed Fm MISOSYS Inc Henry I don t nor mally provide instructions for installing a floppy drive into the hard drive cabinet however you can examine the instruc tions for opening up the drive case al ready provided in the MHDT34 user manual supplied with your drive Adding another drive be it a hard drive or a floppy would incorporate the same method as discussed under Adding a second hard drive Of course you would not need to consider the cabling method discussed because a floppy drive would not connect to the hard disk controller I believe I may have found the answer to the problem you were having with LDOS 5 3 not recognizing a subdisk as if it were an extended dating disk See my re sponse to the next query Letters to MISOSYS LDOS 5 3 BACKUP bug Em Lloyd Evans Roy I may have found a bug in LDOS 5 3 I was attempting to put some TED files onto TRSDOS 1 3 The files were stored on a 6 2 data disk with a bit map of 11000010 double den sity single sided in X CD of the direc tory I formatted a single sided double density 35 track disk with 6 2 Resulting bit map of X CD was 10000001 I them switched to LDOS 5 3 and used BACKUP TXT s d It did not appear to honor bit 3 which says these disks are to use the old date stamp The source disk had X 9642 in both pass word fields just as it should The 35 track disk received X 0002 for the second password CONVERT fr
69. d high level language which you the user can extend and modify at will FORTH also gives direct access to primitive opera tions more readily than assembly lan guage does is both interpreter and com piler and provides compactprograms that run extremely fast In addition FORTH is a highly efficient programming envi ronment thanks to the philosophy that underlies it No memory hogs most ver sions of the language fit into 8 000 to 16 000 bytes of memory In form FORTH is a threaded interpre tive language whose elements are called words instead of instructions or state ments The basic set consists of a dic tionary of 100 to 150 words The purpose of a word is to cause the computer to do something perform a computation dis play a message on the screen and so on Mostof the words look like English words and carry similar meanings such as EMIT which causes a specified character to be output Other words look like symbols e g pronounced fetch which retrieves the value of a variable or mem ory location Programming consists of using these words to define other words which carry out the application involved All these new words are related threaded by means of their definitions and are compiled into the FORTH dictionary which may be further partitioned into specialized vocabularies or lexicons The highest level FORTH words in a program are the tasks that are to be performed
70. d III a piece of hardware that needs to be sol dered or does it plug in I have never had acomputer apart How hard is it to install 25 As far as I know my model 4s can only have 128k in them but your literature seems to indicate a larger ram can be installed Do you or any other vendor offer memory larger than 128k for the models 3 or 4 26 Do youhaveany fonts for your graphic software Power dot draw Fm MISOSYS Inc Dear Harry This is in response to your undated letter book I m providing your address in TMQ in case others may be a source to your needs Here s some answers to your questions 1 I don t use Superscripsit your question is best directed to Tandy But it should have nothing to do with the DOS I do know that SS has a finite limit on it s documentfiles which relates to how much editing has been done Your statement after I revise a file for a while may be the clue Read your SS manual it may shed some light on that According to some technical information which was published in TMQ IV iii a Superscripsit document may not contain more than 174 blocks 2 I have no patches to SS or Dictionary they both should perform just as they did under LDOS 5 1 4 3 See answer to 1 4 amp 5 We don t have an LDOS Quar terly we publish The MISOSYS Quar terly TMQ which as its name implies comes out four times a year A subscrip tion is 25 per year Single issues still in p
71. d invari ably did not list sales of Radio Shack computers But that s no more Tandy s efforts at least in the PC compatible world have been recognized by the media A recentissue of Computer Reseller News presents the following tally of computer Stores in the United States Tandy 7 034 Intertan 2 481 Intelligent Electronics 987 Computerland 902 Microage 732 Software Etc 223 Egghead 190 Babbage s 168 Electronics Boutique 161 Inacomp 109 Businessland 96 Compuadd 89 Computer Factory 66 Software City 64 Waldensoftware 37 Computercraft 23 Soft Warehouse 10 Yes I know Intertan is the international spin off from Tandy so what s it doing in this list FAX Chips Prices continue to tumble in the fax board market as large scale integrated electronics continues to decrease the real estate needed to put together a board Note the low costof the fax modem board currently available for MISOSYS Now comes news of a 2 chip fax data chip set from Exar Corp which imple ments V 29 facsimile and V 22 bis data with Microcom Network Protocol 5 MNP 5 and the emerging V 42 V 42bis stan dards According to Exar all you need to complete a fax modem board is a dedi cated microcontroller such as an 8051 32 kbytes of static RAM and a 256k EPROM And if you buy the chip set in 1000 piece quantities the cost is down to 36 82 a set Winter vacation reminder MISOSYS closes up between Christmas and New Year s That mean
72. d still be unusable At 8 SPG the DIR S YS file would take up five granules or 10K In no case should it ever take up more than 16K because that would have to imply an ERN larger than 34 the size of a granule cannot be greater than 32 So your particular case claiming a DIR SYS size of 48 00K had to be caused by some error You now should see where were wrong to change the ERN to X BB You were correct to change the value in the Granule Allocation Table from X C3 to X FF When you changed the DIR SYS record value in X 17 from X 05 to X 01 you were telling the system that your DIR SYS file used two granules Since your drive assigns six heads per logical drive that should typically be allocated in gran ulesof 32 sectors so you would be correct in showing the directory using two gran ules Now how didit get wrong I can t tell you that But a formatter should set the num ber of records in the DIR SYS entry equal to the actual number of records in the file Anitek s speedup Fm Alan Varga Hi Roy I recently pur chased a 6 7 mHz turbo speed up kit from Anitek They recommended that I up grade my memory from 150 ns chips to 120 s which I ve done I had bought their 5 1 mHz speed up kit a couple of months ago replacing the Z80 PAL U3 and 74xx245 U71 chips I ve now replaced the Z80 and 74xx245 U71 chips again with the ones in the Turbo kit and everything works fine However when
73. dithered image roughly analo gous to making a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy However the techniques used in this program are the best currently available and will produce the best possible rendi tion of the image under the limitations imposed J F R Slinkman 1511 Old Compton Road Richmond Va 23233 TRS 80 Hardware for Sale We have available for sale in good working condition the Call or write for further following 128K computers information 1 TRS 80 Model 4P 26 1080A Ser No 005011 1 TRS 80 Model 4P 26 1080A Ser No 004803 1 TRS 80 Model 4 26 1069 Ser No 0075484 1 TRS 80 Model 4D 26 1070 Ser No 003634 1 5 MB Hard Disk Cables for all equipment Also available is a large selection of TRS 80 software with documentation I Inside TMQ 32 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii DA VID GOBEN 417 Prospect Street Ist Floor Willimantic CT 06226 Ph 203 423 9312 home 203 486 2240 day Dear Roy Sorry it has been so long since I last spoke with you or wrote Currently I am contemplating placing one of your 40Meg hard drives and controllers into my PC and moving the 20Meg ST 225 from it into the Model 4 20Meg kit I got from you as I did the 225 Hopefully Pll make it a sister unit to the 3 1 2 20Meg QUIET drive already in the kit again hoping that this will not involve much more than setting jumpers on it to
74. drive although its face is the right size come to think of it This assumes that your installation instructions would guide unsure fingers into mounting a 3 1 2 720K drive inside the case with little likelihood of my damaging the hard drive and that the computer would thereupon recognize the 3 1 2 drive as drive 6 once floppy dct was applied I further assume that the same AC switch behind the case would turn on both drives And you re sure the power supply can handle both I also Letters to MISOSYS a aa a a TAA dd RS O E E AA a a a a o6A Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii assume that the price would be your ad vertised 88 plus a one drive host cable Please advise where my assumptions may have gone astray I ll weigh your answers against the installation of one or two floppy drives in a separate case Thank you for your LDOS patch list it was kind of you to send it I was able to update all of the files you had checked off exceptSYS7 SYS because it already was updated thanks to a set of patches applied earlier from some source I LL have to look up my patches and see where I got them As for formatting under LDOS it s just like I said I get the old date structure on any files subsequently added i e 1982 for 1990 unless I do a dateconv immedi ately after formatting This is true with format cmd and sdform5 cmd Format cmd is dated 1 5 87 sdformS cmd is date
75. e ground from the command line in a batch file or as a hot key pop up or as a sched uled task in background The send side allows you to preview your fax before it is sent allows you to optionally automati cally include a cover page allows you to merge graphics files TIF etc with text or combine multiple graphics or text files together on one page or even merge the contents of your database with a text file for mail merge automated sending to multiple destinations BITFAX supports printing areceived fax directly to a 9 pin or 24 pin dot matrix printer or an HP LaserJet laser printer at either 150 DPI or 300 DPI I print my faxes to my NEC Postscript printer using its HP LaserJet emulation at 150 DPI The advantages of a fax board over a stand alone fax machine are many First you have no paper waste you can print the fax only when you want to For an other the quality of a fax transmitted from a board when the original was a text file is far superior to that of a scanned and transmitted image For an other the computing power of the host computer can provide the auxiliary fax utilities costing hundreds of dollars if not thousands more forequivalent power from the stand alone unit The one draw back is that the fax board is not necessar ily targeted for the user receiving a great deal of unscheduled faxes And if you need to transmit non original documents unless you have a scanner attached to your computer
76. e trade offs Some of the disk utilities only work with 512 byte sectors DED 86 is one of them I was not terribly pleased that I cannot use DED 86 since I use it a lot for disk exploration but that may be surmountable if the EXPANZ board uses a fixed logical sector size seems like it must Question In light of findings that the sector sizes are altered I wonder how this will screw up disk caches Answer It works with WINDOWS 3 0 s Smartdrive which is a disk cache As I see the implementation of the EXPANZ board the physical sector size remains unchanged but it appears to employ some sort of logical sector Earlier TMQ s available For out of print issues Volume I and Volume II we are providing back issues of THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY via cop ier reprint at 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 Special deal now in effect for either all four issues of Vol ume II or all four issues of Volume IV just 24 per set S amp H 5 US 6 CAN 14 ZoneD 20 ZoneE Here s a synopsis of past issues Ii Reading NEWDOS 80 disks An LB archival utility Popup Application Window XMODEM in C Getting into computer math part I TMQ Volume I index Wii Getting into computer math Part2 Writing interactive RATFOR FORTRAN programs PRO EnhComp a review Desktop pub
77. eaders to solve for me Number one pertains to using a JCL to backup from the hard drive to a floppy drive alphabetically When a floppy diskette gets full the JCL aborts with a Can t switch disks while DO in effect message The JCL allows a SYSTEM S YSTEM DRIVE command so why not allow a floppy swap during a disk backup Could you give me a patch to allow me to switch disks while DO in effect Number two is a question about how LS DOS formats the directory cylinder I had a problem with files text etc getting written to Cylinder 48 the directory cyl inder on my hard drive starting at Sector 64 through Sector 191 When Verify was on I used to always run 10 with Verify on I got Error Code 6 At tempted to read system data record when trying to save copy or backup files to drive 0 Sometimes when looking at the attributes of DIR SYS I would notice that the file size had changed from 48 00K to 15 00K which could be correct if you multiply the 34 records of DIR SYS by the LRL of 256 8K granules but is wrong since the whole 48k cylinder was supposed to be allocated to the directory Some program or programs that I use must look for free disk space in a way not originally intended by the writers of LS DOS or maybe 48K 6 head cylinders were not accounted for in the scheme of things The directories on my 96 Cylinder logical drives are on Cylinder 48 and of course the whole 48 00K cylinde
78. eck for 10 00 which I understand via telephone conversation with your offices is the fee for this service A magazine article published several years ago described how to convert a model 4P to two sided drives I do have a copy of this magazine I will now refer to the MISOSYS Quarterly Vol IV i The Blurb or page 5 of your catalog which I received last fall Listed on the reverse of this page under the category Floppy Drives and Accessories is an intriguing item 5 25 360K 1 2 height My first question is would this be a compatible drive to the one mentioned in the maga zine article More precisely Do you provide all the items necessary to convert my model 4 to a dual sided ala4D machine and if so the cost In the event you cannot I require two new disk drives for my machine as the original Texas Specialty drives are slipping and sliding their way into oblivion What is the availability and cost for replacement drives My first inclination is to convert to two sided double density drives Ihave a RS hard drive utilizing your RSHARD which works quite well thank you Fm MISOSYS Inc Dear Mr Perinn To begin with instead of refreshing your LS DOS 6 3 0 disk to Level L the last 6 3 0 release it would be prudent to consider purchasing the LS DOS 6 3 1 replace ment disk Iam including information on that release At only 5 more than the refresh fee I believe it would be more practi
79. ecord This could be done even in BASIC I leave it to the reader as an exercise 13 Fm Ralf Folkerts Roy have a problem compiling a program with EnhComp When I invoke BC either direct or via the S RUN command it bombs the out the system It either starts to beep and hangs or switches screen format to 16 64 or something like that Below is the program I m trying to compile or part of it I just want to see if it works up to this point It should when ready convert a Data Base from Super to Profile I plus Any tips Thank you for your help By the way is there a patch for CED to force BLH and ELS when starting REM CONVERT REM CONVERT DATA BASE FROM SUPER TO PROFILE I FORMAT REM 10 04 90 BY RALF FOLKERTS ALLOCATE 2 OPEN r 1 weistran dat 84 FIELD 1 2 AS 225 2 AS DATMS 1 AS 215 2 AS DATT 1 AS 22 2 AS DATJ 15 AS KUNDES 6 AS LIEF 11 AS EKP 11 AS VKP 3 AS HCODES 3 AS GERAETS 1 AS FKZ 12 AS ITYPE 12 AS HIN WEISS OPEN r 2 weiss000 key 128 FIELD 2 8 AS ADATUM 15 AS ANACHNAMES 10 AS AVORNAMES 6 AS ALIEF 8 AS AEKP 8 AS AVKP 3 AS AHCODE 3 AS AGERAET 12 AS ATYPE 1 AS AFKZ 54 AS AZZ CLOSE END Fm MISOSYS Inc Ralf You are en tirely correct about the PRO EnhComp problem using FIELD which locked up your system The problem is in the second FIELD statement three of the field vari ables were not string variables EnhComp was trying to report an error but
80. ed independ ent of the rest of the program given the antecedent words and the two values It can even be tested independent of the device itself The output could be in any form desired from a printout to actual device movement Once debugged TURN RIGHT is ready for use directly or as part of a higher level word say GYMKHANA There are four other features of FORTH that give it speed power and elegance Paradoxically these are the features that account for the antagonistic attitude to ward FORTH cited earlier and tend to make learning FORTH more difficult To begin with FORTH uses two memory areas referred to as stacks to pass para meters and as temporary storage Be cause these are Last In First Out struc Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1i tures you must develop the skill of keep ing track of what you have loaded onto them In the example above TURN RIGHT looks for CORNERING SPEED DEG and SAFE SPEED on the stack with CORNERING SPEED on top Hav ing them in the wrong order will not give the results desired consider what could happen if a cornering speed of 25 and a degree measure of 120 were reversed The stacks are important to FORTH They help the programmer hide information i e to exclude from the procedures all arbitrary details and information that may change and to minimize redundancy Stacks also speed up applications by giv ing
81. ed on the phone Will the mounting of both a 3 1 2 anda 5 1 4 drive in one of your cases look cosmetically OK But if my acquaintance is correct then it would seem that your dedication to the TRS 80 world should be rewarded by giving you as much financial support as we can And I want to do that But my wallet tells me that I have to go with the best value What new light can you shed on my outboard quandary Since the README TXT that came with my LDOS 5 3 disk TC0A0628 shows the most recent correction having been made on 02 23 87 I would like to know what bugs have been found and corrected since then so that I can send you the Original diskette for an upgrade I have been a subscriber to TMQ only since issue I i so may have missed some patches If corrections have been made since then let me know your fee for upgrading so that I can send it with the diskette Ihave three questions about minor annoy Letters to MISOSYS ances with LDOS 1 Why is drive 0 very noisy when files on the distribution disk are accessed including booting Are pertinent files too scattered 2 Why must I run DATECONV on a freshly formatted LDOS diskette or Sub Disk before I can create files or copy files to it Why wouldn t the FORMAT and SDFORMS commands automatically apply the current date and time stamping struc ture Does the upgrade if there is one address this problem 3 Why must I have ffhard off 1f I am using Model
82. er 1990 1991 Volume V ii be explained f the new create not set the A register to 00h on exit indicating No error but does not adjust the Z flag I have reported this problem and the work around solution to the author of GIFMOD4 Fm MISOSYS Inc Dear Hans Whether or not GIFMOD4 works with 6 3 0 and doesn t with 6 3 1 is not the point If GIFMOD4 does indeed treat the accumu lator and associated Z flag value as a basis for a return code from CREATE it is not following the documentation DCMNDR is documented in both Tandy s Technical Reference Manual and The Programmer s Guide to LDOS TRSDOS Version 6 as having the return code in register HL That is the only place to look for a return code from a program invoked from CMNDER The fact that GIFMOD4 worked under a previous version of DOS was just coincidence There has never been any effort to ensure that the accumu lator was zero and the Z flag set upon exit from a library module Ihave placed the following short message to Frank on my CompuServe forum to that effect By the way I commend you on your resourcefulness in working around the problem Hans de Wolf informed me that GIFMOD4 aborts after it invokes CREATE under 6 3 1 The problem is that library modules exit with the return code in register HL the A reg and flag register are meaning less as a return code Only HL need con tain either a zero or an error code The state of the accumu
83. er may be the system drive and a Job swapped drives The TED text editor now has commands to print the entire text buffer or the contents of the first block encountered Obtain directories from TED too i DoubleDuty works with all expanded memory known to the DOS a BANK parameter lets you use any two adjacent pair of memory banks for its second 64K Model 4 If you have an XLR8er board installed with 256K additional memory banks 3 11 you could install DoubleDuty using banks 10 and 11 In this way you would have a 128K Model 4 partition and a 64K Model 4 partition still with six more memory banks available Programs which use extramemory butare not expanded memory literate such as Multiplan or enhanced Visicalc could be installed in one Dou bleDuty partition and use 128K still having another program installed in the other DoubleDuty partition Have PRO WAM and DoubleDuty both in stalled above bank 2 in expanded memory What a machine If you already own DoubleDuty and have expanded memory known to the DOS see the MEMORY command of LS DOS 6 3 1 then you really ought to have this version of DoubleDuty Just send your original Dou a a Sa ow o The DATE command Date pi on boot and the bad Enable or disable the printer time out and error ve Customize the display of the time field in the DIR com non stop under your control ve high memory as Control Language file may be
84. es and 20 meg in about 30 40 minutes It also tells you how many disks i to have ready Works under LDOS or TRSDOS 6 both versions on same disk Great utility for hard disk users Superior Hard Disk Drivers for Tandy disk systems Mix Model MI and 4 easily 49 95 E These hard disk drivers out perform the Tandy drivers in many ways Our drivers allow you to combine LDOS and TRSDOS 6 on the same drive and boot from either system with floppy disk They run faster and take much less memory from the system Only for use with Tandy Hard Drives Available allso for Percom drives PowerMail Plus Please specify Model 4 III L 5 Star mailing list data system 4S amp H 34 95 This program was written because all the other mailing list data base systems couldn t keep track of all the types of data most folks wanted to keep track of You needed f speed youneeded hard drive support and you needed a crash proof data structure PowerMail was top rated 5 stars in several publications and has never been topped Worksonfloppies orhard disk under all popular TRS 80 operating systems Allows importing of data from several other once popular mailing systems to avoid re typing f Written in machine language by the author of Super Utility this program is FAST and sorts up to 10 levels very quickly If you keep track of names and addresses along i with associated data for any situation this is the one to use Many churches organizations and businesses use
85. escription 01 Reset Reset signal fro host 02 Ground 03 18 Host ata 0 15 19 Ground 20 Key Unused pin clippec 21 reserved 22 Ground 23 HIOW Host I O write strobe 24 Ground 25 HIOR Host 1 O read strobe 26 Ground 27 Reserved 28 Host ALE Host address latc enable 29 Reserved 30 Ground 31 IRQ14 Interrupt request drive to host When active if indicates to host that the 16 bit data 32 HOST 1 016 register is addressed 33 ADDRI Host I O address line 1 34 PDIAG Passed diagnostics 35 ADDRO Host I O address line 0 36 ADDR2 Host I O address line 2 37 HOSTCSO Host I O chip se lect 38 HOSTCSI Host I O chip se lect 39 HOST Active when drive IS executing a com mand SLV ACT Ground acquired such a machine For the home or small business user this appears to be an excellent machine to get started on The 1000 TL 2 modestly sports an 8 Mhz 80286 processor and a single 3 5 floppy It has the provision for another 3 5 form factor device and a 5 25 1 2 height de vice After ensuring the successful opera tion of TRSCROSS to read write TRS 80 Model HI 4 media files I proceeded to install a hard drive into the TL 2 The TL 2 supports the IDE drive which incidentally has been known to be an The Blurb able 1 Name Description Reset signal from host Pin 01 Reset 02 Ground 03 SO7 04 Ground 05 SO6 06 Ground 07 SOS 08 Ground data 7 data 6 data 5 data 4 data 3 12 Ground 13 S02 1
86. expect BASIC for ex ample to properly deal with an ON ERROR GOTO when reading DIR SYS The plot starts to thicken when hard drives came onto the scene The first hard disk controller to my knowledge which was used in a production environment with a TRS 80 was Lobo Drive s Universal Controller UVC The UVC was designed to support two data address marks Unfor tunately as controller technology pro gressed highly integrated chip sets were developed employing command sets which did not support a data address mark con vention In order to use these controllers with a TRSDOS type OS it required the Letters to MISOSYS 11 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V 1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii directory data address mark to be gener ated in software The method employed in LDOS and subsequently in the Model 4 DOS was to assume that a system data sector was being read if the cylinder being _ read was the directory cylinder as con tained in the drive control table data struc ture Fetch the table value and compare it to the requested cylinder if they are the same and no other error was encountered then report an error 6 because the read directory access service calls want to see that return code Because of the derived address mark it required that the entire cylinder on a hard drive where the directory was contained had to be reserved The hard disk drive has no way of knowing the ex
87. ey can use the remain ing drive as an external drive by con necting cabling from it to the external drive connector What s the best word processor Fm Robert Winn Dear Roy Iam writing this letter to ask if you could tell me in your opinion what is the best and most powerful word processor for the Model 4 I currently have 2 Model 4 s and one Letters to MISOSYS 20 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Tandy 2000 and I always try to buy the best software for them The word processor I currently have for my Model 4 I bought at Radio Shack some time ago It is SCRIPSIT PRO and I am happy with it however if there 1s a better word processor around I would like to know I know you would know about most of the software for the Model 4 and since I am using my Model 4 more and more now if I can improve on its output I want to do so Fm MISOSYS Inc Dear Robert I can not recommend one word processor over another My personal experience with word processors on the TRS 80 has been lim ited to Electric Pencil Scripsit and Allwrite But the criteria which makes one WP program more beneficial to a user is highly personal One user demands speed over wysiwyg Another wants pure text files A third wants flexible printer support A fourth wants lean and mean No one program will ever satisfy every body That s why in the MS DOS world there are over a d
88. f 100 255ths Good filters arrange the white pixels in a seemingly random fashion so that no obvious patterns are created to detract from the image Other popular dithering filters are the Burkes Filter X42 12421 l ths which is a truncation of the Stuki Filter xX 8 4 842 421 42nds and the true Floyd Steinburg Filter X 7 351 l ths Also popular is the false Floyd Steinburg Filter which neither Mssrs Floyd nor Steinburg had anything to do with It s easy to program but produces decidedly inferior results which why it is not dia grammed here Hopefully if we ignore it long enough it will go away Inside TMQ 26 Inside TMG Volume Vii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii To see how scaling pixel averaging and dithering are accomplished let s look at the source code starting at the label BEGIN Up to the label CLRGFX this code merely gets the name of the MacPaint file from the command line and opens the file You may find the GLRGFX routine use ful as itis much tighter and faster than the routine supplied with the Micro Labs board documentation Those using Radio Shack boards may wish to change bit 1 of the values sent to port 83H in this routine to turn off the video waits prior to the clear to radically increase the speed and turn them back on afterwards to eliminating hashing of the graphics image on the screen After clearing the graphics screen the pr
89. g out of disk capacity and are constantly shuf fling files around between floppies and hard drive to make runtime room and have been put off by the cost of upgrading to a larger disk drive it s time to consider an Expanz board They are in stock here at MISOSYS Here s a few questions and answers con cerning the board which traversed our MISOSYS CompuServe forum recently Question How does the EXPANZ board work Answer That s a good question It ap pears to alter the sector size thus com pressing a normal 512 byte record into a smaller size That appears how it can handle random access The board requires some space for a DOS region driver within the 640K and 16K of himem Question What kind of slot does the Expanz board take up Answer The Expanz board is a short card which plugs into an 8 bit bus slot on a PC XT AT or 386 machine It requires the use of MS DOS 3 x Question There sa message on IBMHW which indicates that the EXPANZ board will not work with MSDOS 4 0 Also disk utilities such as Norton and others will not work The people who make EXPANZ is working on their own disk utilities Answer That s correct the EXPANZ board works only with DOS 3 x at this time and not Compaq s nor Zenith s it is expected that Compaq s DOS and MS DOS 4 01 will be supported in the Spring of 1991 Also disk utilities will not work Also you cannotuse de fraggers There s going to be som
90. he source Most filters modify the values called weights thus determined to make them easy to calculate The Slinkman Filter is X10 6 23632 32nds Dithering usually proceeds left to right top to bottom The X represents the pixel which is the source of the error The 10 means that 10 32nds of this error is to be disbursed to the pixel immediately to the right of the source pixel The 6 s Inside TMQ 25 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V H means 6 32nds of the error goes to each of the pixels second to the right and immedi ately below Three 32nds goes to each pixel diagonally down from the source pixel etc If the dithering is to be done left to right then a reflection of the filter would have to be used so that errors would only be disbursed to pixels which have not yet been displayed If an error added to a pixel brings it to a luminence greater than 255 itis clipped to 255 and the excess luminence dis carded Likewise no pixel is permitted to have a luminence of less than zero The purpose and end result of dithering is best described by example Suppose we have an area of an image that is supposed to be at 100 255ths of white Since no single pixel can display the value of 100 255ths we represent the luminence of that area by making 100 of each 255 pixels white and 155 of them black Thus the area will have an luminence o
91. her or not there is more MacPaint image data to process If so we make a jump to DCODOI and do it If not the program falls through to FINISH Finally at FINISH the disposition menu is written to the video RAM and the graphics board switched to text only mode to display it The code is such that the V key toggles between the image and the menu and the Q key returns to DOS ready with the additional provision that if the BREAK key is pressed while the menu is not visible it will act the same as the ss ed key MAC2HR is ademonstration program for the purpose of educating the reader about Inside TMQ 31 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii some image processing techniques The only practical value I can think of for itis to save the user some printer paper by letting him see what a MacPaint image will look like before he decides whether Or not to print it out via a utility such as MACDMP The image quality will not be great for two reasons First in order to scale the image so it will display on the Model 4 screen we ve had to throw away 7 9ths of the resolution and therefore 7 9ths of the detail Second MacPaint images have already been dithered before being stored on disk but we are forced to dither them again after scaling Due to clipping each dith ering operation results in some loss of luminence data which makes dithering an already
92. hich he may be able to modify more on that later Folks with a gate array model 4 26 1069A or 26 1070 4D can installan XLR8er board using the graphics card method which is behind the motherboard Since we need to ar chive a few boards for warranty replace ment purposes if you want to purchase a board now is the time to do it Ribbon Cable Assemblies MISOSYS uses a Cirris Systems cable tester for 100 testing of custom manu factured ribbon cables My assortment of test assemblies supports the kinds of connectors typically associated with the TRS 80 microcomputer Thus I m cus tom fabricating low volumes of cables according to your specifications as well as providing standard replacement cables for your needs These are all using unsh ielded ribbon cable I can provide cables using DB 25 M F A CR The Blurb 6 The Blurb Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1 SR eo 20 pin header 34 pin edgecard M F 36 pin printer 50 pin edgecard F 50 pin SCSIM F 34 pin Header M F as wellas DB9 Male This includes such things as replacement FDC Floppy cables 15 for all TRS 80 Model 4 s 4 4D 4P printer cables 15 for Model IH 4 or H 12 16 6000 RSHD primary secondary interconnect cables 15 set RSHD host cable 15 Kel AM 34 pin male edgecard 8 Kel Am 34 pin female edgecard 5 PC Compatible Product News IIT Math Coprocessors Integrated Information
93. hoicel Check out this list of features WordStar like editing commands are easy to use f Pull down menu system for commanding SAID 86 f Supports nine editing buffers with automatic swap to disk f Supports up to 30 user defined macros 255 characters each Undelete the last nine deleted lines can save your bacon w MOUSE support with automatic recognition HELP facility shell to invoke DOS commands from SAID 86 SAID 86 can expand or contract TABs SAID 86is priced at just 29 95 2S amp H E YS TRSCROSS Now you can transfer TRS 80 Model III 4 files directly to your MS DOS disks right on your PC Convert BASIC programs Convert SuperScripsit document files to 4 DCA RFT Only 89 95 3S amp H h Nats D Now get the clearest view of your disk drive and memory contents with our DE D80 Powerful features in Version 2 When you need to travel through your disk drive why settle for a tool that isolates you from the road DED86 gives you the direct controls you need to explore your disk It s a full screen sector oriented disk file editor and a page oriented memory editor When you want to unerase erased files DED86 s flexible KEEP facility does the job without you fussing over FATS Check out this list of features Look by cylinder head sector sector or cluster even reserved hidden sectors Scan free clusters to search for erased data 4 Jump about subdirectories Y Keep sec
94. ht the version provide 120MB support I don t have explicitinformation from CMS on any of their products which bothers me Yes CMS has a floppy interface which is useful for persons installing their drive internally I have no open drive bays One is reserved for another HD 23 People in IBMHW have noted that CMS and Mountain drives can be daisy chained on existing floppy cables without requir ing an internal adaptor board This is of course only usable if the drive is to be mounted internally I definitely need the 120MB version as I plan to carry this drive from my present 286 to my next x86 system which will definitely have more than 80MB HD space Questions for CMS drives Does their software allow multiple incremental back ups on the same tape Does their software provide unattended operation What exactly is the DJ10 s transfer rate just for kicks What is the warranty on CMS drives just in the off chance something should happen Since I do want an exter nal drive does CMS provide a package which includes the drive a power supply the software and an interface card or does it need to be bought piecemeal I assume CMS also provides the required SHIELDED cable yes Fm Roy Soltoff Shane The adaptor card essentially works like an electronic switch It sits between the FDC and floppy drives connecting the tape drive The DJ10 is a very low power device The beauty of the DJ10 is that one
95. jor opportunities to learn Finally FORTH relies on integer arith metic in most implementations but not all Misosys HartFORTH and Hart FORTH 86 are notable exceptions Inte ger arithmetic has the advantage of being fast and flexible If your application in volves extensive repetitive number crunching the small amount of time re quired to do the programming is rewarded by the execution speed gained I belive FORTH offers advantages which are not equalled by any other language or operating system First the philosophy behind FORTH complements the crea tive problem solving process FORTH encourages prototyping rather than lengthy planning which may turn out to be counter productive After all things change Ina similar vein FORTH s emphasis on effi ciency means that you get to spend your time on your work not on trying to cope with the computer that is managing your application FORTH is interactive so you can still control things directly and don thave to be hindered by a tedious edit gt compile gt test sequence Finally FORTH s speed and flexibility help you to be as productive in the actual applica tion as you were during the design by enabling high speed capture of data pre cise and interactive control of equipment and processes and rapid data reduction Not everyone wants to take the trouble to learn FORTH and I don t expect to be able to influence any seriously negative attitudes
96. lator in CREATE of 6 3 1 is different from 6 3 0 only due to circumstance but HL exits CREATE with a zero value That s the only documented exit code for using CMNDR Incidentally Frank informs me that GIFMOD4 has been corrected A book of questions Em Harry Woodgear 2044 Lake Rd S E Lancaster Ohio 43130 1 I formatted my hard drive with 5 3 Ldos I also have 6 3 Ls Dos on it I have been having trouble with my 6 3 Super scripsit After I revise a file for a while I get an error message record length too long What is the problem 2 I used 5 1 4 on my hard disk for a long time until I formatted my hard disk with 5 3 Most of my files are under this ver sion of Dos I used CONV to convert my Superscripsit from Trsdos to 5 1 4 Ldos My dictionary never did work right under 5 1 4 nor 5 3 I can not add words to my dictionary because if I let it reach the end of the file the computer will freeze up I place the word eenndd at the end of the document and when I reach it I press break All the words I corrected remain corrected but I can not add any words to my dictionary Do you havea 5 3 version of Super Scripsit and dictionary or patches to make it work under 5 3 3 With my old model 2 I could getin over a hundred pages in Scripsit When I get over 30 pages in a document with my models 3 or 4 I start having errors Is this normal or can something be done to cre ate large files in Super S
97. low resolu tion mode the border is one color back ground in one color and three colors are available for foreground This monitor Operates in a non interlaced mode The TANDY 2000 operates on a machine specific MS DOS 2 11 03 which is the latest available for this computer The mass storage devices are two internal 5 1 4 720K floppy diskette drives an inter nal 10 MEG hard drive and an external 10 MEG hard drive The floppy drives are capable of reading formatting and writ ing to 360K diskettes All of the mass storage devices are TANDY supplied but may not be TANDY manufacture Em MISOSYS Inc Dear Dean The Job Control Language JCL file we provide to install the drive divides a drive into Letters to MISOSYS 19 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1i four partitions one for DOS There is an option called DUAL which reserves space for a fifth partition This additional parti tionis obtained by reducing the size of the SYSTEM partition it is used to provide a system partition for the alternate DOS The JCL included with the MSCSI5 soft ware LDOS does exactly the same kind of reservation both JCL files synchronize the actual utilization of the drive to be non conflicting Three partitions are ac cessed in common however you have complete manual control over what por tion of the drive is seen by which DOS by eliminating the JCL and installi
98. ly between L and R HRZSCAL does this by first taking the value of original 1 doubling it adding the value of original 2 and writing the result to the left pixel of the created pair Then it takes twice the value of original 3 adds the value of original 2 and Inside TMQ 28 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii writes the result to the right pixel of the created pair The data from the three pixel set has now been converted to two pixels which each contain a luminence value in the range 0 black to 9 white The processes used in VRTSCAL and HRZSCAL are known as pixel averag ing None of the original data has been lost it is just represented in a different form The code at CONVERT converts the values of our 384 bytes of 10 greyscale pixels so their luminences are expressed in 255ths instead of 9ths of maximum luminence white This is done to make dithering easier For speed the calculations are made via a precalculated lookup table labeled BRITNES Now we get to do the dithering The DITHER section manages three fields namely the line to be dithered LINE1 a buffer to hold errors dispursed to the cur rent line CUMERR1 and a buffer to hold errors disbursed to the next line CUMERR2 These error buffers are used instead of dispursing the errors di rectly to the image data to minimize the amount of data lost due to clipping and to minimize the
99. ly tree P1 also mix tense because what was in effect thenis stil in effect now In the beginning there was one size of disk a 35 track single density 5 25 floppy That was the size of the Model I diskette and drive The structure i e the format that was created for this diskette was ten sectors of 256 bytes each per track Sectors were num bered 0 9 tracks were numbered 0 34 Each sector on the diskette is identified by a header record which contains informa tion about the sector this information is used by the floppy disk controller The file system of the DOS utilized adirectory of files the directory was itself a file The actual directory file was written in about the middle track of the disk and occupied the entire track The scheme utilized for the directory allowed it to contain data structures for up to 256 files Each struc ture required a minimum of 32 bytes Two sectors in the directory file were needed for other than file data structures Thus a maximum directory could occupy no more than 34 sectors But the DOS also used no more than a single track to contain the directory thus that first disk had a capac ity to store no more than 64 files eight sectors each containing eight file struc tures and two sectors containing other data As track sizes increased so did the size of the directory For instance going to double density disk drives provided 18 sectors per track That increased the size of the DIR
100. machine 24 The Hardware Interface Kit is just software It contains a keyboard driver to use all of the Model 4 keys and a Memdisk to use the extra 64K as a RAMDISK 25 Our XLR8er board has 256K of addi tional RAM that s eight more banks of 32K Anitek also sells add on RAM boards 26 Although PowerSOFT did have an index file folder containing some addi tional fonts for PowerDOT it does not appear that they were ever released as a product From reading the letters in the file they were supplied by a PowerDOT user So without any other knowledge I cannot say that MISOSYS has other fonts for sale Whew Inquiry on 20 Meg Hard Disk Tandy 2000 Fm L Dean Dorsey Dear Mr Soltoff I am interested in your 09 30 90 special offer subject to the answers to my ques tions 1 Since your add lists a second software interface can your equipment be config ured to run under both LS DOS 6 3 1 and LDOS 5 3 as initiated by the appropriate booting DOS diskette a by separate hard disk partitions of any size OR b by both DOS s accessing the entire hard disk 2 Will the POWERSOFT Model 4 Toolbelt and POWERSOFT Backrest Restore programs work with your hard disk con troller and driver combination Or would I need to replace them with your GO MTC I am interested in replacing my old RS 5 meg drive that was acquired as a demo It has started to heat up and RS repair was totally incompetent in fixing the problem
101. n attain a 6MB minute transfer rate using Mountain s MACH2 controller card Obviously this is much above the rate of the CMS drive On the other hand the FS8000 is twice the price depending upon the dealer you choose Some people have told me that Com puAdd wants 630 or so I need an exter nal unit so the price goes up about 100 Fm Roy Soltoff Shane If you want unattended backup operation what dif ference does it make for the disk to tape transfer That s kind of a non sequitur if I m using the term correctly I sell the DJ10 drive To get to the 120Meg point you have to use the special 60Meg tape versions DC2120 or equivalent I have both the DC2000 40 Meg and DC2120 tapes now in stock You then need to use the compression setting in the software Why do you need an external unit no drive slot internal Or no floppy connec tor The CMS drive can use an internal adaptor board if both floppy ports are in use or your motherboard doesn t support a third device Call for more information Fm Shane Dawalt Yes after I left the message I thought about what I had said This is something I never really consid ered until I rambled about it in the mes sage to Joe If the drive will be used in an unattended manner the transfer rate 1s not very important except when I must re store Ah HA Now I see the special circum stances that allow 120MB support CMS seems to have a DJ10 and DJ10 Mig
102. n by M Houd and simply relocated into lower RAM Being such a short piece of patching I did away with the 9 byte header that M Houde used and tacked these 33 bytes onto the end of the Volume V ii FD floppy disk driver As of this writing Ihave been using these new patches for over a month now and have absolutely no problem with them I make heavy uscof my XMEMDISK DCT ram disk driver as well as BUSYCALC my yet to be released fast disk file backup program and my new BCX Business Inside TMG 34 Inside TMQ ne Volume V 1i Inside TMQ THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Calculator for eXtended memory spread sheet All of these programs make strenu ous use of extended memory often doing long term rapid fire bank switching and have yet to have one failure They also work flawlessly with other bank switch ing programs such as DoubleDuty SCRIPSIT Pro MemDISK Multiplan and VisiCalc As long as any program which uses bank switching follows the guidelines explained in either The Pro grammer s Guide to LDOS TRSDOS Version 6 orin The Model 4 4P Technical Reference Manual absolutely no prob lems will be encountered In closing it seems pretty funny to think that I did all this work just so I could maintain your MSCSI hard disk driver SubDISK modules and the EXMEM handler all together in low memory which I was previously incapable of doing A
103. nd it feels great The various FIX files associated with this software interface are XLSYSOB1 FIX XLBOOTBI FIX XLR8S2 FIX XLR8 12 FIX and XLRSBUI FIX These patches are handled by XLR8B631 JCL for LS DOS 6 3 1 It is used in the form DO XLR8B631 D n where n is the drive which contains the system disk to apply the patches to Also one can use the O NO OH equals NO parameter if you are patching the new patches over the old ones Just for reference the BANK code I used to develop my patches is named BANK ASM By the way I like the new format of TMQ Without all the downloaded BBS chatter it seems more accessible Also I m very glad you decided to stay with TMQ Here s hoping that you ll now be able to manage to get enough time to catch a breath of fresh air but of course it was in the midst of one of these mo ments that I came up with this patching idea Best wishes to you and your family PS I wrote this using one of my new soft font drivers for SuperSCRIPSIT and SCRIPSIT Pro making use of 10 point proportional Times Roman normal up Inside TMQ Volume V 1i right bold and italics with a touch of 14 point bold Helvetica for my name in the banner Nice huh Fm MISOSYS Inc Yes your letter was nicely presented Anyone in need of a SuperScripsit printer driver check out David s drivers see CN80 for details High X FED1 Low X 2FFF 32K Banks avail 11 11 In use
104. ne TIFF scanner and FAX received from proFAX PC Fax card Color PCX Files will be converted to gray scaling e Auto redial e Sends Multiple Files So you can combine more than one file to be sent to a fax machine For instance you might choose a picture file with graphs or logos and combine it with text message and then send every thing with one phone call Doing so will reduce phone charges as well as save the time needed to make multiple calls e Flexible phone number management You can add change delete and sort phone numbers easily with BitFax The BitFax Phone Book also allows you to store company names and ad dresses You can group sets of phone numbers for distribution lists The Phone Book Database is stored in a dBASE II type format DBF file name extensions so you can access with dBASE or other utility program e Software selective for data modem and Fax mode software automatically switches between data modem or fax e AT command set compatible for use by most communications software e Low transmission cost schedule to send fax at night rate e Fax s are better quality No degradation due to printer quality or scanner quality e Distribute fax messages to multiple destinations e Highest speed and lowest cost solution by combining 9600 bps fax and 2400 bps data modem on one board AN Technical Specifications e Compatibility Data modem 300 bps Bell 103 300 bps CCITT V 21 1200
105. ng a Kalok KL320 20 megabyte 3 5 drive and fed it with a Western Digital WDXT GEN controller That worked out fine giving the 1000TL 2 20 megs of storage I passed it to Brenda for upstairs use I then gave her the challenge of becoming expert with Deskmate The Blurb Volume V 1i THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1 Infochip s Expanz data compression Here s a rundown on the newly released Expanz board for PC compatibles I have had this board installed in my AST 386 machine for over a month now Normally retailing for 199 I am selling this board for 179 10 plus shipping Okay so what does it do I first read about the Expanz board ear lier this year in a few industry magazines covering the electronics marketplace The board is based on a dedicated data compression decompression chip the IC 105 both the chip and the board are products of Infochip Systems Running at a maximum speed of 40 Mhz the chip can accept input data for compression at up to 2 Mbytes s decompression is rated at 5 Mbytes s The IC 105 uses a proprietary compres sion algorithm which is claimed to provide lossless compression of from 2 1 to 15 1 relative to the mix of data compressed Lossless is a term which means that the decompressed data recovered is 100 identical to the original data The algo rithms typically employed by archive utilities such as ARC and PKARC pro vide lossless compression M
106. ng the drive manually The Powersoft Toolbelt and Backrest programs will work with the drive how ever Toolbelt has not been updated to understand the date extended directory structure of DOS 5 3 6 3 so directory reconstruction using Toolbelt may not be 100 effective On the PowerDot II program you ac quired the Epson compatible version will probably be the best for you Most dot matrix printers today support the IBM character set to work with MS DOS That is also Epson compatible since the Epson printer was the first used by IBM Setting it to the IBM mode should be sufficient Finally DED86 comes with two versions one is universal for PC compatibles of which the T2000 is not the other version 1s specifically for the Tandy 2000 Both versions are supplied on the same disk The reason why we do this is that DED86 was first developed on a Tandy 2000 by a Tandy 2000 user Incidentally I don t know if they are still around but there was a newsletter geared specifically to the Tandy 2000 It is was the Tandy 2000 Orphans 387 Main St Westport CT 06880 They were still around in the fall of 1989 6 3 0 Disk refresh 4P Floppy Drives Em Vincent L Perinn Dear Sirs Iown a TRS 80 Model 4 name plate model 26 1069A The operating system is LS DOS 6 3J date of creation 10 Feb 87 by Logical Systems I have two requests Kindly update the enclosed diskette to the most recent version I have enclosed a ch
107. no connections to any other internal de vice except the backplane Incremental backups are easily done but you can t just write over an old copy ofa file I think you missed my question I want to store a full backup on one tape and use a second tape for a month s worth of incremental backups Can the DJ10 be written to like a floppy drive within reason Say did you get the DJ10 driver working for the Model 4 Em Roy Soltoff No Shane the tape adaptor card plugs into an 8 bit slot The FDC to floppy connector on the FDC then is cabled to the tape adaptor The T A has a connec tor to receive the cable unplugged from the FDC which goes to the floppies A third connector cables to the tape drive or is internally connected to an external connector on the tape adaptor bracket The T A also comes with a power Y cable to connect power to the bracket connector for use in powering the external tape drive I recently moved my tape drive external to free up a slot for the 40Meg drive I added 80 Megs even with the EXPANZ card was not going to be suffi cient I expect to need lots of room fo FAX reception Let me provide you some more detail on the DJ10 per your questions I ll assume that when you refer to incremental back ups you are referring to backing up any file modified since the last backup With that assumption as a basis you can easily cause that to happen as the TAPE pro gram provides that as a menu o
108. oblem In trying to write a program that will work across three dif ferent Operating systems I have run into a stone wall LDOS 5x and Newdos v2 all have a neat command CMD doscmd that will let you perform certain DOS functions from within Basic However the closest TRSDOS 1 3 comes is CMD T doscmd So what s the problem you say Well as the manual says and I quote Using this command may overwrite parts of Basic The kicker is that in every instance I have tried it ALWAYS overwrites Basic and returns you to TRSDOS ready Has any one every had that command work All I am trying to do is read a text file on the disk instead of having it buried in my Basic program Is that TOO much to ask of TRSDOS 1 3 My typical statement under LDOS would be CMD LIST ABC TXT and once done continue Basic computing Any info would be greatly appreciated BTW if you have TRSDOS 1 3 do get Henry Herrdegen s upgrades from Computer News80 Great Stuff Fm Gary Phillips Ted I m afraid you are asking too much of TRSDOS 1 3 That operating system was almost if not completely brain dead at birth The best solution is just to use LDOS if you needa model 3 operating system The LDOS version of Basic is superior anyway I don t believe CMD T never returns you to Basic because Basic is always over laid by running a DOS command You might be able to use CMD T to execute a program that in turn call
109. ogram reads the 513th byte of the MacPaint file I do not know the purpose of this byte Over 90 of the time if it is a non zero value it is the first byte of the image data and if it is zero the image data starts at byte 641 However I do have one MacPaint file which has 02H in the 513th byte which is not image data which starts at byte 641 Perhaps a reader can supply 100 reliable informa tion on how to determine the starting point of image data in a MacPaint file At any rate the FCB is supposed to be pointed to the first byte of image data and will be for more than 90 of MacPaint files when the program reaches the label DECODE At DECODE a counter is set up to count the 240 lines on the TRS 80 display which also counts the 240 sets of three MacPaint lines which must be processed to create one TRS 80 line This counteris saved on the stack and image data is read in MacPaint image data consists of sets of from two to 129 bytes in size If the first byte in a set is positive it is a zero based counter of the number up to 128 of unique data bytes to follow If it is nega tive it is the negative of a zero based counter of the number also up to 128 of times the next byte is to be repeated In practice however the first byte never counts more than 72 bytes since the MacPaint format is line oriented and it Inside TMQ 27 Inside TMQ Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii
110. om TRSDOS 1 3 would not work until I zapped these bytes When I used 6 3 1 and BACKUP TXT s d I did not have the problem This is not a big deal to me but I thought that you would like to know Fm MISOSYS Inc Lloyd After dig ging around in LDOS 5 3 s BACKUP utility I came to the conclusion that there is a design flaw As implemented the utility does not directly examine the extended year bit in the directory GAT X CD bit 3 but rather uses the appropriate bit in the YFLAG This flag value is only updated by the CKDRV service function which BACKUP doesn t use thus BACKUP will use the disk type detected from the last disk logged on that drive Given time I may look at a solu tion but a patch may be unworkable After almost three years I don t think the problem is too severe There are a few work arounds One tem porary solution is to either log a disk or target it with a DIR command either way will log the disk with CKDRV This only needs to be done when you are switch ing between old disks and new disks old 16 meaning prior to release x 3 If one is always going to be using new Style disks as was relating to Henry s problem then it may be useful to change the default for the YFLAG bits when LDOS 5 3 boots up It currently defaults to assuming the old style per disk drive except for those logged as new style prior to a SYSTEM SYSGEN Henry could install a subdisk log it remove
111. or itis also indicative of an error you get the Attempt to read system data record error diagnostic Enter two sided double density disks with 36 sectors per cylinder two tracks of 18 sectors The DIR SYS file is at most 34 sectors so there would be two unused sectors on the directory cylinder This brings us to the point of being able to discuss what the ending record number ERN should be for the DIR SYS file There are two ways to access the direc tory from a common program One is to use the DOS service calls which perform directory read write operations But those are not necessarily standard across all DOS branches on the tree Another method is to open the DIR SYS file and read the records All DOS branches except Model HI TRSDOS use the same directory for mat NEWDOS 80 was slightly different in the length of its directory allowing for a maximum sized directory regardless of cylinder size So in reading the direc tory as a file you ignore the first two sectors and then read each sector until you get an end of file encountered error This of course assumes that the DOS provides READ ACCESS privileges to the DIR SYS file Most do Model I TRSDOS didn t which required programmers to employ contortions to read TRSDOS 2 3 s directory Now if a program reads the directory using standard read service calls it has to rely on the system to provide the end of file error at the proper point You certainly would
112. ost compression schemes operate on data sequentially that is any attempt to provide compression for a data file which is accessed randomly would prove fruit less since there is no way to predict the actual location of a data segment in the compressed file On the other hand In fochip Systems appears to have accom plished the miracle of totally accessible compressed data on a random accessed basis It accomplishes this by what ap pears to be some sleight of hand I recognized the value of a hardware compression decompression coprocessor for use in many systems bumping up against the limit of existing disk capac ity Changing a 20 or 40 Megabyte drive toa larger one sometimes can be more of a headache as the possibility of also re quiring a change in hard disk controller becomes evident So an inexpensive hard ware solution which is relatively trans The Blurb parent to the user can be quite attractive I like to look at leading edge technology but also inexpensive to implement Since I want to be relatively first in this regard I jumped in But I did take advantage of my Colorado Memory Systems tape backup drive to make two backups of my 80 Megabyte drive currently in my AST 386 machine Adding an Expanz card to your system is relatively painless However you are cautioned to make backups of your files on the drive partitions you are going to compress Heed this warning The procedure to install an Expanz card is
113. ozen well known and widely sold word processing programs At this stage of the game probably the three premier wp programs for the TRS 80 are Superscripsit and PRO Allwrite and LeScript There are differences among them But the term better is irrelevant Is vanilla ice cream better than choco late Neither is good if you prefer mocha almond fudge See what I mean Also read the article on laser printing on the TRS 80 which appeared in TMQ issue V XLR8er amp M A D Fm Mike Sargent to Fred Oberding I read your excellent article on M A D s software and agree with It is an excellent product I have installed the HBUILD6 software according to the instructions I ve also installed the xlr8set also how ever I cannot get the ramdisk to engage I get a Record number out of range message I do not understand its meaning or how to correct the problem I have a Model 3 4 with MSCSI6harddisk XIrSer 128k memory two disk drives I ve changed the cfgrd jcl to match my current drive system 0 1 2 3 harddisk 4 5 for my disk drives If I understand the instructions from Misosys the jcl configure would be drive 7 When it come to fighting fires and saving lives I am one of the best but when it comes to computers I who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning without explicit instructions Please help Thank you Fm Fred Oberding Mike it isn t you its RAMDISK DCT For some reason I ha
114. ption You can either perform a full backup or a targeted backup The targeted backup allows you to backup either modified files or user selection of either entire subdirectories or files specifically tagged The backup of modified files can easily be performed at the command line level When you schedule a backup for a future time what you are doing is scheduling a BAT file the batch file will contain whatever TAPE commands you want to perform For instance when I was back ing up my entire 80 and 40 meg drives recently since the TAPE program works on only one partition at a time I had to backup drives C D E and F I have nothing on drive G currently I just cre ated a 4 line batch file to perform the tape operation Each partition put to tape is considered a volume a tape can have many volumes written to it If you want to re use a tape you can quick erase or security erase it The former just nulls the directory while the latter writes over those sectors which are in use Although the tape drive is accessed from the floppy controller you can t just write to it like a floppy as the software interface protocol is quite complex True a driver sits between the tape drive and the FDC board and you read and write sectors of data The tape can easily be accessed on arandom sector basis but seeking throughout the tape would be an exceedingly slow process It is normally accessed sequentiall
115. quirements for a fax board were group HI compatibility at 9600 baud send and receive capability and a 2400 baud modem included Why include a modem as well Because without a combined modem you would either have to switch your phone line between modem and fax board add a second telephone line jack for your modem and ensure that some technique exists to preclude both units answering a call or purchase an elec tronic call director One of the lowest priced fax boards is Frecom s with a suggested retail price SRP of 199 street priced at 175 But that does not include a modem Intel s new SatisFAXtion board is elegant and feature laden butat a SRP of 499 Idon t consider that low priced I investigated the Zoltrix ZOFAX 96 24 board which satisfies my technical re quirements This board is a Group III 9600 baud send receive fax with 2400 baud modem It comes with BITCOM and BITFAX software The BITCOM modem software supports eight file trans fer protocols MODEM CheckSum XMODEM CRC Relaxed XMODEM YMODEM YMODEM batch Ymodem G Compuserve B and Kermit The software appears flawless I have been using BITCOM for over a month in ac cessing Compuserve The BITFAX software is powerful yet easy to use Contrary to what has ap peared in print BITFAX does indeed allow you to receive a fax in the back ground while you are running another program RECV_FAX is a removable TSR You may also send a fax either in for
116. r happy M A D customer Fm the A N McAninch s Dear Roy Thank you for sending the hard disk driver TRSHD2 DCT amp TRSFORM2 CMD for my Model 16 so promptly The MISOSYS QUARTERLY Volume V i arrived to day as well Please send me a copy of Disk Notes 5 1 rightaway Thanks forsuch adata packed issue I particularly appreciated Fred Oberding s review of M A D s XROM since I did such a review for Computer News 80 He is right on target The XROM XDROM is the most valuable modifica tion one can add to his Model 4 4p 4d and for only 15 to 35 it is the most cost effective In addition to excellent docu mentation and support it is one of the easiest installations I have made I in stalled an XROM on an old pre revision A non gate array and an XDROM ona gate array machine Both have Smart Watches and high resolution boards in stalled I have experienced absolutely no problems with either machine Thanks also for Frank Durda s article on hard disk drives and Models 16 6000 Lamar Owen s letter together with your response concerning Model 1 12 LS DOS 6 3 1 were most helpful to me I am ea gerly awaiting your patches to update II 12 LS DOS 6 3 1 to level 1G Letters to MISOSYS 21 Letters to MISOSYS re i _ _ _ _ P P x rxrrsrrsrrrsrsrrrrsrr r mr r mr _ mm A LLL LL LLL EG TTT A GP do dedo a e a
117. r shows allo cated to the directory on a free space map Doing a DIR DIR S reveals to me a discrepancy in multiplication 34 records times the LRL of 256 givesan actual DIR SYS file size of 8 704k and I m wonder ing if some programs calculate the free disk space this way and ignore the fact that the whole cylinder is supposed to be reserved for the directory The program must be seeing the 34 rec ords of the directory and using the unused space just past it This helpful program must also try to correct the discrep ancy by changing byte X 30 of DIR SYS Record X 00 from X FF to X C3 and byte X 17 of DIR SYS Record 3 from X 05 to X 01 With PMOD6 CMD I changed the C3 back to FF and the 01 back to 05 and I changed byte X 14 in DIR SYS record 3 from X 22 to X BB and that causes the Recs Attribute of the DIR SYS to show 187 instead of 34 I did this a couple of months ago and haven t had any prob lems with files showing up in the Direc tory cylinder since Should FORMAT CMD automatically make the Recs equal the File Size di vided by the LRL the of DIR SYS Is what I did to correct my problem ok By the way my drive is 40 meg and config Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii ured to have seven 96 cyl 6 head logical drives in the Model 4 mode with format ted space of 4608K each drive The hard drive drivers are
118. rch 31st KIM WATT s Space Colony Symon Capture Horse Race Kim watt author of Super Utility and other famous programs wrote some games that Adventure Intemational published back in the early 70 s They are interesting in that most people have never seen these as by the time SUPER UTILITY was established in the market these games as well as Adventure were gone Originally these were sold on three separate diskettes or tapes but we have combined them all on one disk for you collectors Just 7 16until March 31st LANCE MICKLUS GREATEST GAMES 3 Disk Set This is a great collection as it features space games Space Trek adventure games Dog Star Adventure gambling games The Mean Craps Machine which also includes a Craps tutorial booklet on disk board games Mean Checkers Machine as well as some darn useful programs that you might use for real purposes Also has some educational games for the kids You will enjoy owning this set of programs by one of the early pioneer programmers forthe TRS 80 Just 10 77 until March 31st Lair of the Dragon by David Goben MegAd venture is unlike virtually any other interactive fiction adventure that you have ever played for it will more than just paint its pictures upon the canvas of your imagination it will slap the sweat right onto your forehead If you truly believe that discovery is one of the finest points in life if you would like to test your ability to think logically to the fulles
119. rested in how many pages it will take to print it out Or are you interested in knowing how much disk space does it occupy The answer could require a to tally different calculation Most folks want to know the latter Since disk space is allocated in chunks called granules NEWDOS afficionados refer to these as lumps a one byte file takes up as much disk space as a 4096 byte file if the gran ule size is 16 sectors If you request a directory you are looking at file space calculated as if the file occupied the entire last granule In fact this space is allocated to the file so itis entirely correct to figure it that way Copy a six sector file from a double density disk to a single density disk then request a directory on each Surprisingly the file has magically be come larger on the single density disk No it hasn t but because the SDEN disk uses 5 sector granules whereas the DDEN disk uses 6 sector granules it takes two gran ules to store that file on the SDEN disk but only one to store it on the DDEN disk Confusing isn t it Now the size of the DIR SYS file on a drive partition which can contain the maximum sized directory could be differ ent based on the granule size of the parti tion Let s assume a 64 sector cylinder At 32 sectors per granule SPG that DIR SYS would take up 16K since it would need the two granules At 16 SPG it would need three granules and take up only 12K the additional granule of 4K woul
120. rint are 10 each plus shipping The LDOS Quarterly was a publication of Logical Systems who subsequently pub lished the LSI Journal 6 DSMBLR will disassemble any CMD file as well as memory regions As such it can disassemble LDOS and LS DOS files as well as TRSDOS 1 3 files you have access to 7 There is nothing which publishes the differences between LDOS and TRSDOS 1 3 The LDOS manual publishes the public entry points into LDOS The standard entry points for DOS services is identical between LDOS and TRSDOS 1 3 What programs are you talking about Some talk directly to non standard addresses 8 Dos machine programs You don t provide enough in your question for me to know what you are referring to 9 To begin with LCOMM is supplied with LDOS itcan sendand receive ASCII files I used to sell XFTS which supported XMODEM but discontinued itsome time ago There was an XMODEM written in C by David B Lamkins which I published in TMQ HLi Spring 1988 Youcould get a copy of it on DISK NOTES 3 1 10 Our ENHCOMP BASIC compiler compiles a BASIC program of its dialect to a pseudo code which can speed up runtime depending on the mix of BASIC statements used You may also find a used copy of BASCOM or RS BASIC both of which were compilers sold by Radio Shack 11 There were a few speech boards sold for the TRS 80 Best youcheck around on bulletin boards to see if any used ones are available Dig
121. rom ROM Also make sure that the two entries near the bottom read config sys and read autoexec bat are noted as NO They will try to read from A if set to yes assuming no hard drive is present The easiest way to accomplish this and normalize every thing is to set the SETUP to default That willrestore everything to factory defaults boot from ROM into DESKMATE Letters to MISOSYS 24 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii The accompanying listing MAC2HR ASM is a demonstration of some of the techniques used in graphics image proc essing The main techniques demonstrated are scaling using pixel averaging and error dispersion dithering The program reads MacPaint files which are 576 pixels wide 720 pixels high and contain two greyscales This is expressed as 576 x 720 x 2 It then scales them to a size fully displayable on the Model 4 s 640 x 240 x 2 screen In order to do this the image must be reduced to approxi mately 1 9th its original size and 2 9ths of its original number of pixels The 720 vertical dimension must be scaled to 240 However since TRS 80 pixels have an aspect ratio of 1 2 width height and MacIntosh pixels have an aspect ratio _ Of 1 2 the 576 horizontal dimension is multiplied by 2 3rds rather than 1 3rd to preserve the correct image aspect ratio 4 5 Thus the final size of the TRS 80 image will be 384 x 240
122. room for com LD A HL get current OPREG mask pression AND FH strip out bits 6 5 4 l OR B merge new mask ee LD HL A save new image to OPREGS I never realized until I had actually disas een 84H A select bank 0 1 or 2 sembled M Houd s XLR8er patches that RET return for finish up coda what they were basically doing was forc 4 D st tsi SWC t tC tstSSst iCSsi istS CS Inside TMQ 33 Inside TMQ tt a SL eo Ama sa as ar i ene Volume V ii extended banks and the standard upper 32K bank are maintained together we would no longer have to depend upon separate code to process all the various non bank switching functions accessible through the BANK SVC By testing for bank number limits above 10 at the start of our new BANK routine we can also eliminate the needfora BAR table Bank Available RAM and in fact use that 1 byte freed space as the needed 1 byte extension of the new BUR Of course these patches also assume and require that the user has both the standard 128K expansion andthe 256K of XLR8erRAM available otherwise these patches should not be used Considering the cheap price of RAM chips there is little reason why you should not add the 128K expansion if you do not have it This combination of the 128K and the 256K expansions gives us a total of 384K memory This provides us with 11 addressable banks 0 through 10 and our base 32K of memory which cannot beaddressed through
123. rum on CompuS erve You can reach many experts on TRS 80 and MS DOS subjects by dialing in The forum is reached via GO PCS49 or GO LDOS If you have any questions concerning access get on and leave a message to SYSOP Joe Kyle DiPiet ropaolo will get to you Please don Lo i me here at MI n er uestion 01 ion The forum contains a great deal of pro grams which you can download as well as enter into the lively discussions which thread through the message system Ifyou do programming on a PC the forum also contains the listings from Programmer s Journal If you want to direct a message to me my user ID is 70140 310 Post a message in private if you don t want it broadcast some folks even send me orders via a PRIVATE message DISK NOTES 5 2 Each issue of THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY usually contains program listings patch listings and other references to files we have placed onto a disk DISK NOTES 5 2 corresponds to this issue of TMQ If you want to obtain all of the patches and all of the listings you may conveniently purchase 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 else where XLR8er boards I am down to my last seventeen XLR8er boards as of this writing I have no re placement shields which are needed to install a board in a 26 1069 non gate array Model 4 However David Dahlager has informed me he has a few spare stan dard shields w
124. s Basic back into memory when it finishes or use it to execute a batch command file via the DO command that calls Basic as its last com mand The awkwardness of this situation is enough that you should seriously con sider using a different DOS and Basic combination Letters to MISOSYS Hard Disk device drivers Fm Chuck Todd Roy do you offer de vice drivers or source for device drivers 1 can build a drive interface i am a hard ware Tech But I need info on how to create the drivers Also I am interested in your Newest Ver sion 5 3 of the LDOS system Also can you put me on you mailing list and send me a current catalog of you offerings Fm Roy Soltoff Chuck We offer hard disk drivers for some commercial hard drives previously available to the TRS 80 as well as software for our own host adaptor We neither make custom drivers for others nor release source code for our own I suggest you consider my SCSI host adaptor I will soon have software avail able for it to work with embedded con troller SCSI drives Currently I support Adaptec 4000 4010 and Xebec 1421 with software I also have drivers for the Radio Shack drive Percom drive VR Data drive and possibly the BiTech drive BOOT and DIR Fm Mark Giannini Roy I used the program MAPPER CMD from MI SOSYS s GO MTC package and came up with a couple Error messages on some of the Cylinders What does this mean One time after removing a file before th
125. s one Software provided with the host adaptor includes a low level i PPP formatter an installation utility and driver a high level formatter used to add DOS directory e H A with software 75 ol information a sub disk partitioning utility Utilities to archive restore the hard disk files e Xebec 1421 HDC 95 o i rg fr es floppy omer to park the drive s read write head a utility to set or read cer vette sI e hardware clock a keyboard filter which allows the optional joystick to generate five ive power Y cable 5 i keycodes and a utility to change the joystick filter s generated keystroke values after eXT drive cable set 5 i installation Optional LDOS 5 3 software is available 20MB drive packages are currently e o built with a Kalok 3 5 drive 40MB packages use a Seagate ST251 1 28 millisecond drive Note freight charges are additional j Drive packages are offered as pre assembled kits assembled to order and fully tested all 4 Pri i ithout i i e Prices subject to change w noticee i you will need to do is plug it in and ea the software 50 pin host interface cable included sa sa e e e e e e e e e 6e6ee i seeeeeeeeeeeeesee e seee e eeeeeeeeeee O ER e 9 9 9 99e ee eeeeeeeeeeeee e E PRO WAM Version 2 A B Data Manager 4 Window amp Application Manager A A rere data manager eOur applications turn your 128K Model 4 into a sophi
126. s this year we will be closed from Saturday December 22nd until Wednesday January 2nd 1991 TMO Schedule Why do I bother to state targets If you have a 4 issue subscription you ll get four issues I try to target mailing THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY the last week of the respective month as follows Spring issue in February Summer issue in May Fall issue in August and Winter issue in November it didn t get out until Decem ber Note that your mailing label usually has the expiration date of your subscription For instance those with 91 02 com plete their subscription with this issue If you want to save me the cost of mailing arenewal notice send in yourrenewal fee quickly I usually wait about a month after TMQ is mailed before sending out renewal notices It is best to just extend your 91 02 subscription for two addi tional issues for one half of the normal price A 12 50 B 15 00 D 17 50 E 20 That will adjust your expiration date to 91 08 good through issue V iv As I write this sentence it s Friday the 30th of November This issue will be off to the printers next week 1000 TL 2 and hard drives Due to some misinformation about the alle ged inability of our TRSCROSS prod uct to successfully operate on a Tandy 1000 TL 2 computer MISOSYS recently The Blurb 2 The Blurb Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii apie Pin Name D
127. short while by eating one of the ENERGIZERS on the board Then it s the GOBBLER s tum to chase catch and eat the ZONKERS The game has two skill levels the pace is fast the sound is great the action is continuous bps can t beat this rere of a game Just 9 98 until March 31st Leo Christopherson s Animated Game Disk with sound This is one of the greatest values in games ever produced Leo Christopherson wrote the very first animated game for the TRS 80 and the country went wild for it Android Nim will make everyone laugh to watch these life like creatures as they shake their heads up and down or side to side and blink at you stupidly as they wait for you to make a move Then Leo invented how to make the TRS 80 produce sound and added it to NIM You get ALL of Leo s programs on one disk for one great low price If you haven t yet bought this disk do it now It is a classic Each one of these games originally sold for 9 95 19 95 EACH The disk includes the famous games ANDROID NIM BEEWARY DUELING DROIDS DANCING DE MONS SNAKE EGGS and ANIMATED LIFE All games feature full sound effects and some of them are even in 3 part harmony You and your family will just love this disk Dancing Demon even features saving your song and dance routines to disk and four of them are included The possibilities are endless and it is always entertaining A great way to show off what your computer can do and always fun Just 9 71 until Ma
128. st completely eliminates dumping and artifacts For speed all calculation of error weights is done via the precalculated lookup tables at the end of the program starting at the label WEIGHTS First HL IX and IY are set up as pointers to LINE1 CUMERR1 and CUMERR2 respectively BC is used to count the 384 bytes to dither At DTH010 the previously accumulated errors to be disbursed to this pixel are loaded into the A register and copied to the D register Then they are added to the luminence value for this pixel The fol lowing code to DTH040 tests for over flows and does any necessary clipping The program logic is tricky and it may take a little study to understand how and why it works Hint build a truth table which charts the state of the Z and CY flags vs combi nations of positive and negative errors and luminences Remember the CY flag is affected by the addition of luminence error and the state of the Z flag depends on the sign of the error which has been added What makes this tricky is that errors are SIGNED integers while luminences are UNsigned At DTH040 the state of the Z flag indi cates whether there is any error to dis burse If the value to display is either 0 or 255 in which cases there is no display error the Z flag will be set Otherwise there is an error and it must be disbursed to the seven neighboring pixels The first step in error dispursion is to point DE to the first 10 3
129. sticated business LB is easily used by anyone for managing their data It s menu or personal machine because easily installed PRO WAM comes with driven for ease of use absolutely no programming needed Re e el H many useful and powerful menu driven time savers and work organizers quires a Model 4 with 128K or a hard drive LB86 an MS DOS i i SPRO WAM is accessed with a single keystroke its export and import version is also available Now activate PRO WAM from newly e functions allow you to move data across windows between programs compiled LB beta release hardware restrictions apply ej l S 0 Address CARDS LABELS and HEAD display amp export Store up to 65534 records per data base i j BRINGUP tickler file new PRINTING and sorting Upto 1024 characters 64 fields per record i s CALENDAR flags BRINGUP items visually on screen Nine field types for flexibility i oO Ten3x5 CARD files with FORMS and FIELDS Select and sort on up to 8 fields multiple indexes e j s Virtual PHRASE access for export 10 input update screens per data base ol e New TODO list manager with who does it 10 printout formats per data base i Plus many other vital applications O Extensive on line help available el I SPRO WAM M 51 025 74 95 5S amp H LB L 50 510 74 95 5S amp H 21 FEA SELES SILLS AAA SELES AEE Bs Dh a All Model I Ill 4 Language software 30 off until March 31st Floppy Drives and Accessories
130. t Is there any such program written 5 3 LDOS purpose to produce story tapes and change the voice to match the character 12 Can voice be recorded on disk 5 3 13 Will your 720K drives work with my 102 14 Will your 720K drives work on my portable 600 15 Can your 720K drives be made the primary drive on Models 3 4 16 Can two 720k drives be attached to the disk expansion port 17 LDOS tool box is the same as Super Utility plus and will work with 5 3 LDOS Correct 18 Does Power Mail Plus have a label printing utility 19 When I type TED in on my 5 3 I get an error message attempt to load read only memory This program works fine on my 6 3 What is the problem 20 My friends also bought some of the Letters to MISOSYS 17 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume Vi last Model 4s One of them is looking for a disk that has blackjack on it Doss any of your game series disk have this 21 Power Draw Power Dot Will both of these programs work with 5 3 Ldos 22 I have a DMP2100 I have 5 3 and 6 3 which of these drawing programs will produce the best graphics on paper 23 I have one problem with all of my ASCH text editors scripsit ted teleterm deskmate The problem is that Ican only get files of about 10 pages in them Is there any ASCII text editor which can contain over 100 pages 24 Is Mod 4 features for Mo
131. t extent of your ability if you would like to take on the largest adventure ever written in the genre of interactive fiction and if you have the guts to face that which would make any other mortal elf cringe in fear then Lair of the Dragon is your cup of poison for reward is a hard earned commodity here not given easily to the timid and the faint hearted If you are an old hand at adventuring then be pre pared for a worthy opponent MegAdventure rips the door to adventure right off its hinges Just 11 98 until March 31st ee e o vVvvx 4 AA x DOO 1 y HAVE A DEVIL OF THE TIME WITH MODEL UIIH 4 GAMES FROM MISOSYS 7 Savings up to 60 off until March 31st Gu a 9 ng Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V ii Table of Contents The Blurb 2 Points to Ponder 2 Tandy 1000 TL 2 and hard drives 2 Infochip s Expanz data compression board 4 Earlier TMQ s available 5 PD Software Librarian 6 TMQ Advertising 6 DISK NOTES 5 2 6 Ribbon cable assemblies 6 HT Math Coprocessors 7 Zoltrix ZOFAX 96 24 FAX modem 7 Letters to the MISOSYS 8 BOOT SYS and DIR SYS 9 DOS Directory Structure 10 EnhComp FIELD error checking bug 13 DO bugs Workaround for extended command lines 14 Bargain Floppy Drives 15 LDOS 5 3 BACKUP bug 16 What s the best word processor Still a question 20 Merging LB data bases 22 PC Tape Backup drives 23 Ignore some TRSCROSS errors
132. the PowerSoft WD se ries Fm MISOSYS Inc Carl the restriction on switching diskettes during a BACKUP operation while a batch file Job Control Language is in effect is based on the fundamental philosophy of batch opera tion it is considered to be a hands off operation Thus it would not be expected to have a program reach a point of requir ing Operator intervention that must be considered some unexpectederror That s how BACKUP is programmed FORMAT and BACKUP are also programmed to abort under other unexpected conditions such as password prompts where JCL is active This method of operation is not the same concept as that utilized for being able to switch the logical position of two drives which assumes that both drives already contain the proper disks What should abort and in fact does abort is a SYSTEM SYSTEM d command in voked from an active JCL when the drive is found to not contain a SYSTEM disk That type of request would be equally unexpected from a batch job Your assumptions about the directory file s DIR SYS size and ending record number ERN are wrong In fact those assump tions are where a lot of programmers go wrong and wind up corrupting entries in the directory Let s go back to a little history in the development of increasing disk storage associated with an LDOS or LS DOS type environment This discussion ex tends to virtually all other DOS products which are in the TRSDOS fami
133. the metric system the only legal one in this country and there appears reason to believe that they will eventually succeed in their self imposed mission A few sentences fur ther on Now comes a report from Wash ington that the House Committee on Coin age Weights and Measures have recom mended that the metric system of weights and measures shall be adopted by the various departments of the Government by July 1 1892 and by the nation at large January 1 1901 The editor goes on for another three columns before ending with The time may come when sentiment will rise so far above business considerations that a change will be made from the inch to the metric unit But itis certain that the cost of that luxury will run into many millions of dollars So here you are almost 95 years later not even as close to the joys of metric measurements as you were then Incidentally each monthly issue of the Locomotive Engineering published in New York averaged over 90 pages and the annual subscription rate was 2 00 postage paid to any part of the world A tip of the hat to Lawrence for that input As an aside my prediction referenced the turn of the century a point in time which some folks still are unclear of the specific date Where s Tandy Department It wasn t that many years ago when the industry press refused to acknowledge the pres ence of Tandy in the computer market place Statistics on computers sol
134. tors amp clusters for writing to a file Great for partial file recovery Edit bytes in hexadecimal or ASCH zap in 0s Undo last edit w Search your disk drive a file or memory for ASCII or hexadecimal strings w Touch a directory file entry with your date and or time Obtain complete disk statistics in one screen includes usage data f Alter file attributes archive system hidden read w Save Restore sectors to from auxiliary buffers for moving data around f DOS subshell available while using DED86 lets you shell to other programs w Handles 5 25 amp 3 5 drives amp RAM disks even large partition drives DED86 is easy on ow iai only 29 95 4S amp H MISOSYS sponsors a forum on CompuServe PCS49 Why buy just a FAX board when the ZOFAX 96 24 from MISOSYS includes a 2400 baud modem for a few bucks more Turn your PC into a FAX machine I Send and receive FAX from any CCITT Group III Fax Machine or PC Fax Auto receive and print incoming Fax messages amp Background receiving Distribut Fax messages to multiple destinations Fax mail merge Time schedule transmission to take advantage of low nightime rates f 2400 bps Fully Hayes Compatible Modem Includes powerful but easy to use BITCOM and BITFAX software Speclal Introductory price 225 6 S amp H price good through 01 31 91 Speed up your program s computational execution with an IIT Math Coprocessor IT 2C87 100 237 00 IT 2C87 125 289 00 IT 2C87 2
135. use the input buffer immediately precedes the drive control table DCT in memory If 80 characters are inserted into memory starting at the second byte of the buffer the 80th character would load into the first byte of the DCT That happens to be the jump vector for the system drive Guess what happens when you next need to access drive 0 Letters to MISOSYS 14 Letters to MISOSYS Volume V ii THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Volume V 1i Bargain Floppy Drives Fm Henry A Blumenthal Dear Mr Soltoff A few minutes after I talked to you on the telephone today I leafed through a flyer that came in the mail from Radio Shack On page 21 on special price this month are extemal 3 1 2 and 5 1 4 drives each for 99 and in cases I suppose the cable is extra Well the drives certainly carry a lower price tag than MISOSYS or any of your competitors serving the Model 4 market I called one of the Computer Centers in this sprawling city of ours to ask if their advertised drives would work with the Model 4 I was told no because of differ ences in MS DOS and LS DOS inter rupts Yet one of my computer acquain tances has told me that the drives are generic and that it s necessary only to adjust staking pins in a drive whatever they are and have the rightcable configu ration yours Wov if the Radio Shack PC external drives won t work with the Model 4 let s get back to what we discuss
136. ut 5 5 minutes a DJ10 backs up 10MB s file by file the fastest in the industry 40MB s gets backed up in about 18 to 20 minutes Uses industry standard DC2000 or DC2010 tape cartridges gt The DJ10 plugs into your floppy disk controller to save cost power and a slot Needs 5 1 4 or 3 5 with faceplate mounting slot B Optional adapter board mounts in your host computer to provide an ad ditional tape port especially useful in 286 and 386 computers When used with our external JUMBO it lets you share your drive between computers Note extemal adaptor includes Tape Adaptor JUMBO has custom chips high speed brushless motors automatic circuits no pots to vibrate out of calibration and fewest parts to assure long life and technical leadership for years to come DJ10 Jumbo 275 5S amp H Note DJ10 Tape Adaptor 75 3S amp H price includes External Adaptor 110 5S amp H one DC2000 DC2000 tape 40M 20 00 na DC2120 tape 60M 25 00 P MISOSTS At When you don t have to ma write in stone don t let A your editor weigh you down You need SAID 86 Editing was never so easy SAID 86 is a fast flexible full screen text editor for PC s It is perfect for editing batch files program listings README files CONFIG SYS files and anything you now do with EDLIN or the non document mode of a word processor Why struggle with huge editors when all is said and done SAID 86 will be your text editor of c
137. ve n t figured out it will not work with LSDOS 6 3 1 and gives the error msg record number out of range It will work OK with LSDOS 6 3 0 though I haven t used RAMDISK DCT since M Houd released ERAMDISK CMD with his other patches see TMQ I i Un less you got your XLR8er before these Houd patches were released you should have them on your XLR8er Installation Utilities diskette If you don t have them send your XLR8er Utility disk back to MISOSYS and Roy will add them for you and I believe its at no charge but better call Roy just in case The new XLR8er Utilities will also in clude a README TXT file which will explain the use of ERAMDISK CMD You will have to re do the CFGRD JJCL or scrap it all together as ERAMDISK CMD is much easier to use If you still have a problem feel free to give me a shout again Fm Roy Soltoff Mike You are probably using LS DOS 6 3 1 release but an old version of the RAMDISK software This was covered on the forum some time ago as well as discussed in The MISOSYS Quarterly The SYSTEM command of 6 3 1 uses the entire DOS library overlay region 2600H 2FFFH as is available to the DOS But some DCT modules were written to violate the DOS region and load into that region Your problem is that the loading of the RAMDISK DCT pro gram is overlaying the SYSTEM com mand s code and corrupting it thus the strange error Get an up to date version or use ERAMDISK Anothe
138. when I think of the possibility of it running under LDOS from a RamDisk in my 512K of AT memory all that power being wasted Thanks again for your support over the years Letters to MISOSYS THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Winter 1990 1991 Merging LB data bases Fm William J Neuman 2012 Sandal wood drive Sanford NC 27330 7312 Dear Mr Soltoff I had called your office several weeks ago to help with the task of merging two files together using LITTLE BROTHER You had very graciously pointed out the auto file program in BASIC in the little booklet you had supplied with LB I wrote my own little version of it as shown below and last night I merged the two programs beautifully One file had 525 records and the other had 327 and both were formatted the same with an LRL of 88 Soit was real easy Ihave been using LB for some time now for records for my church and keeping a membership list of about 120 for my Lions club I also use it for other projects such as Property Owners data word processing commands etc Italways has behaved beautifully and would recommend it to any one It is way above PROFILE 4 PLUS which I aban doned as soon as I started using LB The BASIC program below is just adding some of my own ideas to memory jog myself when I went to establish the AUTO JOB I know you still may be busy with other things but I have the beta 1 2 2 version of LB and was wondering have you done any more debugging of that
139. y in a ser pentine fashion have not gotten far into my Model 4 tape program yet Ignore some TRSCROSS errors Em MISOSYS Inc William M Dworzan contacted us to discuss a problem he was having in reading TRS 80 disks on his PC using TRSCROSS Since I was unable to discern the cause I asked him to send me a disk he was unable to read The follow ing letter relates my findings Dear William This is in response to your problem of converting TRSDOS files to MS DOS using our TRSCROSS program I had virtually no problems with your disk I did get the trscross can t read diskette abortor ignore error message but tried IGNORE to see what happens TRSCROSS then displayed the directory of the TRS 80 diskette I converted the three BASIC programs then did a quick scan of them to judge the success Apparently the TRSCROSS process worked perfectly So if you are having difficulty sometimes it may pay to con tinue on and ignore the first error It may be successful on the second try Your MS DOS disk now contains the three files 1000 TL 2 Booting trouble Fm Sherry Gates I m having trouble booting with my Tandy TL 2 1000 For some reason it now needs the DOS 3 3 disk in A drive to boot Was doing fine earlier today I have tried running setup program again with no luck any sugges tions will be appreciated Fm Roy Soltoff Sherry Boot from the disk then go into SETUPTL2 Make sure that it is set to boot f
140. y of runaway puppies Crazy Painter is joystick compatible Just 7 48 until March 31st The Official FROGGER by SEGA SCARFMAN Who are the brave who dare to enter the maze where the monsters live SCARFMAN features quality GRAPHICS SOUND REAL TIME MONSTERS and hours of ENJOY MENT Nine progressive skill levels make the game more difficult as you get better Do you have what it takes to reach skill level 9 Just 7 48 until March 31st SPACE CASTLE Will you save the Andromeda Galaxy by destroying the Space Castle or will the evil warlord Yugdab continue to rule uncontested Your main defense is your ability to skill fully handle your ship and it s projectiles If you are not careful Yugdab s intelligent mines will hunt you down and blow you into space dust Space Castle has fast action and exciting sound Just 7 48 until March 31st The Gobbling Box This fast paced action arcade ty pe game runs on the TRS 80 Model I III and 4 4P 4D It generates a variety of special sound effects and music which complement the action on the screen The arrow keys or Alpha Products joy stick control the movements of the GOBBLER in this game You want your GOBBLER to eat as many dots as possible while trying to avoid the ZONKERS who won t stop chasing your GOBBLER until one of them eats it or until the GOBBLER eats all dots on the GameBox The GOBBLER s reward is a new Box there s 3 in all The GOBBLER can tame the ZONKERS for a
141. you need to terminate each field with lt ENTER gt that s the CHR 13 character When all fields for arecord are entered you press lt F3 gt to save the record LB internally uses a decimal value of 27 for that function key value across both the TRS 80 and MS DOS implementations you can t just look at what it normally represents as an ASCII value Finally one way you can terminate an AUTO file is by entering a lt CTRL Z gt that is the decimal 26 value used as your last entry written to the AUTO command file PC Tape Backup drives Fm Shane Dawalt I m looking for a Tape backup I was thinking of buying a fast drive Read high priced drive when Irealized that Colorado Memory Systems and Mountain Computer both provide soft ware which will provideunattended back ups If I m not in attendance during the backup then I guess I really don t care how long it takes On the other hand restoring a 100 Meg drive using a slow tape drive could be about as bad as using floppies ignoring the fact that floppies require changing periodically I m looking for a drive which has a 120MB capacity at least It seems the CMS DJ10 provides this with the appropriate tape This drive however transfers data at the same rate as a floppy drive the Letters to MISOSYS tape drive is built to interface to a floppy controller Mountain Computer s FS8000 on the other hand will use a dedicated controller and ca
142. your BASIC programs and your assembly language programs it is not functional for printing PowerDOT creates virtual printer images which are targeted for printing on a dot matrix printer There are different versions of Power DOT for Epson Tandy DMP Series C Itoh Prowriter and Okidata 92 93 printers Since you have a DMP2100 you would be interested in the PowerDOT Tandy DMP version 23 Most text editors work with a RAM buffer i e all of the text must fit into RAM Only LeScript provides direct access to extended memory known to it to allow aRAM buffer larger than what remains in 64K after the program is loaded Super scripsit operates from disk buffers but as previously mentioned it allows only 174 blocks of text a block is something less than 1024 characters There was at one time a public domain text editor called VED Virtual memory editor which al lowed for text to flow to from disk you may find a copy if you look hard Allwrite provides only for RAM buffers of text but it does allow easy automatic chaining of files to enable the combining of corre lated files say chapters of a book It would be best to be operating off of a fast hard disk If you really do a lot of editing where you need huge documents you better consider another machine For in stance the text handling capability of Microsoft WORD is virtually limitless since it uses the available disk space as a virtual buffer But that s on an MS DOS

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