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TMQ Vol VI.iv - tim

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1. Windowand A pplication Manager The PRO indicates a TRSDOS 6 product In the Summer of 1986 the first issue of The MISOSYS Quarterly announced the name change from PRO NTO to PRO WAM with this notice You will soon see this term used in our advertising Don t worry it s still the same depend able PRO NTO product not to be con fused with electronic banking Of course you must understand that it is quite difficult to re name a product I remember when Nissan Motors of Japan changed the name used in the United States from Datsun as in Datsun280Z to Nissan as in Nissan 300 SX or is it 300 XYZ In any event the process was spread over a number of years with both names being used simultaneously as in Datsun to Datsun Nissan to Nissan Datsun to Nissan That s sort of similar to chang ing FOOD to WART im four easy steps each step changing but one letter FOOD FORD FORT FART excuse me WART ENTER MISTER ED Meanwhile we were busy at work build ing a separate package of editor applica tions which was released in the Fall of 1986 This product was called Mister ED and includeda bundle of editors for differ ent tasks Mister ED was loaded with seven new applications for use with our Window and Applications Manager PRO WAM You would get a file editor FED a disk editor DED a memory editor MED a video screeneditor VED and a text editor TED All
2. Talk about dense Supercomputer Sys tems Inc and startup funded by IBM and headed up by Steve Chen a Cray Re search former computer designer recently released some details of its first design the SS 1 supercomputer SSI has formu lated circuit boards of 78 layers using line widths of 63 microns Via holes are drilled with CO lasers Recollecting my Ham Radio days I seem to remember the large size of the power tubes used in the RF amplifier and that was for a tube generating about 250 watts of RF output Certainly times have changed but transistors were never known to be power demons However Phillips recently released a silicon bipolar transis tor capable of 750 watts of output power at up to 1 150 MHz when operating in a class C configuration using pulsed trans mission at a 10 duty cycle In short pulse 1 duty cycle applications it generates up to 650 watts up to 1 GHz Not only did General Motors have a very bad year but DEC the stalwart opposi tion to IBM in the mini computer arena lost 2 8 billion in its last fiscal year Since 1989 DEC cut its personnel by 23 000 Possibly in light of this poor per formance DEC s founder and president Kenneth Olsen retired DEC s CEO also steppeddown Idon tknow about you but I believe the days of the profitable main frame computer companies are numbered Judging from the shake ups going on in the micro world the viability of some of those hardware
3. able at a keystroke The applications are loaded from core image files during the installation of PRONTO PRONTO comes with its own set of applications A perpetual calendar appli cation can display amonth ata glance for any year since the adoption of the Julian calendar and for as many years as you care to project there is some upper limit however its thousands of years away PRONTO comes with a programmer s reverse polish notation calculator and a standard algebraic one for you normal folks out there PRONTO comes with a notepad capable of keeping all of those scratchpad entries in order Pronto comes with an Autodialer usable with a Hayes compatible modem This application doubles as an address file The DOS li brary command executive is included as one of the six built in applications Other applications are planned for release PRO NTO was released on schedule The first in depth review appeared in the No vember 1985 issue of 80 Micro magazine Thereview entitled PRO NTO TRSDOS 6 X s Sidekick is reprinted in almost its entirety here It pertained to version 1 0 thus material not pertinent to the most recent release 2 x release of PRO WAM has been deleted Nevertheless the re view conveys a good understanding of what PRO NTO and now PRO WAM has to offer Here s what one user Gre gory Cleland had to say about Harrell s review Of PRO NTO He wrote T ve had my new copy of PRO NTO for a couple
4. first phase Here s a little background EnhComp was originally written by Phil Oliver the author of Scarfman EnhBAS an enhanced BASIC add on to inter preter BASIC and many other Model I Il products back in the early days of the TRS 80 Phil even wrote his own assem bler ZED but it was never released for sale MISOSYS acquired publishing rights to Phil s BASIC compiler a number of years ago and continued to improve it i e rid it of bugs and adapt it to the Model 4 environment One of the big problems I had with EnhComp was that 1 the assembler used to assemble all the modules was written only for the Model DI mode and 2 itdid not support conditional assembly Thus the Model IN EnhComp and the Model 4 EnhComp had to be assembled from two completely different sets of files That included all of the programs supplied with theproduct the S CMD supervisor CED CMD editor BC CMD compiler REF CMD cross reference utility and SUP PORT DAT relocatable support module library That represented a lot of files Since the assembler did not support con ditional code blocks there was a set of files foreach operating environment That caused lots of problems Nothing has been done to EnhComp for a few years because of the pain it took to generate a new version for each environ ment I always had a long term plan to revise the assembler and groom the files to a ingle set before I started on the next release I didn
5. teven have the source code to the assembler which I had to get from Phil Since the last issue of TMQ was mailed I began work on this project Just recently I completed the first phase which was 1 reworked the ZED assem bler to operate in Model 4 mode 2 added code to support IF ENDIF conditional assembly 3 reworked all EnhComp modules to utilize conditional code blocks to support the Model I II or Model 4 version generation and 4 compared all programs generated for both Model MI and 4 to ensure that the program files were identical to what is currently being shipped That was Some job Now I have one big set of files used to generate both versions Phase 2 already begun is to investigate a few bugs fix them then work to add more Model 4 interpreter BASIC compatibil ity For instance backin TMQissue IV ii Michael Dauphin reported a problem with PRINT USING incorrectly formatting and or rounding a floating point number less than 0 1 I spent a few days figuring out the problem and working up a solution the code is sparsely commented and rela tively to understand But that problem is now fixed In October of last year Rick Jones discovered another snag in USING when printing a formatted string where the string length was less than the string field specified by spaces IL just fixed that up The last report still hanging was a difficulty Ralf Folkerts was having with XFIELDed files I m looking into
6. 00000101B or 05H The driver for ASCI port 1 has a similar block of code to establish the parameters for that port The corresponding code range is 3E7CHto 3E8FH Lastly as far as parameter patching goes the correspond ing D patch locations for each of the byte values is identified in the following table Byte Port 0 Porti Control A AND D08 64 DOC BO Control AOR D08 66 DOC B2 Control B AND D08 6E DOC BA Control BOR D08 70 D0C BC With these software adjustments out of the way let s turn to some of the hardware interfacing requirements To begin with if you have the XLR8er manual published by MISOSYS Revision 2 0 dated 04 30 88 make note that there is an error on page 41 Due to some erroneous informa tion provided by Hi Tech the original manufacturer of the XLR8er board the pin assignments for RS2 Port 2 RS232 DB25 pinout are inverted The RX1 as signment should be on pin 3 and the TX1 pin assignment should be on pin 2 An other point is that Hi Tech stated that the Request to Send RTS lead should be tied to DTR Thisis not correct To begin with RTS is an outputof the RS232 towards the host Tying RTS to DTR would make sense if the host was incapable of setting DTR and the RS232 needed to see DTR set TRUE By setting RTS TRUE a con nection from RTS to DTR would make DTR appear TRUE Unfortunately what is needed is to have CTSO set TRUE According to the 64180 User s Manual if the CTS input pin is HIG
7. 1 Read a byte from the port 2 Strip selected bits using AND 3 Merge desired bits using OR 4 Write the revised byte to the port When you AND byte A with byte B you essentially strip from byte A any bit which is a zero value in byte B James method of coding constructs the byte B mask by subtracting from 255 all one s the bit value corresponding to a particular bit assignment For instance the mask value for control register A is constructed by subtracting from 255 11111111B CA_M_PE 80H leaving 01111111B CA_M_RTSO 10Hleaving 01101111B CA_M_MPBREFR 08H leaving 3 2 1 0 DR SS2 SSi SSO R W RW RW RW 01100111B CA_M_MOD1 02H leav ing 01100101B andCA_M_MOD0 01H leaving 01100100B The resulting mask value is 64H Theoretically to be com plete since you really want to strip all bits which are going to be subsequently either set or reset this mask should also strip CA_M_MOD2 04H setting the mask value to 60H This would strip all but bit 6 and bit 5 from whatever value was read from the port The next instruction at 3AD3H OR s the result left in the accumulator with the bits desired to establish the operating param eters settable via this register Hard coded is the ORing with CA_M_RE 40H al ways needed to enable the receiver CA_M_TE 20H always needed to enable the transmitter and CA_M_MOD2 048 This establishes MOD2 1 MOD1 0 and MOD0 0 for 8 bit word length 1 stop bit parity
8. 1981 with a DOS provided by Microsoft Corporation Justlike the Model 4LS DOS originally provided by Logical Systems was called TRSDOS by Tandy the Microsoft MS DOS was called PC DOS by IBM The three magical letters of I B M obviously aided in making the PC the success story of the 80 s It also didn t hurt that IBM provided the machine with an open systems architecture complete with all hardware specifications and printed source code of the Basic Input Output System BIOS After competing companies stumbled when they introduced similar but not totally compatible prod ucts the PC finally took off with sales through the roof when the industry shifted to manufacturing machines which were virtually identical in operation to the now standard IBM PC These identical ma chines were termed clones The micro computer had reached critical mass for SUCCESS One thing necessary to point out with the PC is that like the TRS 80 it was and still is a Von Neumann machine The PC pro cessed only one major task at a time About the only secondary task provided with the DOS system wasaspooler andits means of operation were not part of the publicly disclosed documentation Ittook a small upstart company by the name of Borland to decipher the means which enabled the operation of the spooler and turn it into a product sensation that created a brand new product category Borland s original claim tofame wasan exceedingly popular PASCAL c
9. 4A 75 GE 4A 75 6C 41 75 67 53 65 70 4F 63 74 4E 6F 76 44 65 63 puter software PRODIGY for electronic musical synthesizers and PRODIGY for microcomputers some of the PRODIGY trademarks were owned by Prodigy Sys tems Inc WAM turned up for a laundry detergent and office printing machines with various other derived uses of WAMS such as WAMS LOCATOR for business and legal conflict of interest computer program instruction manuals WAMS SAFE for computer programs for file management not to mention WHAM for entertainment This of course put a dir app 0 0S 1 3 gt EnhConmp M 20 072 AS ass enblers Ordering Inform L 1 lt A0 gt lt BO gt lt Co gt lt D0 gt lt E0 gt lt F0 gt WedThuFriSatdanF ebMarAprMaydundu lAugSepOctNovDec i f I i i i 1 f 1 1 f 1 l 1 l 31 Current Bank O0 Page X 04 Byte X 74 gt X B0 Memory EDitor 1 1 Copyright 1986 MISOSYS Inc Command ABCDFGHINPQSX Z Inside TMQ 34 Inside TMQ Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv and push bytes down quash a byte and pull bytes up and zap a value to the end of the displayed data Changes do NOT take effect until you SAVE VED lets you edit the current video screen with CARD type editing You get block mark and move so you can relocate text on the screen It combines the facilities of DOSAVEand DOLOAD tosave restore a screen image With the
10. CONSTANT LEFT RIGHT MID COMPARE and gt DOS software and hardware interrupt vector access support via GET VECTOR PUT VECTOR THIS SEG DI and EI V24 program input output and interrupt input support Overlay management words FORGET OVLY OVLYNAME PUT DATA OVLY ENTRY SAVE OVLY CORRECT LOAD OVLY NEW OVLY RUN OVLY and LEAVE OVLY Screens provide trigonometric functions SIN COS TAN SIN COS and TAN 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 d Send and receive FAX from any CCITT Group II Fax Machine or PC Fax Auto receive and print incoming Fax messages Background receiving Distribut Fax messages to multipie destinations Fax mail merge Time schedule transmission to take advantage of low nighume rates 2400 bps Fully Hayes Compatible Modem d Includes powerful but easy to use BITCOM and BITFAX software Further price reduction Just 125 7S amp H EXPANZ Disk Expander Card gt 8 e With the EXPANZ data compression card you can boost hard disk capacity upe eto three times EXPANZ plugs into any open slot and intercepts calls to and frome ethe disk controllers Compresses and decompresses in real time Requires PC XT e ged or compatible running DOS 3 x or higher Now Just 150 7S amp H e AEG GO Ce PEN
11. Rick I verified what you discovered with a similar program Apparently you are the first to discover that bug in EnhComp whichis why it was never fixed before The problem you hap pened upon occurs when the string ex pression is printed via a USING with the output controlled by the format spaces and the string expression length is smaller than the space field Interpretive BASIC right fills the field with spaces as it should EnhComp ne glected to add the required number of spaces In order to fix up the problem I had to add some code to the USING support routine andre assemble SUPPORT DAT library I m in the process of updating EnhComp see The Blurb so if you can wait for the nextrelease please do If you need the fix right away let me know and I can supply you with the interim revised SUPPORT DAT library file i od Nae ee ed 2 sided drives on 4P Fm Robert Hengstebeck I need a bit of help again This time I am upgrading my dad s computer a Model 4P from dos 6 3 to 6 3 1 and for some reason I cannot get the format command to recognize that the 4P has double sided drives I have a 10 meg hdand my dad has a 15 meg hd Iam trying to do the update without changing the configuration of the 15 meg hd Origi nally his system had only single sided drives and his system probably has some parameters buried in it to only reflect that But because the hd s are configured differently I must give prefe
12. SAID 86 SAID 86 can expand or contract TABs SAID 86 is reasonably priced at just 29 95 3S amp H MISOSYS Sc Bay one TRSCROSS Sterling VA 20167 0239 Now you can transfer TRS 80 8 0 MISOSYS js Modei IIL 4 files directly to your US amp Canada MS DOS disks nght on your PC or 703 450 4181 Convert BASIC programs Convert MIC amp VISA accepted SuperScripsit document files to S amp H are U S only DCA RFT Only 89 95 S4S amp H M si ch Are you still fussing with floppies for BACKUP CMS DJ10 or DJ20 tape drive from MISOSYS is your solution The Colorado Memory Systems JUMBO tape drives fit all computers Internal mounting in AT s XT s and PC s they connect to your floppy disk controller Tape adaptor board needed when two floppies are in use Kit converts Jumbo to external use In about 5 5 minutes a DJ10 backs up 1OMB s file by file the fastest in the industry 40MB s gets backed up in about 18 to 20 minutes Uses industry standard DC2000 DC2120 tape cartridges DJ10 DJ20 plugs into your floppy disk controller to save cost power and a slot Needs 5 1 4 or 3 5 with faceplate mounting slot Optional adapter board mounts in your computer to provide a tape port When used with the external DJ10 DJ20 it lets you share your drive between computers Note external adaptor includes Tape Adaptor DJ10 has up to 120 megabytes of capacity using compression with a DC212
13. VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VL iv SET CL CL3 DVR SET PO CL3 DVR PO SET P1 CL3 DVR P1 Source Modules There are five distinct source modules that are used to assemble the final instal lation program e CL3 ASM Main program eCL ASM Model 4 standard EIA 232 interface e PO ASM HD64180 ASCI chan nel 0 PI ASM HD64180 ASCI chan nel 1 eIN ASM HD64180 Vectored In terrupts CHI ASM HD64180 In structions L3 ASM This module is the main program module and GETs the required modules during assembly Execution starts here asaresult of a SET command that creates a device program checks the parameters i any and calls the appropriate module installation routine Subroutines that are called by the module installation routines within this module CL ASM P0 ASM P1 ASM These modules contain the interface code for each port Each module contains the following sections installation routine _ driver module header initialisation and ICNFG routine CTL handler PUT handler GET handler interrupt han er buffers and control blocks IN ASM This module contains the HD64180 Vec Inside TMQ vaste te ener AAA RRRA serrinanansr tar ot a ata Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VIiv PRERRERMRERAALRRALEREE RAMA nannat SE RERRRR ERR EE RAE RENT SR ey CORRE RC ER ER EEE EEE ER EEE EE AR
14. added a BANK parameter for PRO WAM instal lation to force PRO WAM to use your designated bank number rather than auto matically search for a spare Even if you don t want to make use of that PRO WAM s automatic search will now look up to bank 30 PRO WAM is installed as a keyboard device filter Under release 2 PRO WAM OFF now unfilters the WM device rather than RESET KI This leaves your KT device chain intact except for the PRO WAM removal PRO WAM now accesses application modules from a library not from standalone modules This keeps the apps from cluttering up your directory PRO WAM initially loads from the WAMO0 Inside TMQ 38 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VI iv APL library Thereafter the UNIVER SAL function request for Application is now satisfied from that library on the drive where the library was found unless overridden by the application module specification mspec entry Even though a library can hold 32 applications more than most folks will have use for UNIVERSAL can still specify the library to access or default to WAMO APL Specify modname to access WAMO APL for modname Specify modname to access WAM APL for modname The new drive will be again used insubsequent UNIVERS AL requests until changed by explicit entries in a mspec either UNIVERSAL or pro grammed execution You can hav
15. and yet prevent input queue overrun 2 DORE x How it was done Software that communicates via serial interfaces is typically divided into two parts The driver program is installed and connected to the operating system and does the actual work of moving data between memory and the serial interface The application program is the one that is using the services of the driver Ap plication programs can be written in al most any language examples are K REEERE DOC BeA Inside TMQ 15 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Viiv KERMIT COMM CMD terminal emu lators and specialised programs for de vice control such as model railways Now a question that arises when imple menting asystem thatrequires XON XOFF protocol is where to putit Do we putitin the application program or do we put it in the driver program that is common across all applications In LS DOS the position taken is to make flow control the respon sibility of the application program This savesmemory because the extra program code required for flow control is not in Ideally however the best place for such protocol logic is within the driver pro gram This is the approach used in this driver The advantages are 1 the logic does not need to be implemented in every application program 2 the application program does not have to execute fast enough to stop or start tra
16. data base program in another a spreadsheet in a third etc If the computer had a means of automati cally switching between each task the computer is then referred to as having a mult tasking capability The time to switch between tasks must be quite small rela tively tothe processing needs of the tasks Typically if the partitioning facility is available but the switching between par titions is performed manually the system is referred to as having a task switcher Task switching conveys a considerable benefit to the computing user People s lives are usually not sequential in the carrying Out of a task Whether we are at a business setting or the home environ ment a great deal of interruptions occur while we are doing something We may be typinga letter witha word processor when a telephone call comes in requiring us to consult our calendar agenda If the calen dar agenda is a program on Our computer we may just have to save the letter to disk exit the word processor load up the calen dar program then exit it to reload our word processor then our letter as well as return to the exact spot we were typing into That takes time Folks generally do not like interruptions So a task switcher permits you to temporarily switch away from what you are doing to use your computer for something else When the interruption is satisfied you can easily switch back to what you were doing On the TRS 80 Model 4 at least two for
17. file PRUN has been enhanced with a param eter APP abbreviated A PRUN will normally load the application from the WAMO APL library or other library when the module name is prefixed with the library number If you want to force PRUN to load a standalone application i e for testing before adding it to a li brary specify the APP parameter as in PRUN application APP Well that s it PRO WAM release 2 in cludes the window application manager 18 different applications in a library a library manager the PSORT utility the PRUN facility a help facility and a DE FAULTS utility to customize your PRO WAM configuration all on disk TESTIMONIALS Over the years we have received various questions andresponsesreferencing PRO WAM Here s some excerpts of past is sues of The MISOSYS Quarterly which may shed furtherlighton how PRO WAM Inside TMQ 40 Inside TMQ Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv can benefit you Harry Hopkins wrote I think I know what PRO WAM is and can do but can someone make me a clear 1000 words or less explanation Tom Gallaudet chimed in with an unsolicited testimony as to how he put PRO WAM to use PRO WAM is one of those programs that sounds neat in the magazine ads Well I received it in stalled it and played a little and then decided that it was a really neat program but I wasn t sure what I wanted to do with it so
18. file of over 140 cards extended memory beyond 128K recommended takes only about 5 sec _onds Also all references to a particular statement keyword or function are easily found often more efficiently than by us ing the existing index in the manual In the past I rarely used help files but the inter active nature of PRO WAM certainly made the effort of creating my BASIC help cards very worthwhile I have also used PRO W AM to create pop up help files for LeScript Those famil iar with this word processing program know that it has an alternate screen for help files However if you want to use the alternate screen to edit two text files at once two copies of the same file in memory at once can be handy you lose access to the help files PRO WAM al lows you to have pop up help files and have two text files on alternate screens Making these help windows was fairly easy using importtotransfertheexisting LeScript help file data onto PRO WAM cards THE WRAPUP If you have kept your eye peeled to the MS DOS market you have noticed that a relatively new popular class of program applications is the Personal Information Manager or PIM for short These tend to become computerized dossiers which tend to assist a person business or otherwise in carrying Out their day to day operation For instance efficiency managers will always recommend a person to create a list of what needs to get done Things won t alw
19. it sat for a while After a couple of months and several ad rereads I started to play with it again and now I could not live without it After pressing two key combinations whatever program if any you were running stops and a little win dow appears in orclose to the middle of your screen If you hit the break key the window goes away and your program continues where you left off never miss ing a beat I have an auto dial modem and use the DIALERall the time Iuse the ADDRESS for anyone that Isend any info toand code each entry for the type of info that I send so I can quickly print a list of who got what I have the BRINGUP appointment tickler automatically run when I boot the system so that I m forced to see what lam supposed to do each day It also has a CARD program which is a little text file which I use for storing notes on people like topics I wantto discuss with my partner when we call No matter what program I m running I can immediately call up his CARD and have the list Besides what comes with the main pro gram there are several additional public domain programs that work with it PRO WAM uses some high memory and all of the first 32k partition leaving the second 32K bank for a memdisk to store the most used PRO WAM data files or as the memory for the TEXT Editor It is a very well written program and it will interface with every program I have tried with only one problem that I c
20. routine within the driver transmitregister empty interrupt which takes a character from the output queue and sends it en a character is received by the serial interface it triggers another interruptrou tine within the driver receive register full interrupt which accepts the character from the interface and places it at the end of the input queue When the application program is awaiting input it calls the driver asking for a character If the input queue is empty then nothing is returned If the input queue has at least one charac terin it that characterisremoved from the queue and returned Why it was needed Any number of keystrokes may arrive without the application program being ble to handle them in time Having the driver perform input queueing means that the application program is greatly simpli With four simultaneous users response time becomes an issue With queueing the transmission of a line of text from the application program will be rapid even though the actual transmission from the output queue to the remote device will be Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Vliv slow This frees up the application pro gram to handle requests from the other users Without queueing the whole appli cation seems rather jerky Also in cases where large amounts of data such as programs are being transmitted an output queue allows more efficient transmission When do
21. soon as possible Com ing soon a new name for PRO NTO to avoid confusion with Chemical Bank s Pronto electronic banking system We apologize for any inconvenience our use of Chemical s trademark may have caused However at the time we selected the PRO NTO name for our product in 1984 Chemical s electronic banking sys tem was certainly not an item known by us to be a computer software program I explored various names for the PRO NTO productsuchas PROTON avaria tion on the letters PRO NTO and an implication of being at the core of your machine But there turned out to be a PROTON corporation and thatname was discarded Other names considered were PRO DIGY meaning a person with ex ceptional talents PRO FOUND I think you know what that means PRO MISE a declaration of assurance and WAM We then enlisted the services of a patent attorney to investigate other names which we could use for our PRO NTO prod uct Weselected WAM PRO DIGY and PRO MISE It turns out that all of those were no good The attorney turned up names such as THE PROMISED LAN PROMIS and PROMISE for com serious damper on my enthusiasm We wound up spending about 500 to exhaust all of our reasonable choices After the trademark search I finally decided that PRO WAM was sufficiently different from all the other WAMs and proceeded to put it to use The WAM part comes from
22. tacts on the appoint list pertinent notes which have been made etc This is not difficult toaccomplish The CALA4 BAS program noted above ties together the PRO WAM appointment application BRINGUP with a monthly calendar If one were consistent with a key field to connect associated records it would not take a great deal of programming to de velop the integrated facility needed to produce the single printed page Is that a challenge left to our readers Anyone still using a Model 4 which has 128K of RAM that doesn t have PRO WAMin their library of programs is miss ing out on one of the best programs ever developed for the Model 4 There s still time to grab this one and put it to use See our special announcements in this issue of The MISOSYS Quarterly References The MS DOS Encyclopedia by Microsoft Press Computer Systems Architecture by Jean Loup Baer Computer Science Press Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge by Grolier Inc Microcomputer Architecture and Pro gramming by Jobn F Wakerly John Wiley amp Sons The MISOSYS Quarterly various issues Inside TMQ 42 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv I wish to thank Roy Soltoff and MISOSYS for their continued support ofthe Model 4 and those who still use it INTRODUCTION The following programs were written to convert the LSDOS 6 3 and TRSDOS 6 2 DOS HELP file to text and then back int
23. that right now Ralf in fact had a few recent suggestions I think the CED could bea bitredesigned to not default to line numbers but editor numbers or giveita configuration facil ity The EnhComp s printing could be improved the print directive and the REF utility It s some time ago that I last used them but I think they defaulted to 66 Line Paper or so It would be great if they were reading the FORMS parameters if FORMS is active and then use this data for printed line lines per page the Tandy COBOL compiler does this works great I have no plans at this point to introduce features beyond that available to BA SIC4 Since EnhComp is more or less extensible with its in line assembler and user defined commands it is certainly possible for any programming user to increase the support sortoflike what I did with the SETEOF and SOUND com mands But I am open to suggestions Incidentally anyone who needs the few fixes noted above can send me a disk and Pll put the revised SUPPORT DAT lti braries on them Don t forget that with our newly pub lished LDOSM amp LS DOS BASIC Reference Manual which covers the interpreter BASIC which is bundled with LDOS 5 3 1 even the ROM BASIC por tion the interpreter BASIC which is bundled with LS DOS 6 3 1 and both Model I fli mode and Model 4 mode EnhComp compiler BASIC you can pur chase the disk version of EnhComp for 23 98 plus 1 50
24. to a local BBS Well all these different baud rates and script files are stored in PHRASE TXT very accessible yet very easily changed PHRASE APPhas shortened the export function by several keystrokes Since the first PRO WAM release I have used CARD APPtokeep track of message numbers to reply to composing replies off line etc I have always loved KSM functions being a better button pusher than typist PHRASE APP greatly expands the KSM function only a little less acces sible But very easy to change and to expand One more reason to hang in there with the ol Model 4 Michael Rogers was so thrilled with PRO WAM he wrote Any Model 4 user reading this who does not own PRO WAM is missing out on an invaluable utility application which is both a great time saver and a program which could be used to revitalize interestin your Model 4 should it be flagging All users should appreciate its facilities and the imagina tive will find a myriad of applications I have recently used its brilliant export import facility to save retyping a database I wished to transport from one program to another Besides reducing typing it was fun giving that satisfying my computer is Saving me time feeling Here s some examples for using the EX PORT capability of PRO WAM which I used to clarify the situation with a user Note what this power can do for you Here is an example for ALLWRITE You are in ALLWRITE preparin
25. were full screen editors which made your editing jobs easy Best of all these were all PRO WAM applications so they were usable whenever you could activate PRO WAM while you were using other programs and applications MISTERED is still avail able DED FED and MED all use a similar display screen and strikingly similar com mands to enable you to edit any byte of a disk sector file record or memory page This lets you get comfortable with one program yet know how to use all three The MED display looks like that shown below Aside from 4 direction cursor movement you can find hex or ASCII strings make changes in hex or ASCI advance decre ment sector record page insert a NULL 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 OA OB OC OD OE OF 62 00 15 1C 1F 1E iF 1E 1F 1F 1E 1F 1E 1F RA FI 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 4C 65 76 65 6C 2D 41 52 64 69 72 20 2F 61 70 70 3A 30 OD 4f 53 20 31 2 33 20 3D 3E 7E 45 GE 68 43 6F 6D 70 20 23 4D 2D 32 30 2D 30 37 32 OD OA OA OA 41 53 20 61 73 73 65 6D 62 6C 65 72 73 2E OD OA 20 20 20 20 20 7F 4 F 72 64 65 72 69 6E 67 20 49 GE 66 6F 72 G amp D 03 C3 F4 OF OC BO 05 98 1F 2F 4C C9 F4 OF OC 31 05 98 1F 2F 4C C3 F4 OF OC 32 05 98 1F 2F 4C C9 r4 OF OC 33 05 98 1r 2F 4C C9 F4 OF OC 34 05 98 1F 2F 4C C9 F4 OF OC 35 05 98 1r 2F 4C C3 3D OE 44 41 14 27 11 45 14 C3 3D OF 44 42 14 27 11 45 14 FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 53 75 6E 4D 6F 6E 54 75 65 57 65 64 54 68 75 46 72 69 53 61 74 4A 61 GE 46 65 62 4D 61 72 41 70 72 4D 61 79
26. with data conversion utility for DIF pfs Profile dBASE We ve added many features asked foroverthe past few years by LB users yet LB is still about 7 the easiest most flexible data manager you can use for managing your data Absolutely no programming is needed to create a database with numerous fields construct input screens i for adding and editing data and create yourown customized report Quickly youdefineyour data fields in response to LB s prompts and then draw your data input screen using simple 4 keystrokes or have LB automatically create your input screen In no time at all you re lt a entering data Customize your printed reports with user definable print screen defini tions LB is just what you need in a data manager Now even moreinversion2 2 Data capacity per database LB supports up to 65 534 records per data base 1 024 characters 64 fields per record and up to 254 characters per field Field types supported LB allows ten field types for flexibility alphabetic A Z a z calcu lated operations on numeric fields using with 2 level parentheses date last modified YYYY MM DD automatically main tained dollar dddddddd dd floating point dddddddd dddddddd literal any ASCH character numeric 0 9 right justifiednumeric upper case alphabetic A Z automatic conversion of a z and upper case literal literal with automatic conversion of a z All fiel
27. withon a single diskette for 10 2S amp H 3 outside of North America The source code to each file is available on another diskette The appli cation source diskette is also available for 10 2S amp H 3 outside of North America e Order any one of the above PRO WAM specials and receive your choice of either runtime or source diskette of wammies free The Blurb The Blurb Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 92 Volume VI iv Letters t MISOSY AN Pro EnhComp and USING Fm Rick D Jones Roy Please help me with this little problem I have with Pro EnhComp The following excerpt from a program I m writing has wrong output when using the USING function as you can see the columns do not line up Is there a fix or procedure I m missing Ihave Ver 2 6a 01 Mar 88 REC 1 1 is loaded with variable length strings REC I 2 is loaded with a one character binary number 0 255 program excerpt REC REC 1 RECLEN 0 CLOSE AS 3 HHH B Record Length HHH FOR I 1 TO REC PRINT USING A RECS I 1 ASC REC I 2 RECLEN RECLEN ASC REC I 2 NEXT I PRINT PRINT USING BS RECLEN END The single quotes are just for the visual reference of this problem I couldn t find any references in the manual readme txt or the last few TMQ s on the stripping of trailing spaces with the USING function Fm MISOSYS Inc
28. 0 TRSTimes magazine 51 List of Patches in this Issue XLBOOTE FIX Model 4 SCR17 FIX The Blurb m Ue The Blurb Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Rg ak aria ge eee se eee TMQ to Continue If you haven t been stuck in a worm hole lately you have noticed that The MISOSYS Quarterly took on a new look by shifting from the glossy kromekoat cover to a black separately affixed perfect binding and migrated to a colored cover stock printed in black The change reduced pro duction costs thereby keeping TMQ pro duction in line with the subscription lev _els and provided the means to continue publishing I received one letter request ing that I revert back to plastic film wrap or a heavier cover stock as the Postal Service did their best to crunch up his issue There s tworeasons why lamavoid ing the plastic film for domestic mailing one is cost and time to wrap the other is that plastic wrap rarely benefits the envi ronment as it gets deposited in the land fills If your issue is grossly mutilated let me know and I ll attend to that And now for the same price ofa subscrip tion as it has been the past six years look forward to TMQ Volume VII You can save me the cost of a renewal letter by getting your renewal in early Check your mailing label ifithas a 92 08 after your name then this issueis the last one of your subscription SRE TR RE Points to Ponder Re
29. 0 tape DJ20 has up to 250 megabytes of capacity DJ10 Jumbo 199 7S amp H DJ20 Tape drive 265 7S amp H NEW A11 Adaptor 45 3S amp H su External Kit H sas LOWER tape DC2120 tape 25 00 PRICES ll MISOSYS sponsors a forum on CompuServe PCS49 HartFORTH 86 HartFORTH is a Direct Threaded Code implementation full 79 STANDARD FORTH which runs under DOS the Virtual Memory that it accesses for storage and retrieval purposes is a file created and controlled by the operating system HartFORTH s enhancements include functions to call the DOS file handling routines so that other files may be created and accessed if required A library of standard screens is supplied with HartFORTH to provide often used extensions to the language such as double length and floating point math editing of source screens string ma nipulation arrays etc Priced at 59 95 5S amp H 2 HartFORTH programs can invoke other programs via EXEC and EXEC PROG z Functions create new files from within HartFORTH and allow the current Virtual Memory file to be changed for another and manipulated at the individual block level Provides the recommended 79 STANDARD DOUBLE NUMBER STANDARD EXTENSION word set that implements 32 bit opera tons CASE and SWITCH functions allow multi way branching decisions to be taken with execution continuing in once the word branched to completes String manipulators include VARIABLE
30. 4800 baud 8 bit word length no parity and 1 stop bit to conform with the hard coded parameters of the CL3 driver then in voked the COMM communications pro gram I was then able to control the first computer from COMM IfI wanted to get fancier I could have installed the HOST portion of LS HOST TERM on the XLR8er equipped computer then used the TERM portion of LS HOST TERM on the second computer This would have enabled me to fully support direct video VDCTL service calls through the serial interface However the initial testing did notrequire this sophisticated arrangement Based on the driver supplied by James Cameron the XLR8er user should be able to utilize it directly for certain purposes taking the idiosyncrasies of the hardware interface into mind and patching the op erating parameters according to your own needs The experienced assembly lan guage programmer should be able to uti lize CL3 as a useful base to easily adapt the driver to serve to your own needs If you do not need buffering you could add the WAKEUP service call interfacing us ing THE SOURCE as aguide andremove the buffering and buffering overhead James Cameron has accomplished the hard work that of understanding the 64180 s Asynchronous Serial Communications _ Interface ASCI and writing the code necessary to use both its transmit data register empty TDRE and receive data register full RDRF interrupts For hardware support MISO
31. COPY DIAL APP 0 2 COPY RPNCALC APP 0 2 COPY DOSAVE APP 0 2 COPY TERM APP 0 2 igure 2a Custom PRO NTOdefault setup igure 2b TRSDOS 6 2 JCL file tha Stalls a modified PRO NTO and loads e other 32K RAM bank with additiona applications and data bases The responses o Memdisk concern the second RA bank and single density operation PRO WAM continued from page 36 tion and 2 a set of application programs some of which may be made to reside in memory PRO WAM uses about 2500 bytesof your machine shigh memory and one memory bank That s why it requires a 128K machine Applicationprogramsprovided with PRO WAM include a calendar a bringup and tickler file an address Rolodex like file a 3x5 card file a modem autodialer a 4 function calculator a disk based key stroke multiplier a todo list manager a _ terminal program and more Let s take a look at the features which have been added to the window manager PRO WAM now supports Model 4 re verse video detection and restoral at each level of application execution there are four levels For those of you using Visicalc or Multiplan you can now get into PRO WAM applications and return to your spreadsheet screen with reverse video in tact Besides that PRO WAM applica tions can make use of reverse video in their screens we use it in CARDX More Model 4 folks are taking advantage of extended memory add in boards to gain additional memory banks So we
32. CR Te HP ee oe Re E E pean 703 450 41 P O Box 239 stenting V VA 201 67 0239 91 M th connected to your TRS 80 Model III your computer will sail through data access Order any hard drive kit or unit from MISOSYS and we ll pre install either LS DOS 6 3 1 or LDOS 5 3 1 at no extra MISOSYS has been shipping complete drive kit packages since September 1989 which plug into Model 4 4P 4D and Model III computers let us build one up for you Our host adaptor which interfaces the 50 pin expansion port of the TRS 80 host to the 50 pin SCSI port of the HDC sports a hardware real time clock using a DS 1287 clock module With its internal battery lifetime in excess of 10 years never enter date and time again It even adjusts for daylight saving time An available option is a joystick port and Kraft MAZEMASTER joystick with a port interface identical to the old Alpha Products joystick thus any software which operated from that joystick will operate from this one Software supporting the 1421 and 4010A controllers includes a low level formatter an installation utility and driver a high level formatter a sub disk partitioning utility utilities to archive restore the hard disk files onto from floppy diskettes a utility to park the drive s read write head a utility to set or read the hardware clock a keyboard filter which allows the optional joystick to generate five keycodes and a utility to change the joystick filter s gener
33. E TS v SUP BET D etat CCR Oe 5 a tos bat ae babe keen he eee ee tae ee Od ere sn n ate DCRI rere Q x a s tored Interrupt module whichis placed in low memory to handle HD64180 gener ated interrupts It is only installed if required and only if it is not already installed The module ensures that bank 0 is enabled before the port interface driver interrupt routine is called HITACHI ASM This module contains macros for generat ing HD64180 specific instructions TRS 80 Serial Interface Com parison Table The Features Table compares the various features and configurations supported by the EIA 232 interfaces available to me 1 Although these interrupts are imple mented in hardware no software has been seen that uses them 2 Not only is DCD available on ASCIO but it must be active before transmis sion is possible There is a hardware interlock I found that a continuous re ceive interrupt condition also exists when DCD is inactive This interrupt could not be cleared except by disabling it or mak ing DCD active The HD64180 manual both supports and denies this according to which page youread the logic diagram is correct but the prose isn t 3 No opportunity to test this but it is probably present 4 Although these lines are unavailable for monitoring by the HD64180 a compe tent hardware hacker would just rewire the interface plug In the writer s vi
34. H the TDRE bit is inhibited i e held at 0 It states Inside TMQ 28 Inside TMQ Volume VIiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv further about TDRE transmit data regis ter empty that TDRE is cleared to 0 until the ASCI transfers the byte from the transmit data register to the transmit send register In other words as long as there is no clear to send condition the ASCI ill be unabl nd James Cameron discusses the 64180 s use of data carrier detect DCD briefly in Note 2 Do not gloss over this note as itis extremely important Port 0 is unable to operate without DCD acknowledged tobe TRUE as the 64180 will continuously interrupt until that condition is met That s why he coded the port 0 driver initializer see address range 3AE2H to 3AE8H to loop until DCD is TRUE before enabling receiver interrupts In typical operation of a connected serial device you must en sure through some means that the DCD line is held TRUE The necessity forrequiring CTS and DCD to be TRUE for operation of ASCI port 0 requires youto make some choices If you are connecting to a modem that usually provides a CTS signal For instance the Hayes Smartmodem does andthe TT512P internal 4P modem sold by MISOSYS does The Hayes Smartmodem also pro vides a switch option to force DCD TRUE the TT512P does not However if youare going to use port 0 to connect to another computer through a nul
35. I iv 2 The line following a lt D gt line is the directory name associated with the text that follows Itis used as the search key to find the text in the file and display it It is usually a program command but may be any text except the text format flags lt D gt lt R gt and lt E gt In the DOS help file the standard is for directory names to be in UPPER CASE only The maximum length of a directory entry is 19 Characters since directory display col umns are spaced every 20 characters 3 To highlight command syntax or any thing else you want in reverse video place lt R gt on a line by itself and put the text to be highlighted on the next line 4 The last line of the source file must have lt E gt on a line by itself It signals the end of the source file and that the directory section should be created and output Using this method of file termina tion makes it easier to test for the end of file in the 4 character testing buffer Italso allows you to artificially generate and end of file condition at some other point for testing purposes 5 End each line of text with a carriage return including the lt D gt lt R gt and lt E gt lines 6 The DOS HELP program will display up to 24 lines of text and wait for any key to be pressed it does not prompt for akey to be pressed On the first page of the display fora help item the directory name is displayed as the first lin
36. K machine Pronto provides a WINDOW Super Visor Call SVC to permit the use of overlayed windows from any and all applications Pronto is a window applica tion manager which supports function key keystroke invocation of up to FIVE small applications plus a LIBrary EXEC facility which gives direct access to all of the DOS s library commands PRONTO re quires one 32K RAM bank about 2K of high memory and a small piece of low RAM We feel that PRONTO is going to be so useful and important to EVERY 128K Model 4 4P user and every systems house writing applications for the 4 4P that we are going to provide preliminary specifications for PRONTO In addition due to the expected popularity of PRONTO you may wish to place a firm pre paid order for PRONTO now All orders for PRONTO will absolutely be filled in the sequence that they are re ceived Here s its capabilities Pronto allows an application torequest a window on the current screen of whatever size you need up to the maximum of 80 by 24 Windows requestedof size 78 by 22 or smaller will have a box automatically drawn by the window manager Under the window application environment up to 4 windows may be nested i e an applica tion can invoke more than one window or nest to another application whichrequests a window More windows may be avail able when operating solely under the win dow mode The window control SVC WNCTL provides nine functions of whic
37. KSM The syntax of a phrase is a 2 character mnemonic followed by 1 78 textcharacters and terminated by an lt EN TER gt The PHRASE TXT file is com posed of any number of phrases It is terminated by a period following the last lt ENTER gt Use any ASCII text editor to input and edit the PHRASE TXT file use TED for instance The phrase facility can work wonders when you want to prepare letters drafts etc using canned phrases Youcanalso use PHRASE to store strings for applica tion print formats How about DOS com mand strings It boggles the mind CARDX APP is a new application which is an enhanced CARD file It supports up toten CARDx DAT files 0 9 rather than the single one under Release 1 It makes use of reverse video to designate pro tected screen positions which cannot be edited nor exported CARDX will actu ally skip overany screen position whichis in reverse video CARDXF APP is used to construct and edit a CARDFORM record for use with CARDX This wammie allows you to create new data files and add edit a cardx record identified as CARDFORM Re verse video which is used for protected fields in CARDX APP is toggled via lt CTRL R gt The screen indicates the cur rent state of reverse video CARDXF also allows you to populate the CARDX file with any designated quantity of records initialized with the CARDFORM form It s easy to use the cardxf editor to paint yo
38. S amp H when purchased along with a BASIC Reference Manual or the disk version by itself for 29 98 plus 3 S amp H if purchased separately If order ing the EnhComp disk please note which version Model I II or Model 4 AE CE ah MS DOS Products MISOSYS is a reseller of products pur chased from Ingram Micro thus we have access to a huge array of MS DOS prod ucts So if you are looking for some hard ware or software to go with your MS DOS system why not get in touch with us fora quote Call write or FAX The Blurb 4 The Blurb Volume Vliv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Power Supplies MISOSYS now stocksreplacement power supplies for Model IM or4 computers The Astec AC8151 01 40 watt supply pro vides SV 2 5A 12V 2 0A and 12V O0 1A It s size is 6 25 x4 x1 75 mounting holes are 3 125 x4 75 The Astec AC12310 68 watt supply provides 5V 7 3A 12V 2 5A and 12V 0 1A It s size is 7 69 x4 125 x2 mounting holes are3 75 x7 25 This sup ply is a direct replacement for the Tandy Model 4 power supply Tandy s was based on the Astec design The 40 watt supply is 40 and the 68 watt supply is 50 S amp H for either is 5 HDPACK for HD s MISOSYS announces therelease of anew utility for hard drive users HDPACK priced at 39 95 3 S amp H will re pack all files on a hard drive so that they take up a minimum number of directory extent fields If you invoke
39. SYS is mak ing available the following kit of parts at a price of 40 we have only 16 kits available e serial interface cable approximately 20 long consisting of a 20 pin header connector on one end to connect to XLR8er header P2 and split into two DB25 female connectors on the other end bringing out serial ports RS 1 and RS2 i e 64180 ASCI ports 0 and 1 RS2 presents TX1 RX1 and GND on pins 2 3 and 7 respectively RS1 presents TXO RXO and GND on pins 2 3 and 7 respectively withRTSOon pin4 CTSOonpin5 DCDO on pin 8 and DTR on pin 20 e 12 volt power interface cable approxi mately 15 long consisting of a 4 pin AMP female connector on one end plugs into XLR8er P3 connector and both a male and female 4 pin AMP connectoron the other end used to tap into the Model 4 motherboard 12V e both a 1488 and a 1489 RS232 interface chip set Inside TMQ 29 Inside TMQ Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Vliv Over the years much has appearedin print concerning our PRO WAM product How ever I was recently asked to provide an explanation of PRO WAM in an upcom ing issue of The MISOSYS Quarterly so as to enable more recent users an opportu nity to understand just exactly what PRO WAM can do for them To that end this article addresses the evolution of PRO WAM from its infancy to its maturity at this tender age of seven yearsoflongevity A Brief History
40. The Status initialise and clear queues requests were implemented in the driver The wakeup vector was not required but it may be added later so that COMM CMD can be used Two new CTL function codes were implemented to turn on or off the PASTHRU flag Separate Driver Modules What it is There is one driver module for each port and an additional interrupt dispatcher module required for use of the HD64180 ports Each module can be installed sepa rately Why it was needed Not all applications will require all three driver modules to be installed and it is a waste of memory to install more than is required Some applications may not run with a HD64180 processor and so the HD64180 port specific code is not re quired Also the operating system com mand syntax does not support the creation of more than one device at a time Control Code Implementation Table Implemented Used By How it was done Test device status SPOOL The entire set of three drivers is packaged 01H Send BREAK or force interrupt n COMM CMD within one driver installation program 02H Initialise ICNFG which is used by the LS DOS SET com 03H Clear buffers and The installation program exam Set wakeup vector n COMM CMD ines command line parameters to deter OSH Preview next receive character n mine which modules should be installed DM To install all three driver programs three LS DOS commands are required Inside TMQ 18 Inside TMQ Volume
41. a DIR command you will see the number of extent fields in the Exr column Anytime this fieldis greater than one there is the probability of in creasing the access time of a file were the number equal to one A single extent field can hold a maximum of 32 granules Multiply the typical 4K or 8K granule size and you see that files up to 256K could be stored using one extent field And when your file takes up more than four extent fields it actually uses another directory entry i e wastesan entry usable for another file Random access files using more than four extent fields require additional access time as the in memory file control block holds data on only four extents at a time For years MISOSYS has been asked for a utility program such as HDPACK Now its here Fail safe and guaranteed to work It can even be used on a floppy if you really want to dothat HDPACK presents a graphical image of the drive s file map ping using discrete characters for the di rectory free granules in use granules and fixed position granules Once a gran ule has been re positioned on the drive its corresponding visual map position is checked off providing a visual indication of its progress It takes only minutes to re pack a 10M partition Because itis important that your directory contain correct information to begin with HDPACK includes acopy of DIRCHECK our directory checking and correcting program Note that becau
42. ad and prescale on write Bit 4 is used for selecting parity even or odd For these assignments the baud rate is determined using the following table PS DR SS2 SSI SSO Rate 0 0 38400 19200 9600 4800 0 0 0 000 oo oO oc OO i bi be ki ei OOOQOocdcCO Hmi bent i OO OO Om rm OO OO OO Om OO OnOOr m1 O m On O mn OO mm Om O m Ke ON O Note thatsome baud rates may be selected Inside TMQ 27 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VL iv Control Register Table 7 6 5 4 MPBT MP CTS PS PEO RW RW RW RW using more than one arrangement of con trol bits Since the parity is also selected using this control register let s look at what is used to select the non baud rate operating parameters before addressing the methods of changing the driver via a patch ASCI Control Registers AO and A1 con tain three bits used to select word length parity enable and number of stop bits These are bits 2 0 and are denoted as MOD2 MOD1 and MODO respectively There configurations is as follows MOD2 7 bit 1 8 bit MODI _Q Parity disabled 1 Parity enabled MODO 0 1 stop bit 1 2 stop bits With this information athand let s look at James source code For the port 0 driver PO control register AQ is initialized with the code at 3ACEH to 3AD7H control register BO initialization is from 3AD8H 3AE1H Both these code fragments uti lize the same form
43. ae ORIGINAL gt i BEERE 279 amp new EIA 232 driver for LS DOS with XLR amp er by James Cameron ts CL3 Additional Remarks by Roy Soltoff ts PRO WAM What s it all about by Roy Soltoff amp HELP to TEXT and Back by Brian Davis cs Fix for Model III SuperScripsit and LDOS directory by MISOSYS w Update to XLBOOTC or D FIX by Frank Slinkman Look at what is in this issue Volume Vi iv 10 Summer Fall 92 7 PRICE LIST effective July 1 1992 TRS 80 Software TRS 80 Game Programs Product Nomenclature Mod Ill Price S amp H Bouncezoids M3 M 55 GCB AFM Auto File Manager data base P 50 310 L Crazy Painter M3 M 55 GCP BackRest for hard drives P 12 244 l Frogger M3 M 55 GCF BASIC S Compiler System P 20 010 f Kim Watt s Hits M3 P 55 GKW BSORT BSORT4 L 32 200 L 32 210 Lair of the Dragon M3 M4 M 55 021 CP M MM Hard Disk Drivers H MM Lance Miklus Hits M3 P 55 GLM CON80Z PRO CON80Z M 30 033 M 31 033 A Leo Cristopherson s M3 P 55 GLC diskDISK LS diskDISK L 35 211 L 35 212 Scarfman M3 M 55 GCS DISK NOTES from TMQ per issue 5 Space Castle M3 M 55 GCC DoubleDuty M 02 231 The Gobbling Box M3 M4 M 55 020 DSM51 DSM4 L 35 204 L 35 205 DSMBLR PRO DUCE M 30 053 M 31 053 A MSDOS Game Programs EDAS PRO CREATE M 20 082 M 21 082 r Lair of the Dragon M 86 021 EnhComp PRO EnhComp Diskette M 20 072 M 21 072 Filters Combined amp Il L 32 053 na GO Maintenance n a M 33 100 GO S
44. am was the means to switch between the main pro gram and the memory resident SIDEKICK program Now besides word processing data base and spreadsheet you had memory resident desk top pop ups SIDEKICK was able to capture data from the video screen and pass the data to one of its applications as well as pass data from an application back to the main program This cut and paste between pro grams was termed import and export de pending on the direction of the data move ment The intrigue of this new class of program and the resulting publication of the newly discovered methods of writing TSR s spawned many others to develop similar competing programs Perhaps the ton of money Borland was raking in with sales of SIDEKICK didn t hurt either The PC world was soon awash in SIDEKICK look alikes and work alikes ENTER PRO NTO Karl A Hessinger was one of my free lance programmers who became intrigued at the SIDEKICK program He began to develop a SIDEKICK like program for the TRS 80 and came to me with his _preliminary implementation His SK was implemented using slightly less than 6K of high memory included a calendar a card filer an auto dialer and an RPN calculator provided cut and paste and popped up its applications in small win dows on the screen The applications and saved screen images were stored in one available 32K RAM bank which required a 128K machine Together we revised the SK architecture to use the l
45. ames snoc01 enet dec com Now in connection with expanding on the CL3 article first note that this driver actually includes three separate drivers e is a replacement for the standard Model 4 COM DVR the driver used to access the Model 4 s Serial Input Output SIO hardware However it is not an exact replacement Although it supports send and receive 256 byte character buffer it is not written to be able to utilize Inside TMQ 22 Inside TMQ Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv DOC CRRRRR RIRE RRR ERIA Se aS OEO ee Inside TMQ meee ee ne Pte CRETE ECRIRE RER RTC ER RRA 7 eK RoE igzs en CR CE ROC SON On 0 RAR AREA RE ER INA titateretatatatatataratatytatatatstatatytetetetatstetetatetetetete total DOC rete telat ete letatetatatetatatatatatatelatete 23 Inside TMQ tote tet tates v gt r at a hi OG side TMQ 24 Inside TMQ 4 Volume VLiv Oe Heth tater g tee eee atetetatatetatatettatatsttet ttt POS Pe ee ee TEEN 2 Inside TMQ THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 ee tere ss te tee RARAAAAARX CA AA Rx CRIE Volume VLiv Inside TMQ Volume Vliv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VL iv Bye 0 90 tata at anes ee eee Inside TMQ 26 _ Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VIiv SETCOM to cha
46. ard pro vides aconvenient way to store individual notes of 12 lines by 40 characters PRO NTO lets you identify a Card file with an eight character key it automatically ap pends the date and time to the record Card supports commands for adding de leting and finding records in the note pad You can move forward and back ward through the data base with single key commands You can select and print a single card or all the cards in the data base Also a simple editor lets you make Changes to the note CHARSET displays all 256 ASCII char acters in a single window When you position the cursor on a character CHARSET displays the character s hexa decimal and decimal numbers You can toggle to the alternate character set char acters in the hexadecimal range COH FFH with a simple keystroke The best feature of this application is the ability to build a string and then export it back to a waiting application For ex ample you might build a graphics string by locating the appropriate character s in CHARSET with the arrow keys and press ing the enter key foreachcharacter When you finish you Can transfer the generated String to the waiting program The telephone list and dialer application Dialer is a small data base of phone numbers and descriptions Dialer fully supports the Hayes SmartModem and com patibles You can dial numbers directly from the data base or manually enter a number for Dialer to call You ra
47. ated keystroke values after installation Optional LDOS 5 3 software is available Twenty megabyte drive packages are currently built with a Seagate ST225 hard drive Forty megabyte packages use a Seagate ST251 1 28 millisecond drive Drive packages are offered as pre assembled kits Your kit will be assembled to order and fully tested all you will need to do is plug it in and install the software Drive kits include a 50 pin host interface cable and the hardware clock Full implement of status lights included power ready select read and write Add a joystick for but 20 additional see price schedule Aerocomp Hard Drives now available from MISOSYS MISOSYS is also the sole source of remaining brand new Aerocomp hard drives All Aerocomp drives include status LEDs software driver and formatter power and host cables and installation Job Control Language Weare building their 20M and 40M drives We also have Montezuma Micro CP M Hard Disk Drive drivers available MISOSYS Inc Contents Printed Matter PO Box 239 N Sterling VA 20167 0239 PEN U S A Address Correction Requested Forwarding and return postage guaranteed Attention Postmaster lt With a 20 or 40 MB MISOSYS Hard ht or 4 REA E n eeeeoeveeeveeoee2 020288080 Prices currently in effect s Complete MISOSYS Drive Kits e 20 Megabyte kit 450 e 240 Megabyte kit 575 Joystick option 20 x e LDOS soft
48. ays occur unless they re on a list Classically such a list was called a todo list things that you needed to do When you deal frequently with a set of other individuals or business contacts it helps to organize them into a telephone or address list for mailing purposes You also take notes from time to time which may very well relate to the contacts in your address or telephone list Or perhaps your notes tend to become more orga nized into a small base of data Lastly if you don t keep track of your appoint ments you can easily forget one or two Appointment schedulers i e calendar pro grams are the salvation of forgetfulness all you need to remember is to use them Now all of the kinds of personal informa tion management previously noted are handled by PIMs From the description and utility of PRO WAM contained in this article it is not difficult to see the resemblance PRO WAM has to a Per sonal Information Manager Such is the case forPIMsevolved from the Sidekick type desktop managers What stands the PIM apart from the Desktop Manager is an integrated facility to create a printed page containing everything a person needs to deal with on a particular day or a week Such a printout is typically used by a salesperson travelling without a usable laptop computer The integrated facility scans all of the associated files and bring together on one printout the appoint ments telephone records of those con
49. be as long as it needs to be to describe all the details If more than 1 screenfull must be dis played include a prompt to press any key and provide enough blank lines to fill 24 lines on the screen the directory name is the first line and format flags are not counted Additional text on the same line may be used to describe what is on the next page eg Press any key to see page 2 of 24 Program HLP2TXT BAS The first program HLP2TXT BAS con verts the DOS Help format file into text format which can be edited with any text editor Note that the editor must be ca pable of producing a simple text output file without the formatting characters that some word processors generate and each line must end with acarriage return Some word processors generate ASCII files with only 1 carriage return per paragraph LINES 10 TO 160 This section is the program identification and disclaimer LINES 170 TO 320 This section is the variable initialization In addition to pro viding the initial contents of the variables used I use this section as a summary list of the variables used and a description of the purpose of each This documentation helps to debug or change the program in the future LINES 330 TO 490 These lines are used to get the input and output filenames Error handling is turned on at the begin ning of this section After the input filename is entered a test is made for its existence If the filename ent
50. ce Kit M3 mode M 12 X10 20 00 B Tacirin TOLOS AT OV MAAG tater eat NN NO OQOQNQO0O0OUO The Fine Print Freight codes A 3 50 B 4 00 C 4 50 D 5 00 E 5 50 F 6 00 G 7 00 H 12 00 varies All unmarked are 3 00 each Canada Mexico add 1 per order Foreign use US rates times 3 for air shipment Virginia residents add 4 5 sales tax We accept MasterCard and VISA Checks must be drawn ona US bank COD s are cash money order or certified check add 4 for COD MSDOS Software LB Data Manager 2 2 DED 86 Disk Memory sector editor RATFOR 86 HartFORTH 86 SAID 86 Text Editor Super Utility PC TRSCROSS transfer lt gt Mod III 4 FM 86 File Manager Lair of the Dragon Volume Viiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 92 Volume VLiv Table of Contents The Blurb Letters to MISOSYS TMQ to Continue 2 Pro EnhComp and USING 6 Points to Ponder 2 2 sided drives on 4P 6 Trade in Policy 3 Aerocomp Driver disk 7 In this issue 3 Splitting a File 8 TMQ Schedule 3 Update to XLBOOTCID FIX 8 MISOSYS Forum 3 Model IH SuperScripsit 8 DISK NOTES 6 4 3 EnhComp BASIC Compiler 4 Inside TMQ MS DOS Products 4 A new EIA 232 driver Power Supplies 5 for LS DOS 10 HDPACK for HD s 5 PRO WAM 30 Address Change 5 PRO NTO TRSDOS 6 X s FAX Number 5 Sidekick 36 HELP to TEXT amp Back 43 List of Advertisors MISOSYS Inc TFC 51 52 IRC RC Pacific Computer Exchange 5
51. cessing center to review the status of his or her accounts transfer money between accounts pay bills and send messages to the bank and other PRONTO users A copy of the cur rent PRONTO brochure describing this service is enclosed Chemical Bank is a pioneer in the devel opment of electronic banking and its PRONTO system and PRONTO service mark and trademark are widely known The PRONTO system and marks are li censed to other banks nationwide Your company and its PRONTO software recently came to our Clients attention We believe that your use of PRONTO in connection with the sale of this product will likely cause confusion with our cli ents PRONTO products and services We ask therefore that your company not use PRONTO in connection with the sale of software or in connection with the sale of any similar product or service Please reply promptly with your assurance that you are taking prompt steps to cease use of the PRONTO mark With the information supplied to us Chemical Bank received their first trade mark on PRONTO on May 31st 1983 for computer programs recorded in a memory cartridge for use in personal and small business banking and financial pro grams Chemical s Pronto was an elec tronic banking system that interestingly enough I believe is now defunct Our attorney investigated the purported claims and advised us astothe position we should take Even though our use of name for our produc
52. ch can be used to generate DOS HELP files as well as turn exciting HLP files into ASCII for your own editing With the interest in windowing going on these days I have been asked to expand on the capabilities of orPRO WAM window and application manager An in depth look at that product is here These were all big articles so big that the issue grew past 48 pages You readers got a bonus Next Volume starts our focus on the C language Look for the first issue to begin with a revised update of an old six part series originally written by Earl C Terwilliger for the old LST Journal With that coverage will be a series of programs by Rich Deglin which introduce an envi ronment facility to LS DOS Finally if someone is interested in begin ning a series of articles on FORTH for either MS DOS or TRS 80 MISOSYS will provide you witha free copy of either HartFORTH for the Model IAH or Model 4 oreven HartFORTH 86 And for those who wantto play around with FORTH but arenotinterested in writing aboutit ll be offering our FORTH programs at one fourth the regular price That s 9 98 S amp H for the Model I M or Model 4 ver sion and 14 99 S amp H for the MS DOS version HartFORTH 86 TMQ Schedule The MISOSYS Quarterly is mailed ap proximately every three months This is sue should be mailed less then three months since the issue VIL ii was mailed so I m hanging in there time wise Note that your mailing label
53. companies is also ques tionable Even the X86 CPU competition is starting tocrumble C amp T is now exiting the 486 and next generation clone busi ness they re also dropping their 386SX line keeping only their Super386DX and SuperMath 387 Remember how computers were supposed to create the paperless office Well laser printers and faxes took a dim view of that When I was growing up the inventor of the pop top soda can was considered a genius having done away with the church key until those tops started littering the highways byways andoceans That prob lem was solved with the pop top which remained on the can Now laser printer cartridges are being stuffed into landfills in record numbers But there s still room for innovation Kyocera has now released a new type of LED scanner array printer just another form of what folks com monly call a laser printer But this one uses a fine grain ceramic toner which polishes the print engine resulting in a much longer drum life Kyocera is offer ing a 300 000 page warranty on the print drum Considering your typical Canon cartridge is good for about 4000 copies that s a 75 fold increase in drum life The 2400 listFS 1500A printer supports Post script PCLS and HP Laserjet II Al though it won t do anything to reduce the paper laden office atleast the drums won t fill up our landfills as fast as current printers Here s more innovation now from AT amp T my forme
54. ctercounthas been exceeded A limit is set to 21 characters less than the maximum to account for the possibility that the charactercountmay be exceeded when the next directory entry is read since the character count is updated with the entire length of the directory entry line 1160 rather than 1 character at a time as for regular text line 900 The second IF statement checks to see if the maximum number of directory entries has been exceeded If the directory entry or Character count limit has been ex ceeded then the user is prompted to pro duce a help file with the information processed to that point If the limits were not exceeded and the lt D gt sequence was detected then the subroutine at lines 1010 to 1180 is called An end of block form feed character is output to the file the 4 character buffer is cleared and filled with newcharacters the directory text entry is added to the DIRTXTS array and the address of the corresponding text block is added to the DIRADD array If the lt R gt sequence was detected then the next line is output preceded and fol lowed by the reverse video toggle charac ter using the subroutine at line 1190 If the lt E gt sequence was detected then processing of textis terminated the direc tory is output the files are closed and the program exits to the DOS prompt Lines 700 to 730 implement space com pression according to the following rules considera s
55. cting a byte containing data in each of the bit fields You need to build a value after determining the individual selections The hard coded valueis OFFH or 11111111B which hasall bits enabled Referencing the above table you can see this sets EVEN parity which is not used since parity 1s disabled 8 bit word length 2 stop bits parity disabled normal opera tion DTR OFF and RTS OFF DTR and RTS use inverted logic perhaps James had wanted to set those to ON If you want to select 7 bit word 1 stop bit even parity DTR ON build 10100101B or OASH This is the default setting of the COM driver Now let s turn to the XLR80 and its 64180 ASCI ports The baud rate and parameter setup of these ports are more complex than the SIO port Examining the baud rate selection first the actual transmission rate is determined by five bits ofa register the ASCI Control Register BO and B1 as well as the clock rate used to control the 64180 The XLR8er uses a 12 244Mhz crystal whichestablishesa6 144 Mhz clock rate The five Control Register bits are a prescaler PS which is always set to 0 when using a 6 144Mhz clock a Divide Ratio DR and three source speed select SS bits The table on the following page describes the bit assignments of the Con trol Register Bits 7 and 6 deal with multiprocessor mode they would be set to 0 for XLR8er installations Note that bit 5 is used for dual purposes itis Clear to Send CTS on re
56. d file of addresses you use like a Rolodex file oras a mailing list the data structure matches that of Powermail Plus Address accommodates all standard ad dress file entries like names and addresses and adds a few new ones In addition to two line street addresses you can include a company name and nine digitzip codes Inside TMQ 36 Inside TMQ a Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Address provides two other fields for key words useful for sorts and telephone numbers It also offers up to 24 flags you Can set or reset for use as search criteria For example you could set flag 6 for customers who get a 10 percent discoun on merchandise BRINGUP a reminder file and appoint ment book lets you schedule up to 12 entries for each day in priority time order The only limitto the number of entries you can store is the amount of disk space available BRINGUP represents the only PRO NTO application that doesn t use MISOSY S s standard data base format BRINGUP defaults to the system date on initial display If you invoke it from the calendar it defaults to the date currently selected Unfortunately PRONTO doesn t highlight dates on which you ve sched uled activities PRO NTO s perpetual calendar displays the month forany year from 1582 to 4902 PRO NTO highlights thecurrent date with a pair of flashing angle brackets You can pass this date to the BRINGUP m
57. d types utilize input editing verification so invalid data cannot be added to a record Field name strings can be up to 19 characters long Data entry and editing LB allows you to design up to ten different input update screens to provide extreme flexibility for selectively viewing your database fields Using a database password provides the capability of selectively protect ing fields from being displayed or printed without entry of the correct database password or they can be protected from being altered This is quite useful in a work group environment Fields may selectively be established to require a data entry before a record being added or edited is saved You can enable a special index filetokeep track of records being added This can be subsequently used for example for a special mailing to newly added customers Flexible editing includes global search and replace with wild card character match and source string substitution Search and replace can be performed on all records or on records referenced in an unsorted or sorted index file Record selection and sorting You can maintain up to ten different index files to keep your data organized per your multiple specifications Records may be selected for reference in an index file by search criteria using six different field comparisons EQ NE GT GE LT and LE Youcan select on up toeight different fields with AND and OR connectives Index files can be left unsorted or you can
58. disabled If you wanted to select 7 bit word length 1 stop bit andeven parity the OR d value would need to be 62H MOD2 0 MOD1 1 MODO0 0 The code from 3ACEH to 3AD7H estab lished the baud rate The value sent to the control registeris like before obtained by reading the current value stripping off some bits then ORing in the desired ones To be complete we should strip all of the bits associated with baud rate selection then OR in the ones we need to set to establish the desired rate Jame s code takes a little shortcut since he was specifi cally using 4800 baud In general since we are dealing strictly with the XLR8er we know that the MP bit must be set to 0 MPBT is irrelevant with MP 0 the PEO bitis used to select parity type and the five remaining are used to select the baud rate Thus we really do not need to read any value but can just output the desired set ting However to stay with the code and develop a short patch to deal with the operating parameters I would recommend masking the value READ with 80H keep ing what ever was the value of MPBT then ORing with a value developed from the baud rate selection table above and the desired selection of parity For in stance if you want to select 1200 baud with EVEN parity you first must have enabled parity at Control Register AQ above then select 1200 baud here with PS 0 DR 0 SS2 1 SS1 0 SS0 1 with PEO 0 for EVEN parity The resulting OR value is
59. ds up the game It has evolved through three languages BASIC Assembly and finally FORTH The reason for the migration from BASIC to Assembly was that I wanted the oppo nent in a two player game to be able to use a spare Model I Level I 16k TRS 80 that was lying around The reason for the migration from Assembly to FORTH was that I wanted to be able to run a multi tasking FORTH environmentso that up to four players could play at the same time using the one computer Providing multi tasking in BASIC or Assembly language was not as easy as it was in FORTH Just to set things straight this article does not describe the software or the game in any more detail than above I m not selling the software nor giving it away to Inside TMQ 10 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VL iv anybody since the game is clearly cov ered by the appropriate copyright laws This article describes how I went about setting up things so that four people at once could use the resources of a TRS 80 Model 4p thus saving many dollars in hardware Hardware inventory This is the hardware I used to build the four user setup e One TRS 80 Model 4P with XLR8er board e Two Tandy 102 Laptop Computers One TRS 80 Model I with expansio interface and EIA 232 card e Three cables The laptops and the Model I were con nected to the Model 4P I followed th instructions in the XLR8er user manual fo
60. e entry conditions state that the program must load address 4271H with the ASCII coded drive number 0 1 2 or 3 then CALL 4419H At the time of the CALL register A has your input value which happens to be in the correct form Now under LDOS the 4419H DOS ad dress is not DSPDIR but DODIR a similar but not exact equivalent service call Under LDOS DODIR entry con ditions need the logical drive number in register C and a function code 0 4 in register B function code Ois equivalentin operation to DSPDIR Thus eventhough Tandy supplied patches to SuperScripsit to operate under LDOS the DOS they used for their Hard Disk Operating Sys tem HDOS they apparently never pro vided a patch for this directory command Since the code has that apparently need less LD C 0 instruction it gives me the exact quantity of patch bytes to convert thecode to LDOS use What we need todo is convert the value in the accumulator to a logical value i e a binary number by subtracting 30H from it then loading the result into register C and finally loading register B with the function code of 0 So we simply change two of the instructions in the fragment to LD B 0 SUB A 30H LD C A and the fix is in While I was at it I also touched up the limit of drive 3 to permit an entry up to drive 7 as well as also touch up the message query The final patch to SuperScripsit s SCR17 CTL be comes SCR17 FIX which
61. e leaving 23 lines for text To make the display more user friendly place a prompt such as Press any key for more at the last line that will be displayed If you want to break the text at an earlier point in the help item textand still continueon thenext page fill the empty space with blank lines carriage returns in the file 7 The source file entries and ultimately the directory entries must be in alphanu meric order of directory name so the DOS HELP program can find them All direc tory entries will be shown in the directory display but if the entries are out of order the out of order entries will be inaccessible since the DOS Help cmd program will stop looking for the requested item as soon as it encounters a directory entry with a higher sort value than the item requested 8 Reverse video sections that were not on a separate line in the source help file such as in Some sections of the original DOS HLP file will be formatted incor rectly in the text file resulting from the conversion The added complexity of de tecting an inlinereverse video flag wasn t considered to be worth the trouble The current method allows entry of any text provided that the text format flags appear on lines by themselves and that the flags are not unintentionally entered as text on lines by themselves ie the flags can be entered anywhere else within a line as shown above 9 Themaximum numberofcharactersin the source f
62. e product In the Spring of 1987 The MISOSYS Quarterly Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Viiv announced the release of version 2 This announcement conveyed a good deal of information concerning the utility of PRO WAM thus itmakes sense to provide that information again in this article Many current TRS 80 users have not had access to TMQ issue Liv Enter PRO WAM Release 2 Spring 1987 Since the release of LS DOS 6 3 we have had many requests from PRO WAM nee PRO NTO users asking for revisions to the BRINGUP application to extend its date support beyond 1987 Well hereisan announcement that should please every PRO WAM user and make many other folks run out to get PRO WAMRelease2 In the 80 Micro review of PRO NTO Release 1 back in November 1985 Hardin Brothers said PRO NTO is one of the most useful products for the Model 4 I ve seen Well we have supercharged this new release to include just about every feature requested by our PRO WAM us ers and added other significant enhance ments that should make PRO WAMeven more useful to just about every owner of a 128K Model 4 To those Model 4 owners uneducated about PRO WAM here s a little PRO WAM overview The WAM stands for window application manager PRO WAM is amanager of applications which pop up in windows on your video screen You can popup a PRO W AM application whenever youarerunning any ot
63. e the first space after the previous non space character The first space is compressed as above 5 The start and end of a reverse video field is signalled with a decimal 127 hex TF code 6 The start of the Directory section is signalled with a form feed as above Each directory entry has its last character com pressed asifit was followed by aspaceand is followed by the address of its corre sponding text in the file 2 bytes low order then high However spaces in the directory entries are not compressed 7 The last 2 bytes in the file indicate the address of the first entry in the directory again 2 bytes low order then high 8 Lines of text are ended with acarriage return character decimal 13 hex OD Blank lines are entered carriage returns 9 If a single character is preceded and followed by a space the character and the following space are not compressed If this occurred there would be2 space com pressions in a row and the second would be treated as a simple space compression by the HELP program rather than a space compressed onto another character 10 The DOS help file text format con sists of 4 sections Section 1 is the nameof the command you want help for This is the first line of the display Section 2 is the general description of the function of the command Section 3 is the generalized syntax of the command in reverse video Section 4 is the detailed description of the ER SS aaa enna c
64. e up to ten application libraries designated WAMO APL through WAM9 APL We ve expanded the capabilities of the window supervisor call with two signifi cant enhancements programmed control of export and programmed invocation of an application module We use the former to automate the PHRASE application and the latter to enable the bringup hot key in CAL Of course both facilities are available to every programmer as well To expand on the concept of protected fields we ve added the concept of pro tected characters to the behavior of ex port import Any character within the de finedrectangularexport importarea which has a value greater than 127D i e bit 7 set will not be output input i e it will be considered a protected character Most typically this would be a reverse video character however if reverse video is not in effect any graphic or special character greater than 127 will be considered pro tected and not output input This will be extremelyuseful with ourrevised CARDX card file application Export import now supports a logical ENTER character which will be trans lated to a hard carriage return regardless of the import export state CR or NOCR Thus a text phrasecan beexport as multi line even though itisa continuous stream of characters without a carriage return The logical ENTER character is tested before the protected character test thus values greater than 127 are acceptab
65. ec tionately referred to as wammies Inside TMQ CTL255 A filter module by Lynn Sherman to emulate the keyboard matrix accessed by SuperScripsit which does not use the DOS Key board driver so as to enable full use of PRO WAM with SuperScripsit including export and import DM A PRO WAM application by Dick Newman which shows where pro grams reside on your disk Works on 40 track single sided double density disks only ELEMENTS A PRO WAM application by Danny Mullen which pops up a periodic chart of the elements FELSWOOP A special purpose PRO WAM utility by Jeff Joseph used to convert text data for export to ei ther Multiplan or Visicalc HELP A PRO WAM application by Matthew Reed which accesses a DOS type HELP file to pop up help screens similar to HELP CMD LIST A file lister module by Ken Kroninger for PRO WAM MAPMEM A PRO WAM application by Don Brandt used to display the contents of selected low high memory modules and system data It also calculates the machine size RAM banks MODEM A PRO WAM application by Don Brandt that supports XMODEM file transfers It re quires that CL be set to COM DVR MXDUMP A PRO WAM application by Gregg L Rupple to screendump the Model 4 screen with lo res graphic characters NXWAM A printer setup PRO WAM application by Danny Mullen for the Star NX 10 printer 35 OKIDAT This is an application program by Mark Bowman designed to run wi
66. ectronic mail messages discussing his intended use of the driver I wrote John that I didn t think he would be able to get away so easy from not commenting further on the Starfall game I suspected that TMQ readers would find that game of significant interest But his response to that subject tells the tale Concerning the Starfall game he wrote I agree But you see my problem The software was developed for personal use and requires the presence of the actual game hardware playing board rulebook and counters I don t know if it s still available or if the company still exists Short of actually clearing it with them PH just try to stay low Also the software is by no means complete Thereare gaping holes in the simulation which are handled by manual procedures I d want to make it a quality product long before dconsidermak ing it available to others I can t offer anyone game software until I am sure of the legality but the actual FORTH multitasking environment is mine to give away Yoh bee ee ee htr LOC state TMM ale state Tete tarate 5 rs ve I wrote James that I would keep him posted on the feedback I get from readers His response They are welcome to con tact me directly My internet address is below and my snail mail address is P O Box 339 Epping 2121 Australia From INTERNET cameronjames 3 snoc01 enet dec com From CompuServe gt INTERNET cameronj
67. equence of4 characters where the first character has been processed and Output and the others are the first three characters in the 4 character buffer 1 if the second character is not a space the third character the second in the buffer is a space and the first character was not Compressed then compress the third character the space onto the second character 2 if the second character is not a space the third character is a space and the first character was compressed then output the second and third characters without com pression Thiscase applies to a single non Inside TMQ 49 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv space character surrounded by spaces It prevents outputting twocompressed char acters in a row which would be translated by the HELP CMD program as a space compressed onto a character followed by a space compression code 3 if the first character was compressed and the second Character the first in the buffer is a space then convert the second character and any following spaces into a space compression code Line 740 outputs a character to the output file LINES 780 TO 830 This subroutine gets Characters from the source file and brings them into the right side of the buffer until it is full Certain subroutines remove more than 1 character from the buffer at a time It also echoes the input text to the screen LINES 840 TO 860 This subrouti
68. ere eeeee_e Inside TMQ 47 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv command options All keywords used in the command are in UPPER CASE 11 A directory may contain more than 76 entries but the DOS HELP program will only display 76 entries on the first page 92 entries on each following page and no prompt is provided to tell the user that there is another page orhow to get to it To see the entries on the next page the user must press the lt ENTER gt key at the key word break prompt Pressing the lt EN TER gt key on the prompt for the last page cycles back to the first page The help item to be displayed does not need to be shown on the screen when requested ie items on following directory pages can be requested on thefirst page The programs presented here allow for3 pages of direc tory entries total 260 The directory flag signals the end of the previous item and that the next line is a directory entry Up to 76 directory entries may be displayed on the first page and up to 92 entries on following pages where each directory entry has amaximum of 19 characters per entry The entries are dis played in4 columns in the order entered in the file left to right then top to bottom The reverse video command is used to highlight the actual syntax Reverse video lines may be separated by text Any num ber of lines of reverse video may be used The text can
69. ered does not exist then the attempt to open the file at line 390 will generate an error which will cause the lines from 960 to 1000 to be evaluated If the file does exist then the program continues on to line 420 and opens the file in random access mode with a record length of 1 otherwise it resumes at line 410 displays the error and requests a new filename The same sort of test is performed after the output file request The output file specified is checked tosee if it exists in order to prevent overwriting another file unintentionally LINES 500 TO 720 This area reads the directory section of the help file There is no check made to see if the file is a valid help file so if the wrong filename was entered either garbage will be producedor a fatal error will result Lines 530 to 550 determine the last record number in the file BASIC isa little incon sistent in that the LOF function which returns the last record number in the file returns values from 32766 to 32767 while the PUT and GET functions require 1 to 65535 as record numbers Therefore a conversion is made to make negative returns from the LOF function compatible with the GET and PUT functions Lines 560 to 580 get the last 2 bytes of the help file to determine the starting record of the file directory The loop from line 600 to 720 then moves through the directory and loads the directory titlesinto the DIRTXT array and the addresses of the beginning of the corr
70. esponding text blocks into the DIRADDarray The last character ofeach directory entry must be expanded from its compressed format LINES 730 TO 910 Theselines reformat the text block entries and output the result ingtextto the specified file The form feed character decimal 12 hex OC is used as the text block separator in the help file and this program uses it as a flag to end the conversion for a block Reverse video entries in the source file are preceded and followed by the decimal 127 hex 7F character These are stripped andreplaced by a lt R gt sequence preceding the text that was in reverse video Expansion of compressed spaces is also performed ac cording to the rules explained above Thisis the subroutine toread each charac ter from the source file Program TXT2HLP BAS In general the program reads the source file 1 character at a time into a4 character buffer Aseachcharacter is read the buffer is checked for the the special character sequences lt D gt lt R gt or lt E gt each followed by a carriage return If the se quences are not detected then the charac ters are processed according to the space compressionrules describedin the sample text file above If the lt D gt sequence is detected then a directory entry is created and stored in an array DIRTXTS for the title and DIRADD for the address to be Output at the end of the file If the lt R gt sequence is d
71. etected then thereverse video characters are output before and after the next line of characters If the lt E gt se quence is detected then processing of text stops the directory is output to the file and RL si epg Inside TMQ 48 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv the program ends Note that each of these sequences mustbeon aline by themselves or they will be treated as normal text While characters are being output arun ning count of the output file length is kept including directory entries so that if the source fileis too big a help file is still created with the text processed to that point Note thatin generating directory addresses breaking the record numberinto 2 bytes the MOD function was not used since it requires arguments in the range of 32766 t0 32767 andrecord numberranges from 1 to 65535 LINES 10 TO 610 These lines are the program description disclaimer variable initialization and filename input sections as described above One difference is that when a file is opened in random mode its contents are not erased before writing to it so to prevent previously written informa tion from overlapping the new the file is first deleted and then opened LINES 620 TO 770 These lines make up the main loop of the program which calls the other subroutines to do the processing The first IF statementin theloop checks to see ifthe running chara
72. ether the following QnD quick and dirty SPLIT program in BA SIC which he used to split the database file into two pieces SPLIT could have broken it into more than two pieces if that was necessary SPLIT essentially partitions a file into 400 256 byte records or 100K sized chunks In its simplicity SPLIT writes the file fragments onto the same drive as the source file that drive must have sufficient space available The frag ments are named PIECE1 PIECE2 etc Once the file is fragmented each piece can be copied to a separate floppy disk then TRSCROSS d to the MS DOS disk Once all the pieces are available the MS DOS COPY command can be used to concatenate the individual pieces similar to LS DOS s APPEND command Update to XLBOOTCID FIX Fm Frank Slinkman Model lil SuperScripsit Fm R Jim Seibert Dear Roy I transfered Model I SuperScripsit running on a 4 to an LDOS 5 3 0 minimum disk using CONV 3 1 Q N Everything seems to work fine including the spell checker which I also transfered to adifferentdisk using the same method However it will not give a listing of the disk directory when requested from the menu It will ask for which drive but then not display any files nothing except the flashing message to press BREAK to get back to the menu Pressing BREAK sends us back to the menu which of course still has the option of going back to TRSDOS I loaned a Model II and so
73. ew the Tandy interface is a case of overkill 5 Who needs 3600 baud Good ques tion but note that the Tandy interfaces supports some pretty strange baud rates 50 110 134 5 1800 2000 3600 and 7200 whereas the HD64180 only sup ports baud rates derived by repeated halv ing of 38400 baud editor s note actu ally 110 and 134 5 baud were quite com Inside TMQ Inside TMQ Volume Viiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv on in teletypewriter private line and switched dial up TWX communications back in the 60 s and late 70 s 50 baud was I believe used in the old teletypesetters back in the days before photo composers PR ET a i ht 6 He ate ate ag ee a a aay reteset eters ea we ey ate ata at a arts The End 4 I ve played one full game and three small ones using this setup Of course I ve found areas in my game software that would benefit from a bit of fun er recoding The other players found the interactive response to be fine except when disk I O was inprogress my FORTH environment goes into a single threaded mode when that happens Pil fix that someday maybe by adding a deferred write back disk sector cache So now I have a machine that can easily provide service to four people at the same ime You don t need a Mess DOS ma chine or an 80n86 processor to do multi tasking just some intelligent software CL3 Additiona
74. f the block Then move thecursor via the ARROW keys tothe lower right corner of the text block that you wish to export You can choose to depress lt ENTER gt atthis pointor lt SHIFT _ENTER gt The difference is that lt EN TER gt will export line by line but an lt ENTER gt is added after the last character of each line If youuse lt SHIFT ENTER gt to close the text block the marked lines will be export as if they were one continu ous stream of characters I suspect that this would be better for ALLWRITE unless the text were a table In any event when you close the block the CARD window will go away and you will be back in ALLWRITE with the marked CARD text magically piped into your letter Can these examples illustrate a time and finger sav ing operation for you Lastly Michael Rogers reports I have used CARDX tocreate pop up help screens for BASIC Besides having ahelp window which in no way interferes with the BA SIC program you are writing PRO WAM s import export feature allows ex amples from the help windows to be trans ferred directly into the program you are writing I have found this particularly useful when using seldom used statements and functions Instead of digging through the manual CARDX s search function allows quick access to the information I need and often the example field on the card provides me instantly with program material Placed on aramdisk a search for anitem on the last card in a
75. follows By the way I don t know if the dictionary data file from the Model II would be usable on the Model 4 but the dictionary program certainly would not be The two operating system environments are as different as nightand day Uniess the program file was actually two programs in one and detected which machine it was running on and adapted its local environment to that it would require two separate programs I know of only two programs in the entire TRS 80 market which operate on either machine mode One is our Gobbling Box program which actually is but a totally self contained Model HI program which automatically switches a Model 4 into a Model HI mode if itdetects itis running on the Model 4 the other is Anitek s LeScript which is a hybrid type of program that is actuall a Model HI verison and a Model 4 version combined into one file which modifies itself depending on the machine it is running on Letters to MISOSYS i Ox Letters to MISOSYS Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Inside TMQ Why Read This This article eventually discusses e A Model 4 EIA 232 interface driver e A XLR8er ASCI ports interface driver e XLR8er Interrupts e Input Output Queueing e The XON XOFF Protocol Background In 1981 while in my eleventh year at school I came across a game that simu lated the construction of galaxy spanning empires using fleets of ships and involv in
76. ful for subsequent printing or downstream data export to other programs Report formatting allows for multiple across mailing labels multiple copies of the same record or even printing onerecord per page forsales books You caneasily generate mail merge files of address or other data for your word processor Or you can use LB s built in form letter capability Automatic operation For automating your processing needs LB can be run in an automatic mode without operator intervention Frequently used procedures can be saved by LB s built in macro recorder for future use Entire job streams may be produced so that LB operations may be intermixed with literally any DOS function that can be batch processed Maintenance utilities To make it easy for you to grow your database as your data needs grow we provide two utility programs formanaging your database One allows you to construct a new database with an altered data structure and populate it with data from your existing database Another allows you to duplicate your database structure copy or move records from one to another or automatically purge un needed records A third utility converts to LB from pfsFILE4 Profile4 DIF dBASE I amp II and fixed record also converts to DIF dBASE and delimited Help is on the way The main menueven provides a shell to DOS so you can temporarily exit LB to perform other DOS commands LB provides extensive on line help available from almost every s
77. g the colonisation and development of planetary systems The game was called Starfall and was published by Yaquinto Publications Inc of Dallas Texas Each player started out with a planet or two and some space ships They would go Out and find other planets to colonise and develop The goal of the game apart from having fun was usually to be the largest empire at the end of a particular turn Each turn represented 10 years of game time and each hexagonal section of the universe represented a distance of three light years The full game of twenty turns often took between 7 and 12 hours and was thus rarely played Part of the fun of the game was the discov ery of planets However each discovery attempt required about eight double dice rolls and the use of 14 look up tables to determine the details of the discovery Not surprisingly this was the one thing that significantly slowed the game s progress Withone opponent the solution was to change the rules so that only one discovery attempt could be made each turn For me however automation was the solution Initially the software merely automated the discovery procedure by generating random numbers and looking up the ap propriate tables Slowly over the years the software grew to the state it is at now covering almost 80 of the game s proce dures Players still require the board playing pieces and associated material the software just simplifies and spee
78. g to type a letter and positioned at where the heading is to go You want to send the letter to someone whose address is in your AD DRESS file So youpopup PROWAM via lt CTRL P gt then invoke UNIVERSAL via lt F3 gt and type head in response to the Application prompt You then issue a SEARCH for SMITH find the rightone then press lt ENTER gt the export is done automatically and you are back in ALLWRITE seeing the heading being brought into your text as if you typed it yourself That s quite easy but since HEAD controlled most of the export you didn t get the flavor of it as you should Here s another You previously jotted down a note to Smith in a CARD file record the other day while you were run ning some other program Now you want to bring that note into the letter to Smith without re typing the note So you have the ALLWRITE cursor at the place for text insertion and you are in insert mode Inside TMQ 41 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Press lt CTRL P gt select the CARD file _ search for the note then press lt CLEAR RIGHT ARROW gt You willsee acursorat the upper left corner of the window You move this around via the ARROW keys so that itis positioned at the upper left corner of the text text must be envisioned as a rectangular region When you have the cursor in the right spot press lt CTRL B gt to mark the beginning o
79. h the first six are similar to VDCTL WNPEEK character window peek WNPOKE char acter window poke WNSETCUR set cursor position in window WNGETCUR obtain cursor position in window WN2WIN mover buffer image to win dow WN2BUEF move window image to buffer WNCREATE request a window of size and position WNCLOSE close current window and revert to previous window WNDSP display character at window s cursor and WNDSPLY dis play string at window s cursor The win dow display driver supports CR LF Erase to EOWL Erase to EOW and destructive backspace The PRONTO application manager pro vides support of application programs whichrun totally within the DOS s library overlay region and do not exceed 2K in length Five applications may be resident at one time and are stored inthe32K RAM Inside TMQ 32 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv segment Applications run in the address range 2800H 2FFFH and have available two512K data blocks from 2600H 27FFH and 2400H 25FFH Where the program requires less than the 2K of code space it has more space available for data Pronto saves this 3K address space on each appli cation invocation and the contents of the video screen are saved when a window is requested Applications can be invoked recursively or consecutively The appli cation manager even displays a window menu describing each application avail
80. header record that was added too BRINGUP data files can now be sorted by date and time using PSORT This requires a convert utility for your existing files which is included with the release Now sorting the bringup data file only makes sense when you have a facility for printing activities Enter the new BUP APP application This wammie which can be invoked directly from BRINGUP supports printing of bringup activities by date range using a syntax exactly like that in your DOS for BACKUP and DIR date parameters We also added as a short handfor today Standard user input print formatting is supported similar to that facility in ADDRESS and CARD BUP also incorporates the REMOVE command which used to be in BRINGUP I keep an ADDRESS file in the computer on my desk Since I like to use it to capture address headings when writing letters I got tired of exporting the address recordas it appeared in the window which required editing in my text editor That s why I designed HEAD This new application accesses the ADDRESS DAT file and presents an address record in the format Company First Last address1 address2 City ST ZIP If the Company feld is blank then it won t appear in the window Likewise if Address is blank it won t take up a line Ievencoded HEAD to drop trailing spaces from the fields so for instance there sno big gap between First and Last HEAD provides commands just like ADDRESS
81. her DOS behaved program The PRO WAM ap plication can capture anything on the video screen by means ofa function called im port Similarly a function called ex port can be used to pass back to the interrupted program anything which is in the PRO WAM application s window There are essentially two parts to PRO WAM 1 aresident module which super vises and controls the operation of the video windowing and application execu continued on page 38 Fekk cic oc PRO NTO runs on the Model 4 4P 128K and requires two disk drives MISOSYS Inc P 0 Box 239 Sterling VA 20167 703 450 4181 oie KA ofc oie ke akk ricci ic oie k Easy to use Good docs Bug free Does the job Finally TRSDOS 6 X users have a pro gram comparable to Borland s MS DOS Sidekick and Montezuma Micro s CP M Monte s Window Like these packages PRO NTO gives you a memory resident calendar calculator index card filer and phone dialer at the touch of a pair of keys even from within another application In addition you can link your own applica tions to PRO NTO s windows All in all PRO NTO is one of the most useful prod ucts for the Model 4 I ve seen How it Works PRO NTO resides in high memory and reserves a 32K RAM bank for its pro grams and various buffers When you call up PRO NTO it saves your currentscreen and the DOS overlay library in one of these buffers You can call up to four windo
82. ibrary overlay region for each application s execution This allowed the implementation to use but 3K ofhigh memory and made it exten sible by allowing for easily written exter nal applications which could be invoked Inaddition I worked with Karl to generate additional applications to beincluded with the package These included a character set display an algebraic calculator and address mail list a bring up file a small terminal program and an external data file sort utility During this time period I was using a convention of naming all Model 4 MISOSYS programs with a prefix of PRO which essentially stood for pro fessional products Weobviously couldn t use SK as the name of this product so I came up with the name PRO NTO In December of 1984 I pre announced the package with this coverage in NOTES FROM MISOSYS Issue IV the announce ment notes the derivation of the name MISOSYS is going to do something it rarely does pre announce a product PRONTO is not expected to be released until March 1985 however the internal development prototype of this package 1s so outstandingly significant that I felt it most important to let you know whatis on the immediate horizon PRONTO sounds like TONTO whom we all know was the sidekick of The Lone Ranger Does that perk you up PRONTO conjures up vi sions of being fast i e pop up here pronto Pop up you say PRONTO is for the Model 44P 128
83. ile is approximately 65535 since the HELP file has arecord length of 1 and the maximum number of records that can be addressed in a file is 65535 However the compression of the HELP version of the file will actually allow more characters to be entered The program checks the output file size as it 1s created If the limit including directory entries is exceeded it stops processing the source and completes the output file with the entries processed up to that point DOS HELP FORMAT The output help file format follows 1 The logical record length of the file is 1 2 Each help item page is separated iden tified by a form feed character decimal 12 hex OC 3 A single space following a non space character is compressed by adding deci mal 128 hex 80 to the ASCII value of the Character before the space and deleting the space This also applies to carriage return characters followed by a space ie if there are multiple spaces at the begin THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv ning of a line the first space will be compressed on the previous carriage re turn and the rest of the spaces will be compressed by a space compression code There is a slight difference for reverse video lines as described in the program description 4 Multiple spaces are compressed using space compression codes A decimal 129 hex 81 generates 1 space 130 hex 82 generates 2 and so on Multiple space codes do not includ
84. is just one more reason why it is so important to report exactly what is happening exactly means verba tim In any event I figured it would at least ask using the word drive Scanning for that allowed me to wade through the appearances of drive in the SYSTEM modules which were also present on that disk finally cametothestring Which drive do you wish todisplay 0 3 FED2 told me that the string was in SCR17 CTL My next step was to feed that control module into my disassembler and locate the code for handling SuperScripsit s di rectory query The fragmentof code iden tified as SCR17D ASM is the specific code which prevents the directory com mand from working under LDOS The comments are mine M8D50 CALL M7445 LD HL M8D93 Which drive CALL M7543 M8D59 CALL M697D Get response CP of JR C M8D59 Bad if less than 0 CP 4 JR NC M8D59 Bad if gt 3 CALL M7589 LD C 008 LD M4271 A CALL M4419 GDODIR LD A OFH CALL M0033 z Cursor off To begin with note that the fragment restricts the directory query response to the range 0 3 This was fine as far as TRSDOS 1 3 was concerned however LDOS supports up to eight drives num bered 0 7 The key part of the fragment is the CALL toaddress 4419H Since thisis expected to operate under TRSDOS 1 3 the 4419H address is documented as the TRSDOS 1 3 DSPDIR service call According to the TRSDOS 1 3 DOS Manual th
85. l Remarks from MISOSYS by Roy Soltoff Feature Model ModelIV ASCIO ASCII James Cameron has put together quite an Dip Switches interesting project Itshows you just what Min Baud 50 50 37 37 can be accomplished with the old com Max Baud 19200 19200 38400 38400 puterhardwareprovidingtherightamount Bits per character 8 5 8 8 8 of initiative and investigative work is Split Speed carried out On the other hand another Receive Interrupt Y XLR8er user would not be able to easily Transmit Interrupt Y use the provided driver as is I consider Error Interrupt N Yy myself somewhat experienced yet it took DMA Mode N Y me a few days of playing conniving and Y Y testing to get everything in the CL3 DVR DSR Y N 4 N driver to work The problem is in under DCD nd 2 N standing some of the finer aspects of how Y N 4 N 4 the ASCI ports in the 64180 processor RD input bit Y N used in the XLR amp er board behave and x N 4 N what you have to do from a signalling Y N standpoint to interface to the ports at the 3600 Baud 5 r N RS 232 level I fell into just about every trap and eventually extricated myself For notes see text These additional remarks should enable Inside TMQ 21 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VI iv CORRE RAC CHOCO ox other XLR amp er users to more easily adapt the CL3 driver for their own purposes But first I want to note that James and I had sent some el
86. l modem cable you must provide some way to enable both the CTS and DCD leads Because of this it would make sense to tie the DTR lead to both CTS and DCD My testing of the driver utilized two Model 4 computers I modified the cable sets which I had originally purchased from Hi Tech by connecting DTR pin 20 to both DCD pin 8 and CTS pin 5 I then added the two serial converter chips the 1488 and 1489 to the XLR8er board Lastly I connected 12V power to the serial con verter chips by adding a jumper power cableto XLR8er port P3 tapping the power from the RS232 SIO power cable on the Model 4 Again with this cable I had to correct a wiring error in the original set of power cables Hi Tech had had manufac tured and which I had purchased Once the XLR8er changes were accomplished I routed the revised serial interface cable through the computer case bottom and connected it to the XLR8er board My 4P had a similar adaptation with the serial interface cable routed out through the modem cover plate I then used a null modem cable to connect the two comput ers For the computer with the CL3 driver I installed both the PO and P1 drivers with these commands SET PQ CL3 PO SET P1 CL3 P1 I then set up that computer as a simplified host by issuing the commands LINK KI PO LINK DO PO On the computer at the other end of the null modem cable I installed the COM driver used SETCOM to set it up for
87. le for use as a logical ENTER The default logical ENTER character is 127d 7FH which can be entered by lt CLEAR gt lt SHIFT gt lt ENTER gt We ve added an ENTER parameter to the PRO WAM installation so you can change it to one of your choice It s even configurable with DEFAULTS We ve used the expanded features in the application manager to make considerable improvementin the existing applicationsand addedsomepowerfulnew ones Here s what s been done in the application arena Many users requested that the CALendar application flag days which have a BRINGUP activity entered Well weadded a facility to display an asterisk in the leftmost position of a day cell if thereis an active BRINGUP record for that day CAL scans the entire BRINGUP DAT file and maintains a table of flags indicative of activity per day for an entire year The file is only re scanned when you change years if it found a BRINGUP file initially We also added a bringup hotkey in the CAL command list so that you can easily position totheday showing an asterisk and hitonekey to bring up the list of activities you have scheduled for that day That facility has become indispensable here at MISOSYS Speaking of BRINGUP we altered the structure of the data file so that the year spans 16 years from 1984 to 1999 The date field storage was also reorganized so that is can be sorted in ascending order Since sorting by PSORT requires a data file
88. loppy 134EDC each end H FD CO04 owerDot Epson or Tandy P 32 21 n a Cable 4Ft M3 M4 printer H RC PM4 PowerDraw P 32 220 na i i PowerDriver Plus Epson p50 200 P 60 200 1795 Gable 4Ft MISOSYS hard drive HHD C04 PMS ee PEU paoros Sanes I Gane 2610c mamai noopt HED 2NG PowerScript P 50 142 P 50 142 Cable 26 1069A 26 1080 internal floppy H FD 2GA PRO WAM A M 51 025 Cable 26 1080 A internal floppy H FD 24P PRO WAM Toolkit va M 51 225 er nie ge HET Cable XT hard drive set H HD CXT Programmer s Guide DOS 6 na M 60 060 Cable Custom IDC ribbon M3 M4 M2 2 27 22 varies Se eg PAT Standby Power System 200VA R PS 200 199 00 ane ORE ohare Standby Power System 450VA R PS 450 399 00 ST80 IIL ST80 PBB ST80 X10 P 35 300 ae HD Controller Adaptec 4010A H HD CA4 75 00 S Utili PJ P 32 132 P 32 104 HD Controller Xebec S1421A H HD CX2 75 00 UPerUullyr ius HD Controller WD1002S SHD H HD CW2 75 00 SuperUtilityPlus CMD file diskette P 32 832 P 32 804 i T80 to SCSI host adaptor HHD MHA 75 00 Supreme HD Driver PowerSoft RS P 12 113 P 12 113 ZOFAX 96 24 Fax Modem PC XT AT R Z1 FAX 125 00 phen feire A L 21 010 L21911 Infochip Systems Expanz PC R IC EXP 150 00 Volume Set na L 60 020 DJ10 Tape Backup PC R TD D10 199 00 Toolbox Toolbelt P 32 203 P 32 245 24 95 B I 20 Tape Backup PC ay rin UNREL T80 same M 30 054 29 95 AB11 Tape Adaptor PC anaes UTILITY 1 L 32 070 na 19 95 XLR8er Softawre Interfa
89. m is mi nor If you have one of these disks pre _ pared by MISOSYS the following pro vides corrective action The files should work properly over on LDOS 5 1 once you take care of what 5 1 thinks are passwords The disk containing the Aerocomp drivers is an x 3 disk Ap Letters to MISOSYS Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 92 Volume VI iv parently the files had owner passwords however the access levelis FULL access Thus an x 3 DOS either LDOS 5 3 orLS DOS 6 3 will consider the files as having no passwords Under LDOS 5 1 you will have to remove these extraneous pass words with the ATTRIB command Short of upgrading you can get rid of the as sumed passwords by using a command under LDOS 5 1 such as ATTRIB filespec P3UF d o u This will change the passwordofeach file specified to blanks Obviously you only have to take care of the files you need to use a RE Splitting a File ee eee es eee Fm MISOSYS Inc I had a recent cus tomer who had purchased the TRSCROSS and LB86 products to migrate a Profile database to MS DOS running with LB86 The problem was that his Profile database was stored on a hard drive and the DA1 data file exceeded the size of his floppy disk Thus he couldn t use TRSCROSS directly It does no good to use the seg mented files created from HCOPY4 BAS since there is no equivalent restoral pro gram under MS DOS To accomplish the port I threw tog
90. me software to a refugee family to help the children do their school work They need all the help they can get to learn our difficult spelling Letters to MISOSYS Letters to MISOSYS Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 92 Volume V1 iv system I suppose the loss of the DIR option from within the program is not fatal but it is a nice feature to have if available Do you have any ideas Shouldn t this Dictionary on LDOS 5 3 Data disk also work with SuperScripsit 1 02 working on LSDOS 6 3 Fm MISOSYS Inc Jim I had your letter and disk sitting on the back burner until I got to issue VLiv of TMQ I decided to explore the directory problem in SuperScripsit first Since you provided meacopy of your SuperScripsit and gave a little description of what was happening itreally wasn ttoo difficultto find theculprit Inever played with SuperScripsit butI do know that it uses a series of overlay mod ules to carry out its work that s what all of the SCRx CTL modules are the printer CTL modules are the drivers for specific printers Since I did not know in what module the directory command was lo cated my first plan of attack was to use FED2 in the disk mode to scan the diskette containing SCRIPSIT CMD and all the SCRx CTL modules to look for the string which drive You threw me a slight curve when you said SS asked which drive That s because I could not find that string This
91. ms of task switchersare currently avail able One is DoubleDuty This task switcher available form MISOSYS di vides a 128K machine into three partitions two of which are full sized 64K operat ing environments capable of running a complete program such as a spreadsheet data base or word processor The third partition allows you to invoke DOS li brary commands Switching between the tasks is accomplished by simply pressing a particular key combination In this case if you are writing a letter in one partition you can switch to the second to bring up a data abase record or whatever else you need your computer for Another task switcher for the Model 4 is PRO WAM also available from MISOSYS This task switcher uses one 32K RAM bank of a 128K machine and provides the capabil ity of manually interrupting a major task to allow operation of a multitude of me dium sized specialized applications pro vided as part of the PRO WAM package In addition PRO WAM also includes the ability to cut and paste text between the interrupted program and any of its appli cations PRO WAM was designed to be extensible which means that a relatively straightforward process exists for the as sembly languageprogrammer to write his her own applications This brief history of computers now pro vides the background necessary to ap proach the next topic ROOTS International Business Machines BM introduced its Personal Computer in Au gust of
92. n a re verse engineering case If the process of reverse engineering entails the duplica tion of the copyrighted work and the recasting or transformation of the object code into a form more intelligible to hu mans it may infringe on the copyright owner s exclusive rights The case in volved Accolade disassembling the ob ject code of a Sega game cartridge to understand how to make cartridges which would work on Sega s game machine Sounds like the same prohibition on disas sembling for instance a DOS to under stand how to create a competing DOS which operates the same way aa a ne TS Trade in Policy The policy for trade ins of an equivalent non MISOSYS software product for a MISOSY S published software product is to just send in an original Table of Con tents page with the trade in fee which is 50 of the price of our product So for LB 2 2 trade in any other database product and you can purchase LB or LB 86 for 49 50 plus S amp H How s that for a deal It doesn t matter for what system or oper ating environment your trade in was de signed for This offer does not extend to products re sold by MISOSYS The Blurb eee In this issue There are some exciting articles in this issue From James Cameron is a serial driver for the XLR8er ASCI ports His use for the driver turned the Model 4P into a four user machine with a special purpose in mind From Brian Davis is a series of programs in BASIC whi
93. n also export a number from the address or any other application The storage field for the actual telephone number is only 16 characters long butthis isn t really a limitation for those services that require more numbers Dialer sup ports 15 user defined macro keys you can use to store up to 16 characters in the original phone number The DOSAVE application saves the con tents of the previous screen to a disk file as 24 strings of 80 characters each This application has limited use and is pro vided in source form as an example ofhow to write an application for PRO NTO The terminal communications program Term is another example of a simple application written for use with PRO NTO The only filtering performed con verts a form feed signal to the traditional Screen Clear command Term won trun unless you install the CL device with COM DVR Typer jerry rigs your keyboard and printer so that the printer types out the character you press on the keyboard It uses a two line window so you can type a line at a time directly to the printer Here again this program seems more a demonstration of PRO NTO than a practical application In addition to the four defaultapplications PRO NTO loads on boot up it loads two other programs the Library Executive LIBEXEC and the Universal Applica tion Invoker LIBEXEC lets you access all TRSDOS library commands You can also run other programs with the Run command if you know
94. nce told me that CP M stood 7 for Can t Prove it by Me Although I have been involved with CP M for many years I agree totally But since MS DOS is nothing more than enhanced CP M I feel MS DOS really stands for More of the Same Dumb Old Stuff MS DOS isa bastardized cross between CP M and TRS DOS with the worst features of both and the best features of neither Where we do we go from here With the crippled X86 architecture the ridiculous PC architecture and antique OS it is hard Windows Forget it This is a kludgey attempt to place the Mac environment on top of another kludge of an OS that in turn is a clone of the kludgey CP M which in turn is a clone of the old TOPS 10 operat ing system of the 1960s As a result performance is dismal It takes a lot of horsepower torun this atany decentspeed because of the many layers of kludgey software The Mac designed for a similar environ ment does its jOb well as it was designed that way from the start OS 2 Maybe Whileit is definitely a better implementa tion and has modern features one would expect it still has to deal with the dismal PC architecture as well as retain some software compatibility So where we go from here ea Aerocomp Driver disk Fm MISOSYS Inc Ron Miller had a problem in trying to access our Aerocomp driver disk using LDOS 5 1 4 Seems that most of the files had password protec tion Here s the snag the proble
95. ne takes one character from the left side of the buffer and places it into a holding string variable for output LINES 870 TO 940 This subroutine out puts a character to the output file and updates the character counter LINES 950 TO 1000 This subroutine outputs a directory entry to the output file LINES 1010 TO 1180 This subroutine adds a directory entry to the array The directory text line is stored in DIRTXT and the address of its corresponding text blockis stored in DIRADD The character counter is updated in this section so that there will be enough room for the direc tory in the output file if there happens to be too much text in the source file LINES 1190 to 1350 This subroutine outputs a line with thereverse video toggle characters before and after it It first out puts a toggle character and then it throws away the the lt R gt in the buffer as well as the following carriage return It then Outputs the text line with space compres sion Space compression codes are ig nored by the HELP CMD program if they follow the reverse video toggle code so if the reverse video text line starts with spaces they are output as follows 1 One to two spaces output without compression E Threespaces first space output with outcompression the third space com pressed onto the second 3 More than three spaces same as 2 with the additional spaces converted to a space compression code The reverse video t
96. nge driver parameters the parameters are fixed at 4800 baud 8 bit word length 2 stop bits no parity and the driver does not use the WAKEUP service call interface Because of this last provision the driver will not work with the COMM program The second driver which is part of CL3 contains the code necessary to provide a system interface to the ASCI port 0 This driver contains two 256 byte character buffers but again the driver has no WAKEUP interface so it too cannot be used for COMM The third driver used to access ASCI port 1 contains only a receive buffer and no WAKEUP interface Both ASCI drivers are hard coded for the same parameters as previ ously noted The implementation James designed how ever permits the ASCI drivers to be in stalled in memory independently of the SIO driver This means that you could install theregular COM driver to use with COMM and then install either the PO or P1 driver to add additional eee pose serial ports Using any of the trio of drivers provided in CL3 requires you to make modifications to the code if you need parameters other than the hard coded ones These param eter changes can be made to the assembled driverprogram through a series of patches The SIO driver has two configuration bytes one at X 3646 alters the baud rate while another at X 3647 alters the other parameters Let s first look at the baud rate The SIO has a baud rate register BRG accessed through po
97. nsmission and 3 if the protocol changes e g toa byte count oriented packet with checksum pro tocol such as DDCMP the application program s need not be changed The disadvantages include 1 higher usage of system memory 2 increased build and maintenance cost of the driver program it s no longer a simple task 3 possible increased usage of processor time to handle each character TANSTAAFL There Ain t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch To implement XON XOFF is reasonably simple The driver mustkeep a flag which indicates whether transmission has been paused ornot When an XOFFisreceived the pause flag is set When an XON is received the pause flag is cleared The XON XOFF character that is received is not stored for the application program The transmit register empty interruptrou tine checks the flag prior to attempting transmission If the flag is cleared then transmission proceeds normally If the flag is set then the transmitregister empty interrupt is disabled and the routine exits The XON receive routine also enables the transmit register empty interrupt ates EE Inside TMQ 16 Inside TMQ Raw data mode PASTHRU What it is Raw data mode or PASTHRU as it is called in the source code is simply a flag that is set to indicate thatall data must pass through the driver without any translation or filtering Why it was needed When XON XOFFis implemented trans mission of binary da
98. o Help format in order to correct errors in the file and enhance some of the commandexplanations The programscan also be used to generate other help files for any other application I find that the advantage of the DOS help iles is that each contains a directory of its contents which allows quick access to the desired information I could not compile these programs using Tandy s BASCOM compiler since it will not handle random access files withrecord numbers greater than 32767 Therefore be prepared for slow conversion especially by TXT2HLP BAS Hardware Requirements rs Model 4 4D 64K 1 drive en PRIOR EP ot Fr QI onea DOS HELP CMD Program 239 179 RE BEE ER Requirements foun To understand the programs it is first necessary to understand the requirements of the DOS HELP CMD program The text which follows explains some of the requirements The text is included on DISK NOTES in the proper format to be onverted into Help format The help file source format is as follows 1 The first line must be lt D gt to iden tify the first directory entry b D C sad irata e A Det teat gy 5 5 a Boor CO ata Mra a a CT RE SO ES RCD DE aa he er CE 20 Inside TMQ 43 Volume Vliv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv a4 bt eae ona RINT Oo N D OF rr PS te d a Inside TMQ A5 Inside TMQ Volume V
99. ode if you invoke it from the calendar PRO NTO s floating pointcalculator pro vides a rudimentary four function capa bility with a one number memory You make entries to the calculator using alge braic notation PRO NTO considers all operators of equal precedence and calcu lates the formula from left to right in the sequence entered PRO NTO displays results in decimal or scientific notation If a number exceeds the decimal limits PRO NTO displays it in scientific notation for example it dis plays 0 00000002567 as 2 567000E 8 The calculator works with single preci sion floating point numbers and maintains six Or seven decimal digits of precision The reverse Polish notation RPN four function calculator is really a programmer s tool and provides for data entry in binary octal decimal and or hexadecimal format You can use three additional operations logical Andand Or and Exclusive Or While the calculator doesn t support negation and comple ments you can quickly calculate these using simple arithmetic operations Unlike the floating point calculator the RPN calculator lets you enter an operation sequence as a String and you Can edit this prior to pressing the enter key You have to separate operators and operands by a space The default result base is decimal and you can change this to any other base by appending the appropriate designation to the entire expression The card filer and notepad C
100. of days now andl ve got to say that this is the best price performance package that I ve ever bought As usual for MISOSYS prod ucts the documentation was excellent and the software stunning John Harrell s re view in 80 Micro is right on target PRO NTO is a five star product PRO NTO was our most successful non DOS product although not anywhere suc cessful as I thought it should have been Perhaps there were a great deal of copies in use which were never purchased Nevertheless PRO NTO became notice able to Chemical Bank In February of 1986 MISOSYS received the following letter from the legal firm of Davis Hoxie Faithfull amp Hapgood Dear Sir We are trademark counsel for Chemical Bank and Chemical New York Corpora tion and their wholly owned subsidiar ies Chemical Technologies Corporation and Pronto U S A Inc owners of the PRONTO electronic banking and infor mation service and the PRONTO trade mark and service mark Chemical New York Corporation is the owner of a num ber of United States trademark registra tions for this mark including one for computer programs Copies of these reg istrations are enclosed along witha copy of the label onthe PRONTO software disk which Chemical distributes to its PRONTO customers The PRONTO electronic banking and in formation service enables a bank cus tomer using the PRONTO floppy disk and a personal computer linked by a modem to the bank s data pro
101. of Computers The first electronic computer is generally considered to be the ENIAC which was completed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineer ing The project was under the direction of two physicists J Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly To put this computer into perspective it consisted of more than 18 000 vacuum tubes and 1500 relays The computer was hard wired to perform the task to which it was designed that of computing ballistic trajectories ENIAC was capable of performing nearly 5000 additions per second The fact that the machine had to bere wired for each change in program required a great deal of set up time Nevertheless it was in use for about ten years Thenext stageof development came when Hermine H Goldstine and John Von Neumann joined the team to develop the EDVAC computer the first to utilize a program stored in memory That project was almost doomed when Eckart and Mauchly left the Moore School to start their own company the Eckart Mauchly Corporation to design and manufacture the UNIVAC UNI Versal Automatic Com puter computer In 1950 RemingtonRand acquired the company it s now knownas UNISYS UNIVAC I was first delivered in 1951 and used by the Bureau of the Census for its 1950 results I remember visiting the Remington Rand plant in the late 50 s when the Univac II was being built Von Neumann is the one generally credited with the inclusion of a program st
102. oggles are output after the carriage return on the previous line and before the carriage return on the re verse video line torestrictreverse video to only the one line LINES 1360 TO 1500 This subroutine outputs the stored directory entries to the file when regular text processing is termi nated because the lt E gt sequence was detected the end of the source file was reached or the maximum character count was reached The directory entries and addresses are echoed to the screen as they are Output LINES 1510 TO 1540 This subroutine compresses a single space following a character by throwing away the space and adding decimal 128 hex 80 to the char acter LINES 1550 TO 1590 This subroutine compresses multiple spaces by convert ing them to space compression codes The first space in the string is output asis or is Compressed onto the previous char acter before this subroutine is called LINES 1600 TO 1640 This error han dling routine works as described for the HLP2TXT BAS program above Program TESTHLP BAS Description This is asimple program to generate prop erly formatted text files of selected sizes to test the TXT2HLP BAS program It does not contain error checking so be careful with your choice of file names The operation of the program needs no description CONCLUSION The DOS HELP CMD program is par ticularly useful when Double Duty pro gram is usedsince you can interrupt what ever
103. ompiler known as Turbo PASCAL Borland had a core of gifted programmers Now programmers by nature are quite Curious they like to solve puzzles One of those puzzles was of course PC DOS now generally re ferred to as MS DOS the operating sys tem on the PC Borland was the first to decode the workings of the spooler and to capitalize on that discovery with a com mercial product in 1984 What they dis covered were the tricks necessary to cre ate a terminate and stay resident TSR program The TSR is no different from the installable device drivers and filters avail able under L S DOS since its inception TSR is just a fancy new name However Inside TMQ 31 Inside TMQ nl Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv with the discovery of how to write a TSR program and with the availability of a much larger addressable address space in the PC compared to the older 8 bit com puters Borland was able to write a major program called SIDEKICK and allow it to be resident along with the main program running on the PC Borland as sembledall of the usual desktop parapher nalia i e calendar a calculator notepad a programmers conversion chart a tele phone list etc into a single cohesive program made it able to reside totally in memory along with any other main pro gram and enabled it to be activated at the touch of a button to be popped up onto the screen Along with this progr
104. on MISOSYS roducts programs patches and articles in a professional magazine format A subscription to 7MQ will provide you with information news and announcements conceming our entire productline andrelatedmachineenvironments Asaspecial for new subscribers we ll provide you with five issues and start you off with issue VLiv and send you three past issu atno charge That s eight issues for the price of four Subscrip tions are 25 US 30 Canada 35 Europe 6000000000 00000 0000000000 ee 8 6 o e When your hard drive files become fragmented with exces Sivedirectoryextents access speed degrades Yourprogram e Will finish in less than the optimum time Now with our HDPACK utility you can restore that ZIP to your computer HDPACK will automatically and intelligently re pack th e fragmented files on your drive which will improve th performance of file access time e HDPACK provides a visual display of its de fragging opera 2 tion which in minutes can restore aten megabyte directory Of files to a mininum number of extents HDPACK can even e work on floppy diskettes too x e HDPACK cat no M 33 400 is available for Model 4 DOS 6 only and is priced at 39 95 3S amp H 000000006008 800000850000 0000000 LetourLB Data Manager solve your data storage problems LB Version 2 2 A Flat File Data Manager with more powerful and easy to use features in this latest enhancement of Little Brother Now
105. ored in memory Von Neumann Goldstine and other col laborators at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton began developing a new Computer model referred to now as the JAS or Von Neumann machine Most modern day computers are still based on this design The Von Neumann architec ture is classic Because of this point it is wise to discuss a little bit about the archi tecture The Von Neumann machine typically has five Components an input unit amemory unit an arithmetic logic unit a control unit and an output unit Thecontrol fetches an instruction decodes it and takes the appropriate action It is important to note that only one instruction is executed at a time the entire process is conceptually a serial one In todays microcomputers their compu tation processing is still a Von Neumann architecture This means that only one action is processed at a time The com puter is engaged in only one task ata time As computers got faster and faster in their processing it became a challenge to de sign the input and output units to be able to keep up with the processor In fact in most cases the processor is just sitting around waiting for a slow human or a slow peripheral to do something Most tasks fall into this kind of activity in which the amount of processing needed is small relative to the input and output the task is I O bound There are other types of tasks which are compute bound i e they demand a g
106. ould com plain about and I haven t complained because it s not that big a deal The prob lem is Ifyouare using RS s Videotex Plus and you want to use the TEXT Editor it s reset button time Videotex just freezes solid But you can use all the other pro grams with no ill effects The bottom line is it takes a while to figure out how to use it but once you get started the possibilities seem endless It s very well written and well worth the price And it s worth more then 1000 words And I also got the MR ED add on package which has TEXT FILE DISK MEMORY and VIDEO EDITORS Ken Kane wrote My favorite new ap plication forPHRASE APPin PRO WAM is for browsing the DL s I set up a KSM key to invoke PHRASE as per Roy s instructions on pg 112 Last night I did a search for ink jet printer reviews on sev eral SIGs My PHRASE TXT file in cluded S1BRO KEY DICONIX lt gt S2BRO KEY HEWLETT lt gt S3BRO KEY INKJET lt gt S4BRO KEY JET lt gt I didn t find much but was my searching fast I searched about a dozen DL s on several SIGs in about 2 3 minutes True I could have used separate KSM keys for each BRO KEY but this is less disrup tive I used to keep two keys tied up under KSM tolog ontoCIS at 1200 to download and the other at 300 baud et alia for XMODEM I now have other ways to use my DTERM communications program including experiments logging on at2400 via TELENET and at 2400
107. r employer They have a new low cost voice recognition module des tined to provide voice dialing of mobile cellular telephones as well as applica tions in answering machines modems and consumer appliances Toaster do your stuff Finally on the copyright scene there s been some interesting rulings First Lotus won out over Borland in the 123 suit against Quatro Pro Judge Keeton ruled that Borland illegally incorporated parts of Lotus 1 2 3 spreadsheet in that old look and feel case Monetary dam ages have yet to be ascertained as I write this however as expected Borland is appealing Second on the opposite side of the fence the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision involving Altai against Com puter Associates which severely restricts copyright protection for the structural el The Blurb 2 The Blurb Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv ements of a computer program The deci sion noted that a program may be com posed of numerous submodules that may express many different ideas and consist of both text and behavior The judge ruled that the behavior is not a proper subject for copyright protection common ideas structures and standard techniques should be filtered out before deciding what por tion of a program if any deserves to entertain a copyrightable expression And thirdly in April a U S District Court Judge Barbara Caulfield ruled i
108. r installation of the two chips and cable to provide an extra two EIA 232 ports The 4P now has three EIA 232 ports N more will be said on the hardware side o things Software The software was constructed in layers 1 an application program written in FORTH 2 a multi tasking FORTH language en vironment 3 serial interface device driver and 4 the operating system LS DOS e remainder of this article describes the ird layer the device driver for using the three serial interface ports on a TRS 80 Model 4P The driver program required the following features 1 ability to interface with the HD64180 ASCI ports side TMQ J r tat Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VL iv 2 transmit and receive queueing up to 256 bytes per port 3 XON XOFF protocol 4 Raw data mode 5 Full CTLinterfacing except wakeup support 6 Support forinstalling each port s driver separately Each of these features will be discussed below with subheadings for what it is why it was needed and how it was done HD64180 ASCI ports What it is The XLR8er contains an HD64180 chip which contains two Asynchronous Serial Communications Interfaces called ASCIO and ASCI1 The device driver must be capable of sending and receiving data via these ports Why it was needed To support four users with a minimum of hardware three ports were required An alternative sol
109. r resources into areas such that each area could contain one task and have a control facility which would auto matically switch the processor to each different task in turn In the L S DOS environment there is a task processor which controls the automatic switching Inside TMQ 30 Inside TMQ Volume Vliv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VI iv between one major task and multiple mi nor tasks A major task may be the word processing program you are using to write that letter to Aunt Mary Orit could be the data base you are using to print out that list ofaddress labels Most users are notaware of the minor tasks going on however if you are using the system spooler the activity of despooling your printed mate rial is actually a small task being con trolled by the task processor If you are displaying the clock time on your video screen it is being displayed by a small task under control of the task processor Keyboard type ahead 1s another smailtask The actual time keeping of the real time clock is managed by a small task con trolled by the task processor But suppose you wanted to perform two major tasks Obviously on a Von Neumann machine you could not process them simultaneously However if there were a means to partition the computer s resources into multiple areas of size each sufficient to hold a major task then you could load up the computer with a word processor in one area a
110. racters If the queue is empty then the flags are set Inside TMQ 14 Inside TMQ ERARA Re EE EEE ERREUR tatty eae ene ee ee ee eee ee ARAN SANS Bee soren accordingly and the routine exits Other Szcz firm ins ition show modul wise the next character is returned XON XOFF Protocol What it is XOFF means hang on for a moment XON means ok continue XOFF is an abbreviation for Transmit Off XON is an abbreviation for Transmit On et Imagine one machine sending data to another the recipient runs out of memory or something and has to ask the sending machine to stop for a while so that it can save the data to disk It sends an XOFF back to the sending machine which hope fully recognises the XOFF as arequest to stop transmitting When the receiving machine is ready for more data it sends an XON The sending machine starts up again ee ae ee eee ee as DOC CCC OO ons ne Oe COCO EE a 5 eters So CE The most popular coded values for XON and XOFF are the equivalent of Control Q and Control S or DC1 and DC3 or hexadecimal 11 and 13 or decimal 17 and 19 Machines that support the XON XOFF protocol usually recognise these characters as requests to Start or stop smission CCE tee Why it was needed 9 Ptah ty OO CO The devices connected to the central ma chine are capable of using this protocol to ow high speed transmission
111. reat deal of processing with relatively little output Typically the applications are sci entific in nature such as weather data assimilation and processing performed to produce probability forecasts and real time simulation of complex processes For these types of tasks supercomputers have been developed which generally use multiple processors and an architecture called parallel processing As a simple example consider the calculation of the mathematics problem 3 x7 4x8 Ina Von Neumann machine 3is multiplied by 7 then the result is temporarily stored then 4 is multiplied by 8 with that result in term added together with the previously stored result of the first multiplication Every math operation is performed se quentially In a parallel processor the problem can be broken up into sub prob lems Calculation of the first product is carried out on one processor simulta neously with the calculation of the second product on another processor A complex control program is essential to properly break up the master problem into separate problems which can be processed simul taneously But parallel processor machines are com plex expensive and most tasks are not capable of being partitioned thus most machines are of the Von Neumann archi tecture and incur a great deal of idle time In order to be able to utilize the processor during this idle time operating system developers designed a means to partition the compute
112. rence to his system So how do I change his system to see the double sided floppy drives espe cially with using the SYSGEN com mand to save a new configuration It seems to me that the answer lies in the use of the SYSTEM command butmy books show only the options to change the floppy drive access time eg 6 ms I put in the double sided drives in the 4P and also made up a new cable for the drives There seems to be no problems with the drives in reading and writing to double sided diskettes in the machine Whatis strange to me is that I can boot up the 4P with the diskette that I use to boot Letters to MISOSYS 6 Letters to MISOSYS Volume VI iv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 92 Volume VI 1v up my cOmputer and then when the for mat command is used the computer will ask me if I want to format 1 or 2 sides But when I boot up on the modified boot disk for the 4P it will not give me that option when formatting The command FORMAT x sides 2 does work But I would rather the format command ask my dad how many tracks what density and how many sides does he want formatted So how do I get the system to recognize that the 4P has the option of two sided drives and to act accordingly What I can t figure is why the backup ofmy bootup diskette to the 15 meghd and then the backup of the 15 meg hd to the 4P bootup diskette ends up with the format command operating differ entl
113. rt OE9H The driver stores the configuration value for this register at X 3636 There are 16 distinct values which can be set for the receive side and 16 for the transmitside Although the COM driver provided with the DOS doesn t support different baud rates for send and receive this is only a software restriction the hardware is perfectly ca pable of using a differentrate for transmit ting and receiving The BRG register uses the high four bits to control the transmit rate and the low four bits control the receive rate The next table reflects these rate assignments Value hex Rate baud 00H 50 01H 75 02H 110 03H 134 5 04H 150 05H 300 06H 600 07H 1200 08H 1800 09H 2000 0AH 2400 OBH 3600 OCH 4800 0ODH 7200 OEH 9600 OFH 19 200 Note that the CL3 driver has this configu ration byte initialized to OCCH setting up the transmit and receive side for 4800 baud If for instance you wanted to use 2400 baud change the value to OAAH The configuration byte at X 3647 con tains initializing values for word length parity and number of stop bits The fol lowing table depicts these assignments Bits Function Value 7 Parity 1 EVEN 0 ODD 6 5 Word Size 01B 5 10B 6 01B 7 11B 8 4 StopBits 0 1 Stop Bit 2 Stop Bits 3 Parity 0 Enable 1 Disable 2 Break 0 Const SPACE i normal 1 DTR O ON 1 OFF 0 RTS 0 ON 1 OFF Here s where aknowledgeofbinary comes inhandy Word length etc is selected by constru
114. se facilities and the windowing function of EXPORT youcan easily use VED as the clipboard facility found on more expensive systems You can even use it to screen edit a BASIC program TED isa full screen ASCII text editor that sports a 30K text buffer while you are using other programs You get full cursor control search and replace insert and overstrike delete mode scroll up scroll down as well as page up and page down TED has block mark block copy block move and block delete Mister ED even comes with an OOPS facility in case you exit TED without saving your text you can get it back TED is friendly fast and great for those quick editing jobs you need todo while on line TED s great for bang ing out notes when you are right in the middle of a program which you can t interrupt The LS DOS 6 3 TED CMD editor was derived from TED APP which came first WAMMIES For All Recollect that PRO WAM as released was originally designed allowing program mers to easily write their own pop up applications And they soon started ap pearing A good handful of applications were placed on our Compuserve forum as either shareware or public domain pro grams In addition many were also con tributed for publication in The MISOSYS Quarterly Here s asum mary of the appli cations which have been made available over the years Incidentally with the change of name from PRO NTO to PRO WAM the applications have been aff
115. se of the memory require ments for running HDPACK it is avail able only in the Model 4 operating mode However since the directory structure of Model 4 LS DOS and Model I or Il LDOS is identical a drive running under LDOS can be packed by connecting the drive to a Model 4 and bringing it up in the Model 4 mode under LS DOS Address Change The United States Postal Service has seen fit to change the ZIP code of our Post Office Box mailing address effective July 1 1992 The new ZIP is 20167 Please update yourrecords I don t want to lose any of your orders FAX Number If you want to reach us by fax try 703 450 4213 ST80 III Version 2 50 I have received a few calls lately which reflect confusion on what is included in the ST80 III package listed in the TRS 80 productcatalog The 39 95 product price includes ST80 II version 2 50 the most recent and most powerful version ever generated by Lance Micklus as well as his Personal Bulletin Board ST80 PBB and Host Interface ST80 X10 PRO WAM Special This issue of The MISOSYS Quarterly provides in depth coverage of the PRO WAM Window and Application Man ager To coincide with this coverage the following special pricing is in effect for TMQ subscribers only e PRO WAM at 37 48 e PRO WAM and MisterED at 74 95 e MisterED at 19 98 e Programmers Toolkit at 14 98 The user contributed wammies noted in the PRO WAM article are all available in run time form
116. search next prev first last An lt EN TER gt will automatically export the record The application is useful for extracting address information foruse asa heading in a letter It sure saves me some time and eliminates needless editing We ve modified ADDRESS APP to pick up the sort key and key length so that the search command now uses the external key information specified in the data file header record rather than hard coding the search to the lastifirst fields This means you can alter the key location and length fields in the ADDRESS DAT file to or der search by ZIP Company or what ever This was to satisfy a few requests from folks wanting ADDRESS to sortand search on the Company name field I fail to understand why the MS DOS world clamors for key stroke multiplica Inside TMQ 39 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Vliv tion facilities such as SUPERKEY POWERKEY and whatnot yet the TRS 80 users rarely explore the capabilities of their own KSM facility which has been available in LDOS and DOS 6 for years Nevertheless we have added anew appli cation called PHRASE This wammie accesses a PHRASE TXT file consisting of any number of phrases You can scroll through the phrases or enter a phrase mnemonic An lt ENTER gt will export the phrase selected Your phrases can make use of the logical ENTER character of _ export This is akin to a more or less infinite
117. sort in ascending or descending order By attaching a sorted index file any record may be found within seconds even in a very large database LB even includes a special command for auto matically finding duplicate records Report generation Report generation incorporates a great flexibility Your report presenta tion is totally customized through print definition formats which you _ define on the screen as easily as you define the input update screens You can truncate field data strip trailing spaces or tab to a column You control exactly where you want each field to appear LB provides for a report header complete with database statistics database name date time and page numbers A report footer provides subtotaling totaling and averaging for dollar floating point and calculated fields print number of records printed per page and per report Attach any of the ten a ae er is Fo T iiai i ix ra an te TX h o PE t t Dvw index files and you control exactly whatrecords get printed even a subset of indexed records can be selected for printing to give you a means of recovering from that printer jam halfway through your 30 page printout Youcanevenforce anew page when the key field of an index file changes value Up to ten different printout definition formats can be maintained for each database Reports may be sent easily to a printer the console display screen or to a disk file use
118. t was in form PRO NTO we nevertheless felt it imprudent to wage battle with Chemical Bank and looked for another name We then addressed the following to Chemical Bank s attorney After reviewing the documents supplied by youand the documents associated with the announcement ofour PRO NTO prod uct in December of 1984 our corporate attorney has advised us that we should change the designation for our software Counsel further added that Some of the ads MISOSYS provided clearly would be confusing when compared to the use of those words bythe Chemical Bank Thus I have been advised by counsel to write you indicating that we will take the neces sary steps to cease using the PRO NTO or PRONTO designation for our soft ware In light of these findings I have instructed our attorney to performatrademarksearch for anew name that has been selected for our product As soon as we can determine that the selected name does not infringe onany other company we will proceed to Inside TMQ 33 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VI iv alter our advertising and other product information concerning our windowing and application manager product Since advertising leadtimes are in excess of two months and a trademark search may take some time to accomplish I have instructed our advertising department to incorporate the following notation in our PRO NTO ad as
119. ta will suffer since any occurrence of the XON or XOFF characters will be misapplied PASTHRU modeeffectively turns off the XON XOFF protocol Binary transfers are used for loading memory images from the Tandy 102 into the 4P How it was done A flag in the driver represents the PASTHRU state A CTLrequestcan be used to turn it on or off When it is on incoming XON or XOFF characters are ignored and placed into the input queue CTL Interfacing What it is Application programs or the operating system send requests to device drivers to perform particular tasks Such requests are called Control requests and they use the CTL supervisor call The TRS 80 Model 4 4P Technical Reference Manual 26 2119 on page 42 and 65 describes the CTL interface to device drivers The ontrol Code Implementation Table shows the CTL function values requests and whether they are implemented by the driver Inside TMQ TR RER TOR at ve s are x se DOO ee ee ane et ae ey 0 COCO ECS aan at at tat ay azote Earra pene 5 Pe ee ee ee a ea er 17 Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv Why it was needed The application needed to be able to clear the queues and enable or disable PASTHRU mode The best way to pro vide this functionality was via the CTL interface How it was done
120. tation imaginable of said architecture the PC Anyone who has taken an unbiased ob jective look at the PC will agree It is nothing more than a glorified TRS 80 Model I not the nicely integrated Model Ill with the expansion slot idea of the Apple II thrown in From an architectural point of view it was designed with the same Basic in ROM cassette port CPU power robbing memory mapped video and useless inter rupt driven real time clock that had to be set each time power was applied All subsequent improvements have been kludges of attempts to get around the limitations of the architecture the most glaring of which is the gap in user RAM to accommodate memory mapped video and ROM From a mechanical standpoint the PC is also a kludge When the PC was intro duced the microcomputer industry was moving toward fully integrated systems such as the above mentioned TRS 80 Model I the Northstar Advantage and the Superbrain The PC was a throwback to the 1977 introduction of the TRS 80 three ugly boxes connected with cables From a software standpoint the PC is an absolute nightmare The first converts were TRS 80 and Apple programmers who were used to employing poor pro gramming practices such as direct hard ware control vs OS calls The CP M community which laughed at the PC for the kludge it was did not become in volved with it until these poor program ming practices were firmly entrenched Someone o
121. th PRO WAM to sendinitializa tion strings to your Okidata printer PAW A utility by Roy Soltoff to enable a single keystroke execution ofany PRO WAM application directly from a PRO WAM library file PG2 A small PRO WAM application by Jacques Verhelst which 1s used to page through either of two data files DATAI TAB and DATA2 TAB PRCTRL A PRO WAM application by Paul Bradshaw which can be cus tomized to send control strings to any printer It features user defin ablekeywords user definable code sequences substitutions repeti tions and more SVC A PRO WAM application by Doug Tittle used primarily by program mers to pop up a database of DOS service calls By popular demand it includes a Search by SVC Name and Number ability WAMDUMP A utility by Claude Hunter to convert a PRO WAM core im age application file into a standard load module image which can then be disassembled by PRO DUCE WINCALC A programmer s calculator by Bryan Headley which provides all the mathematical and logical operations aZ 80 programmer may require during the development and maintenance of assembly language programs It took a few years for folks to migrate to thenew name PRO WAM Butit eventu ally took effect One good way of assisting in the changing of a product s name is to release a new version Based on the initial feedback from PRO WAM Version 1 us ers MISOSYS continued to add features enhancing the value of th
122. that it will run in the DOS overlay area The Universal Application Invoker runs any PRO NTO application from disk since you can configure PRO NTO for only four of the supplied applications This gives you access to PRO NTO s other programs Inside TMQ 37 Inside TMQ Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Vliv The Utilities PRO NTO Includes three utilities PRUN lets you bypass PRO NTO s program menu so you can call an application much as you would from DOS Instead of an swering prompts to invoke an application you call a program by typing in PRUN FILENAME from DOS You can also use PRUN in an autoexecute file to automati cally load one of PRO NTO s programs on boot up PSort a sort function written specifically for PRO NTO data base files can be easily used for other data structures Misosys has provided complete documen tation on the data structure required for this utility MISOS YS also includes a full help utility It provides documentation for each of PRO NTO s features and is similar to the TRSDOS 6 2 Help command Blemishes PRO NTO s major strength is also its weakness The generic nature of the pro gram means that it won t work with sev eral software packages such as SuperScripsit and LeScript Both of these programs ignore PRO NTO because they don t read characters from the standard TRSDOS keyboard driver K1 Also I found that having onl
123. ticular who does it Any item tagged as who 0 will always appear on a list ing Forget Hi s job jar TODO does it PRO WAM comes with an on line help facility which has been updated to include all of the features added in release 2 Itcan keep you from having to resort to the user manual when you forget a particular op eration of PRO WAM Of course since every application has a command menu you willrarely have toresort to the manual once you have familiarized yourself with the operation of the applications you will use PRO WAM also comes with some im proved utilities and some new ones to boot With all the talk about sorting BRINGUP files by date and time you _ may have realized that PSORT needed some work Well PSORT has been revised to accept an expanded data definition of up totwokey sort fields Not only that but the fields can be either character or integer Because of the switch to application li braries we ve included WAMLIB a util ity to build and maintain application li braries WAMLIB has functions to create a library as well as the functions e add a module e delete a module e replace a module e extract a module e list module directory WAMLIB is menu driven and easy to use Since applications are now invoked from libraries PRUN has been enhanced to load applications from libraries too How ever since some folks may have a need to invoke an individual application
124. ub command A 200 page User Manual documents every facet of LB s operation Trade up policy Send in an original Table of Contents page from any existing database program and get LB Version 2 for half price Specify MS DOS or TRS 80 version LB is priced at 99 5 S amp H US 6 Canada 7 Europe 9 Asia Pacific Rim and Australia To trade up from any other database send Table of Contents page and 49 50 S amp H Remit to MISOSYS Inc PO Box 239 Sterling VA 20167 0239 703 450 4181 or orders to 800 MISOSYS thie ill Un TMi tu th l nll li j When you don t have to write in stone don t let fyour editor weigh you 4 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 struggie with huge editors when all is said and done SAID 86 will be your text editor of choice Check out this list of features WordStar like editing commands are easy to use Pull down menu system for commanding SAID 86 Z Supports nine editing buffers with automatic swap to disk Z Supports up to 30 user defined macros 255 characters each A Undelete the last nine deleted lines can save your bacon MOUSE support with automatic recognition HELP facility shell to invoke DOS commands from
125. ur form onto the text area of the win dow By using reverse video for every position which you want protected from entry while using CARDX youcan create a form to be filled in later When using CARDX the cursor will be automatically moved to the unprotected positions This combination of CARDX CARDXF can really provide you data base functions Around here we always seem to forget to do this or forget to do that Sometimes BRINGUP doesn t work when you just want to Keep a list of items to be done Remember that todo pad That s why I designed TODO APP a new application which is used to establish and maintain a simple list of items to do Now I wanted to keep Brenda s todo list together with mine so I designed it with a field to indicate who does it This wammie generates a TODO DAT file which is similar toa BRINGUP file Allows prior ity of 1 8 a who does it value of 0 15 where a value of 0 is considered global more on that later and a text field of 29 characters The add date is added to the record Commands allow you to add an item mark an item as done which de letes it file any changes move to next or previous display page and list items A page displaysthe 8 itemsin adisk record the display works like DIALER The list command allows you to print all records or the current record additionally specifying either all who does it or a par
126. usually has the expiration date of your subscription Forinstance those with 92 08 complete their subscription with this issue The renewal fee to continue with the next volume is covered on page 1 MISOSYS Forum I sponsor a forum on CompuServe You can reach some experts on TRS 80 and MS DOS subjects by dialing in then GO PCS49 or GO LDOS The forum contains many programs to download as well as lively discussions which thread through the message sys tem You can direct a message to me at 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 6 4 Each issue of The MISOSYS Quarterly contains program listings patch listings and other references to files we have placed onto a disk Where feasible the text accompanying an article is also on DISK NOTES DISK NOTES 6 4 corre The Blurb Volume VLiv THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume Vliv sponds to this issue of TMQ The disk is formatted for TRS 80 LDOS LS DOS users at 40D1 that s 0 tracks double density one sided If you want to obtain the patches and the listings you may conveniently purchase a copy of DISK NOTES priced at 10 Plus S amp H The S amp H charges are 2 for US Canada and Mexico 3 elsewhere EnhComp BASIC Compiler Texpect to be doing some improvement to my BASIC compiler EnhComp As a matter of fact I recently completed the
127. ution using some form of ring network and only one port was dis missed due to software complexity wir ing horror and the requirement for ring management intelligence at each remote terminal Another alternative solution of constructing two extra ETA 232 ports from remains of say spare Model IN cards was also skipped How it was done Modules were written in FORTH to pro totype access to the ASCI ports using information from the HD64180 manual These modules worked acceptably and so were converted into a device driver writ ten in assembly language When interrupts wererequired a problem RARE PERRET ERE IEEE IEC eee ee ae Ot SOT ais a annee PTA eee eee Inside TMQ Volume VI iv Inside TMQ hos OO ETES THE MISOSYS QUARTERLY Summer Fall 1992 Volume VLiv was found Since HD64180 interrupts are delivered using a vector table the table had to be positioned somewhere Since an interrupt could occur at any time code had to be borrowed to ensure that the appropriate bank is switched in so that the device driver interrupt could be called The vector table and the bank switching code associated with it had to be installed in low memory Queueing What it is When characters are to be transmitted they are placed in an output queue and the driver returns very quickly to the applica tion program When the serial interfaceis ready to transmit it triggers an interrupt
128. ware interface 30 Aerocomp Hard Drives e e 20 Meg unit 400 rs e 40 Meg drive 500 e MISOSYS H A with software 75 Separate Hard Disk Controllers Adaptec 4010 HDC 75 z WD1002S SHD 75 i e Drive power Y cable S3 o e XT drive cable set 5 e Note freight charges are additional lt e Prices subject to change withoutnotice 00000600000000000e BULK RATE U S POSTAGE PAID Sterling VA PERMIT NO 74
129. wnloading a pro gram to a Tandy 102 with XON XOFF protocol the LS DOS COPY command works fine The queueing means that the transmission is sustained without any breaks caused by disk access The COPY command fills the output queue and when ithas to perform disk I O the transmission keeps going using the contents of the queue Pd ete Oe ea How it was done z 2S es ae The driver contains two 256 byte queues D BL SE 5 one for transmit and one for receive The input end of the transmit queue is connected to the PUT service request in the driver The PUT will stall if the queue is full If when the PUT com pletes the queue has exactly one charac ter in it then that means that the transmit register empty interrupt will have to be enabled The output end of the transmit queue is handled by the transmit register empty interrupt routine When an interrupt oc curs the next character is taken from the queue and placed into the transmit regis ter This clears the interrupt If no char acter is available queue empty then the interrupt must be cleared by disabling it The input end of the receive queue is handled by the receive register full inter rupt routine When an interrupt occurs the received character is taken from the receiveregister and placed into the queue The output end of the receive queue is connected to the GET servicerequest in the driver The GET checks to see if the queue contains any cha
130. ws simulta neously though you can work only in the most recently called window When you finish using PRO NTO it closes any open window restores the previous screen s contents and the DOS overlay andreturns control to your interrupted program One of PRO NTO s notable features is its system of data transfer between windows and applications referred to as data im port and export PRO NTO lets you im port data into a window from a previous screen or export data from the current screen to another application For ex ample I used PRO NTO to generate a small job control language JCL file with the note card application When I finished writing it I used the export capability to feed the text to the DOS Build command This very capably overcomes TRS DOS s lack of a text editor The Applications When you type In PRONTO at TRSDOS Ready the program loads itself links into your system andinstalls akeyboard filter PRO NTO then loads its four default ap plications the calendar calculator in dex card filer and phone dialer into the alternate RAM bank along with a DOS library and auser defined universal appli cation and returns control to DOS You can change the default applications to any of PRO NTO s seven other applications with a supplied utility Pressing control P activates PRONTO it instantly lists the installed applications I ll describe all 11 of them below Address maintains an index car
131. y So what is my next step Fm MISOSYS Inc Robert The answer isin the setting of the L flag that s the letter L According to my information the number of sides prompt in FORMAT will be inhibited unless bit 5 of the LFLAG is set Looking at THE SOURCE on page 184 of The Utilities see line 6970 testing BIT 5 of the L flag Bit 5 setis a value of 20H The DOS will not ask the of sides query in FORMAT if bit 5 is reset You can determine this setting by issuing a command MEMORY A L Check the resulting value I Ilassume that the value of bit 5 is a zero Next calculate the new value of the byte adding 32 Then issue the command MEMORY A L B newval You should then SYSGEN to the BOOT drive after cor recting the value of the suspected bad value Lflag Actually the value should normally be X 21 to prompt for sides and step rate but inhibit the FLOPPY DCT 8 query PC is a nightmare The following letter which appeared in a major electronics industry newspaper _ Electrical Engineering Times June 22 1992 is reprinted here with the permis Letters to MISOSYS sion of its author Fm Mark D Pickerill Monterey CA I read with considerable amusement Mr Andrew Gray s letter in the June 8 issue see page 32 I could not agree more but Mr Gray neglected to mention that not only are we bogged down with the inferior X86 architecture but we are also bogged down with the silliest implemen
132. y four PRO NTO applications in the RAM bank just wasn t enough I continually referenced the program disk for other applications Even after I customized the default set up see fig 2a I needed the PRO NTO disk handy when I wanted an uninstalled appli Cation Since I was using only one of my alternate 32K RAM banks I thought I could put the otherto use Figure 2b shows aJCL procedure that loads PRO NTO and copies specified applications and data bases to Memdisk You must format Memdisk for single density operation to keep the granule size as small as possible and to minimize wasted space While DOSAVE preserves thecontents of the video screen you can t simply restore the screen by listing the contents Each 80 character line ends with a carriage return and this makes the display double space Also writing to the last locationon the screen lower right corner scrolls the entire screen PRO NTO is an excellent tool Not only does it have applications immediately available for use but the large amount of technical information provided makes it easy for programmers to use it for other applications And the documentation 90 pages is clear and succinct Disregarding thefew problems mentioned this package is truly outstanding Figures 2 a and b 1 Calculator 2 Calendar 3 Card 4 Address PRO NTO SYSTEM DRIVE 2 DRIVER MEMDISK BACKUP DAT 90 2 COPY BRINGUP APP 0 2 COPY CHARSET APP 0 2
133. you are doing and get help With these programs and a simple text editor you can create help files for use on the Model 4 that give you compact and por table storage backup for your documenta tion All that remains to be done is the typing Us XENES 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 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 50 Inside TMQ M Pau Aerocomp Hardware is now available from MISOSYS Model I DDen Controller DDC 45 65 amp H Model 11 4 FDC board 45 6S amp H Model Ill 4 RS232 board 45 6S amp H Model lil 4 RS232 Kit 50 6S amp H WD1002S SHD HDC new 75 5S amp H Aerocomp 20 Meg HD 400 S amp H Aerocomp 40 Meg HD 500 S amp H MM CP M 2 2 HD drivers 29 95 3S amp 000000000009 000000080000 000000005000 060000080008 The MISOSYS Quarterly subscriptions Keep up to date with the latest information
134. ystem Enhancement Wa M 33 200 Hardware GO Utility na M 33 300 ile Power Supply 40WT Astec AC8151 H PS A40 HDPACK Disk De fragger n a M 33 400 Power Supply 68WT Astec AA12310 H PS A68 Hardware Interface Kit na M 12 110 gt Floppy Disk Controller M3 M4 H MM FDC HartFORTH PRO HartFORTH M 20 071 M 21 071 Double Density Controller DDC M1 H MM DDC LDOS LSDOS Reference Manual M 40 060 M 40 060 RS232 Serial Card M3 M4 H MM SPC LDOS LSDOS BASIC Reference Manual M 40 061 M 40 061 i RS232 Serial Card Kit M3 M4 H MM SPK ete verte R E A TeleTrends TT512P modem M4P H 4P 512 LDOS 531 Diskette M3 M 10 130 f Floppy drives 5 25 360K 1 2 ht H FD 360 LDOS 5 3 1 Mod3 Upgrade Kit M 10 333 same Floppy drives 3 57 720K 1 2 ht ere 729 Tyr Pg area 13 eo Floppy Drive Case 2 1 2 ht drives H FD 2SV MSCSI HD kit e w clock 20Meg M3 M4 H HD 020 LB Data Manager M4 Ver 2 2 n a M 50 510 MSCSI HD kit e w clock 40Meg M3 M4 H HD 040 LS DOS 6 3 1 Upgrade Kit M4 n a M 11 043 Aerocomp HD 20 Meg M3 M4 H MM 020 YWMVVVINMDWOMATTNTNOSO LS DOS 6 3 1 Diskette M4 n a M 11 243 Aerocomp HD 40 Meg M3 M4 F e p re Upgrade kit M2 12 16 pure MSCSI Hard Drive joystick port option H HD JSO LS UTILITY si L 32 150 j Hard drive Seagate ST225 20M R HD 020 reg I PUS T Hard drive Seagate ST251 1 40M R HD 040 ne a at nen Hard drive Seagate ST 157N SCSI R HD S40 MRAS PRO MRAS M 20 083 M 21 083 Sr ag rer HE En S Cable 4Ft f

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