Micro_Cornucopia_02_Sep81.pdf

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September 1981

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Supporting a Language ...................................... 2

Parallel Print Driver

Listing ................................ 3

Disk Drive Motor Control .................................... 5

Jumpering the Wild Shugart .................................. 6

More Power Supplies ........................................ 7

Direct Input Routine

Listing ................................ 7

Program Storage Above PFM

Listing ........................ 8

REGULAR FEATURES

Editorial ..................... 1

Letters ....................... 2

Notes from Garland ........... 4

Something New .............. 7

MICRO CORNUCOPIA

11740N.W. West Road

Portland, Oregon 97229

503-645-3253

II~ID ~DI.U~D'II

Sept. 1981

The Journal of the Big Board Users

No.2

Editor

Publisher

David

Thompson

Technical Editor

Ruth Fredine-Burt

Graphic Design

Sandra Thompson

Typography

Patti Morris

Martin White

Irish Setter

Cover Illustration

Gerald Torrey

Here We Go Again!

Exclusive!

What happens when a Xerox copies a Big Board?

Why you get a "Worm", of course! That's right! The

Xerox 820 is just a Big Board in disguise'.

My informed sources say that last fall Xerox bought

non-exclusive rights to manufacture a system based

on the Big Board. Xerox re-Iaid out the board (4 layers)

so that

would fit in the cabinet, they dedicated the

SIO port B as a printer port, and they set up the disk

interface (1771) to handle either 5 or 8 inch. Otherwise,

it appears to be all Big Board, right down to the 2.5

MHz clock. The system PIa does the same things on

both systems, bit for bit, according to Xerox's docu-

mentation.

Xerox had 50,000 orders in hand the day they

- shipped the first 820, and they expect to recoup all

their startup costs by the end of this calender year.

What a market for software and hardware developed

around the Big Board. I'll say more about the 820 as

information comes in. (I'd give my eye teeth to see a

schematic and service manual for the 820.)

Picnic

We had a Saturday noon picnic to celebrate our first

issue.

turned out that the Saturday we picked con-

flicted with every party/birthday/outing/etc. for three

states around. But Sandy and I and those who came

had six hours of very interesting and mellow conver-

sation.

The knowledge, resources, and excitement among

the local group members are terrific. I only wish all of

you could have joined us.

The First Issue

Despite the speed of the U.S. Snail, a heartening

number of readers have actually received issue no. 1.

The responses from these lucky folks have made the

daily trip out to our mailbox most enjoyable. The com-

ments have included; 'surprised, happy, delighted '.

Though Micro C is a long way from being a success

financially, feedback like this tells us that it is success-

ful in other ways. We like doing it and we really appre-

ciate your response.

Sometimes a dream generates momentum of its

own. This one has.

Thanks.

MICRO CORNUCOPIA is pub-

lished six times a year by Micro Cor-

nucopia of Oregon, 11740 N.W.

West Road, Portland, Oregon

97229.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES:

1 yr. (6 issues)

yr.

(Canada)

1 yr. (other foreign)

$12.00

$15.00

$20.00

All subscription orders payable in

United States funds only, please.

ADVERTISING RATES: Available

on request.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS:Please

send old label and new address.

SOFnNARE, HARDWARE, AND

BOOK VENDORS: Micro Cornu-

copia is establishing a group of re-

viewers. We would very much like

to review your Big Board compatible

products for Micro

Please send

material to Review Editor, Micro

Cornucopia.

WRITER'S GUIDELINES: All

items should be typed, double-

spaced on white paper or better yet,

on disk. (Your disk

will

be returned

promptly.) Payment is in contribu-

tor's copies.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Please

sound off.

CP/M is a trademark of Digital Research, Inc.

Micro Cornucopia.

There once was a

Big Board

brisk.

could eat all the

bits off a disk.

chewed up the bits,

then spit out the pits,

which made feeding it

software a risk.

David Thompson

Editor

Publisher

Letters

Supporting A Language

David Thompson

Dear Sir,

July came and July went by, and

my mailbox has completely rusted

out due to all that drooling.

Silly me! When I read 'Issue No.1

will hit the streets during July' I as-

sumed it was July 1981! But now I

realize you meant July 1982. I'd bet-

ter get a stainless steel mailbox or

maybe not bother to wait, because

the magazine will never get here.

Maybe it went the way of Mitt's

Newsletter, the Digital Group

Newsletter, and Processor Technol-

ogy's Access."

I hope not.

Joe Kish

758 Yucca Ridge Lane

San Marcos, CA 92069

Throughout these early months of

Micro Cornucopia, I have been look-

ing at commercial and public ver-

sions of various languages with the

hope of finding a semiofficial lan-

guage for this group.

A common high level language

would mean we could pass around

source code in something other than

assembler. But the language would

need to be powerful enough for sub-

stantial commercial applications and

inexpensive enough that most of the

people in the group could afford it.

Plus, it would need to produce fast

and compact object code, encourage

readable source code, and promote

structured programming. (Whew!)

I am looking seriously at three lan-

guages: Forth, Pascal, and C. Of

these three, C is presently leading.

One reason is that all the versions I

have seen have been upwardly com-

patible with Bell Lab's C.

Versions of C that I'm aware of:

Small C (Pu1=lic)

Small C

(Public)

Tiny C ($100)

CW/C ($75)

Editor's note:

called Joe; after all it was the least

could

do for his mailbox. And besides,

think it's a

great letter! (He did finally receive issue no.

1.)

Sandy and

made a desperate, last ditch

effort to get all 500 first issues collated,

bound, labeled, sorted and bundled in one af-

ternoon

we could get the first issue in the

mail on July

31.

We missed the8

deadline

at the post office

minutes.

the magazine was mailed Monday

morning, August 3rd. (So much for hitting

the streets in July.)

Someday maybe I'll write a book about

starting a users group magazine.

could al-

most write the book about the first issue, and

Murphy would certainly be a leading figure.

(For those of you who don't know Murphy,

he is the one credited with the first voyage of

the Titanic.)

Quote from Murphy:

there is no way

your plan can fail,

you simply don't have

all the information.

Letters continued

my H19 with the DEC-20 at work. I

think the Big Board is an excellent

value and very useful.

I agree that Frank Gentges' idea

about the parallel ports is excellent.

That would take care of most of the

board's limitatons. I think your pub-

lic;ation has already been worth the

price and I suspect that an active

users group with a publication will

enhance the usefulness of the hard-

ware significantly.

Doug Faunt

PO Box

11142A

Palo Alto CA 94306

Dear David,

CONGRATULATIONS!!! FAN-

TASTIC!!! You really made it.

looks great and reads great. Youare

certainly to be congratulated for un-

dertaking such a task that should be

helpful to so many.

I hate to mention that Momma

and I are just back from five weeks

vacation in the Smokey Mountains

in Tennessee. I am about ready to

get my feet on the ground again. I

hope that I can get back on track to

help keep the pipe full of articles for

future issues.

Don Retzlaff

6435 Northwood

Dallas TX 75225

Editor's note,

What can

say? Thanks again Don, with-

out you and John Jones and Andrew Beck,

and the rest of you who are writing up things

for future issues this wouldn't be possible.

(As for the five whole weeks in the Smokey

Mountains, that's just not fair.)

Dear Editor,

I bought a bare board version and

built it up from scratch. I had to buy

about $80.00 worth of parts beyond

what I had around. I have it up and

running CP1M and am currently

working on packaging it in a ter-

minal-type case with a Ball Brothers

CRT. The unit is going to be used for

text processing and formatting for a

friend's photo typesetter. My other

computer is an LSI-II and I also use

BDSC ($145)

Supersoft C ($200)

Whitesmith's C ($600)

(The prices are approximate.)

White smith' s C is a full blown ver-

sion of the language. In fact, sources

tell me that it was created by three

fellows who worked on C for Bell

Labs. They left Bell in order to de-

velop and market C for the business

and scientific community.

I've heard that BDSC is a compe-

tent enough subset to be an option

for someone writing commercial ap-

plications.

has its own users group

and publication. All this for $145,

such a deal. (Lifeboat is offering dis-

counts on quantity purchases of

BDSC.)

is an expanded version of

Small C with lots of nice utilities, but

I don't know if it is ready to do com-

mercial work. However, it still looks

like quite a bargain at $75.

Tiny C is the only interpreter in

the bunch.

also comes in compiler

form for about $300. The only thing I

have heard about Tiny C is that it has

an excellent manual (and I heard

that fourth or fifth hand).

Supersoft's C is new on the mar-

ket. The ads say that they support

'most' of version 7 Unix.

that in-

cludes floating point and pointer

arithmetic, then it would be· a very

credible piece of of software, assum-

ing they have taken time to exorcise

bugs:

The standard text on Cis:

"The C Programming Language"

by Kernighan and Ritchie

Prentice-Hall

•••

(continued next column)

•••

Micro Cornucopia, Number 2, September 1981

Parallel

Print Driver

John

Jones

5826 Southwest Ave.

St. Louis, MO 63139

ADS

you want millions to know what you're doing,

buy a page in Byte.

This is a simple parallel printer

driver that can be incorporated into

anyCP/MBIOS.

On first entry, the program initial-

izes PIO port B and the interrupt

vector register. The program also

modifies the BIOS jump table so that

all subsequent calls for list output

bypass the initialization routine.

As each character is output to port

B, a flag byte is set, indicating that

the printer is busy. When the printer

is again ready, the PIO does an inter-

rupt. The sole purpose of the inter-

rupt service routine is to reset the

'printer busy' flag. The character

output routine tests the flag byte and

loops until it is reset. When the flag

is reset, a character is sent and the

flag is again set.

However,

you:

• need help designing a commercial product

• can provide help on a consulting basis

• need to find a source of ...

• want to sell that new BB peripheral we've all been waiting for

Well then, how about an ad in Micro C ?

Space Ads

People laugh when we tell

them what our space rates are.

They stop laughing when they

realize that a

1/3

page ad costs

about as much as a sack of groce-

ries.

you are int.erested in one of

our grocery ads or in something

larger or smaller, call or write.

We'll send a rate card and com-

plete details. The advertising

deadline is October 15 for issue

no. 3, and December 15 for issue

no. 4 .

Want Ads

For a modest

cents per

word, you could become famous

on a budget. (Please include

payment with ad.) Where else

could you say

WORLD'S GREATEST

PROGRAMMER

503-645-3253

for only

cents?

So write it down just the way

you'd like to see it. Dnt abbrev

the pr thng to deth. List the price

possible and any expected

shipping delay.

•••

Write or call the editorial office for information.

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Micro Cornucopia, Number 2, September 1981

Notes From Garland, Texas

David Thompson

Clearing up the screen.

The clear-to-end-of-screen com-

mand is CONTROL

not CON-

TROL W as indicated in the docu-

mentation.

~38

II<

P..'37

It<.

''''w---

Q2.

l.N2.'1°7

(+,5)

Bringing up stubborn boards.

A number of people have been

contacting Jim and me about prob-

lems they are having -bringing up

boards. One of the most common

symptoms is a pattern of two charac-

ters on the screen or a screenful of

random garbage. Either way, it basi-

cally means that the board probably

didn't finish loading the PFM moni-

tor in RAM so it could

try

to clear the

screen.

Jim is going to put together infor-

mation about what they look for

when they troubleshoot boards.

Hopefully, I will have that in time for

the next issue.

Don't (orget the 90 day guarantee

which completely· covers defective

parts and boards. Plus, he has been

doing out-of-warranty or pilot error

repairs very reasonably. Most of the

time these charges have been be-

tween $25 and $50. The maximum so

far has been $75 (the board had to be

almost completely resoldered,

among other things). That's pretty

hard to beat.

CIO,

I---~D

loMHi!

CliO

47PFT

IOoPF

U80

3880

(I)

MREq8

------ooi"""-)O-L-t_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _..,

_ _ _ _

HE"V'I LINES

I~DICAlT:

NEW CONNEC.TlONS

[)OrrED

LINES

INDICATe

OLD

c.oNNEC.TIONS

4 MHz Modification Version 2

Jim said the ready-to-run version

has BIOS shifted down· 200H be-

cause they thought they needed

room to store 256 bytes (a double-

density sector) in high memory.

Then the data could be moved into

low memory in 128 byte chunks and

accessed. Jim isn't sure whether

there is going to be a use for this

space but he is concerned that we

maintain consistancy.

According to Jim, it's easy to make

the EAOO BIOS into an E800 BIOS.

Original-.RES.(MSIZE-20)*1024

New-.RES.«MSIZE-20)*1024)-200

Now reassemble the mess and you

too can ORG at E800.

By the way, a pretty reliable way

to teU which version you have is to

look at the

that's displayed when

you boot CP/M.

it just says "60k

CP/M version 2.2" then you proba-

bly ORG at EAOO.

the prompt in-

cludes the words "BIG BOARD"

then you already ORG at E800.

The separate BIOS (and monitor

etc.) disk Jim is shipping with orders

now ORGs at E800.

you would like

the latest version rather than reas-

sembling BIOS with the modifica-

tion above, send Jim a disk and $3.00

for shipping.

4 MHz (Again).

This is an updated version of the 4

MHz mod printed

issue no. 1.

This version reportedly does not re-

quire special ram. Jim says he has

300ns 4116 working consistently us-

ing this mod. The only difference be-

tween this one and the previous one

is that the CAS and MUXC lines are

each moved left one pin on U76

(shift register) so that they change

states SOns earlier. This change

means that the system meets the

precharge requirements for the

slower RAM.

4 MHz Mod Version 2

1. Cut the trace (bottom of the

board) to U76 pin 4 .

2. Connect the cut trace (MUXC) to

U76pin3.

3. Cut the trace (bottom of the

board) to U76 pin 5.

4. Connect the cut trace (CAS) to

U76pin4.

5. Remove U96.

6. Connect U97 pin 4 to U96 pin 4.

7. Don't replace U96.

TwoCP/Ms

I have noticed that some software

which runs on one Big Board system

will not necessarily run on another. I

also noticed that there are two differ-

. ent IDs when CP/M boots.

I called Jim about this and he said

that those folks who used the BIOS

he sent out" with the boards and who

did their own incorporation into CP/

M have a version which origins the

BIOS at EAOO. All the folks who

bought CP/M already modified for

the Big Board have a BIOS starting at

E800. The difference has led to some

problems with software which de-

pends on having BIOS in a certain

place.

(continued next page)

Micro Cornucopia, Number 2, September 1981

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