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barrym95838

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About barrym95838

  • Birthday 01/04/1966

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Sacramento, CA
  • Interests
    Anything 6502.

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  1. It irks me that those keys were lost sometime in the last 24 years, but you are the third owner and your home is the ninth residence for that poor old Franklin, and it suffered some inadvertent rough handling and sub-standard storage conditions during its existence. I last powered it up around 1995. I wish you the best of luck, my friend!
  2. David Schmenk has been working on PLASMA for a few 6502, 65c02 and 65c802 platforms. Steve F is already porting it to the BBC micro, and an Atari 8-bit version shouldn't be far from reach, with a bit of time and effort from someone willing and able. https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JEqbczrvsk&list=PLlPKgUMQbJ79VJvZRfv1CJQf4SP2Gw3yU Dave has recently released version 2.0, with a JIT compiler. The Hat sine program has been making the rounds for some time. I had ported it to the 280x192 Apple ][ hires display by playing with the various constants many years ago. The symmetry of the algorithm allows several easy optimizations, but I think that John Brooks took things to a "whole nother level" on usenet last year, with a z-buffer and all kinds of other cool stuff. He was eventually able to get a compiled BASIC version to complete in about 61 seconds @ 1 MHz! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.sys.apple2/hats$20off|sort:date/comp.sys.apple2/buTFvk-VnTo/F-4KSEd4AAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.sys.apple2/hats$20off|sort:date/comp.sys.apple2/Uc4EmM3xX88/WRGQCTWLAQAJ Mike B.
  3. The year was 1982. The PDP-8/A "CLASSIC" in my high school Trigonometry class had 8" floppies. It also had a very loud card reader and a rather slow dot matrix printer. It had its own little "room" in the corner of the classroom, and my teacher Ms. Hill promoted me to "sysop" when she realized that I didn't need to hear her lectures to get good test grades. I explored most of those gigantic disks and messed around with DEC BASIC, but never got into PDP-8 assembly language ... I was already in love with the 6502, and was learning it at home in my spare time on my Apple ][+. It would be a bit of a stretch to call that PDP-8/A a "home computer", though ... it was roughly similar in price and capability to the TRS-80 Model 2, but much bigger and heavier, and most of the nerds considered it to be a dinosaur already in 1982. Mike B.
  4. Uhh ... I'm no expert on Forth, but I believe that you need a compiler to handle colon definitions. : turns on the compiler, and ; turns it off (I know that's not the whole story, but it's a very important part anyway). No compiler = no new definitions. Thankfully, every Forth I have checked out so far has a simple compiler included in the base package. Mike B.
  5. I had already gone through my truly trivial BASIC phase on the TRS-80 Model 1 at school, so my first Applesoft program was a slightly less trivial giant Lo-Res "THANK YOU" to my uncle Jim and aunt Michele for giving me a new Panasonic cassette player to go with my new ][+. It looked kind of like this, and was rock-solid reliable for a few years, until I got my first Disk ][: Mike B.
  6. In about 1983, we had a high-school field trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science. In one room, there was an Apple ][ hooked up to a very large projection monitor, and it was controlling some kind of laser disc rocketry demo of some sort. The computer and other hardware were in a very secure box, so the power and RESET were not accessible, but most of the keyboard was exposed, to allow some visitor interaction. Something in me wanted to see if it was running BASIC or ML, so I jammed a whole bunch of CTRL-C and REPT combinations as fast as I could, and in a few seconds I blew out the "ONERR GOTO" stack and crashed it to the monitor prompt. From there, I "CTRL-B"d my way back to BASIC and quickly typed in and ran a LO-RES kaleidoscope program on the huge screen. Only my two friends saw me do it, but we only had to hang around nonchalantly for a few minutes before a pissed-off employee saw what happened, and unlocked the security box to reboot and restart the proper demo, glancing around and mumbling under his breath the whole time. If I had been caught, I'm pretty sure that I would have had to wait for the rest of the afternoon on the bus, but I got away free. Mike B.
  7. My favorite keyboard arcade-style game was Apple Panic. Easy to play, but a bit more difficult to master. I still have my hi-score of 152,520 written down on a paper somewhere in my attic. http://atariage.com/forums/gallery/album/1777-old-scans/ Mike B.
  8. barrym95838

    old scans

  9. If you are using assembly language, you should JSR BASCALC at $FBC1 to translate the row in A to a screen address in $28 and $29, load the column into Y, and peek the location with LDA ($28),Y. If you are using BASIC, you can peek the screen value with the formula P = SCRN(C,R*2)+16*SCRN(C,R*2+1), where C is the column (0 .. 39) and R is the row (0 .. 23). Both of these methods will return the screen code at that location, which is related to the ASCII code, but not the same. Mike B.
  10. @cbmeeks: I already have that Franklin Ace 2200 with the manual and some software boxed up for you, but it weighs about 35 lbs. and the box is about 18" x 24" x 10". It looks like it's going to cost about $75 to ship it from CA (95838) to TN (37343), and I'm not really sure that it's worth that much (it's in rather rough condition, and hasn't been powered up in over 20 years). Do you know of any cheaper ways I can use to get it to you? I don't want to just throw it away, but I also don't want to waste "our" time and money on an unsatisfactory transaction. Mike B.
  11. 280 x 192 pixels, memory-mapped, with six simultaneous colors, and page-flippable, at a price mom and dad can actually help me reach? No way ... mind completely blown ... [me, age 14]. Mike B.
  12. I wonder how many popular late-70s and early-80s machine language games depended on undocumented NMOS op-codes, making them buggy or unplayable on any CMOS Apple II. Mike B.
  13. Is it possible that they were pre-formatted? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the DD tracks may need to be pre-erased by something stronger than a typical SD head, but it's a foggy memory.
  14. First things first. Did you find the "ANY" key and actually press it? Thanks ... I'll see myself out ...
  15. It crashes about once or twice a month on average. It sits on the main menu during business hours, and goes into some sort of standby overnight, There was one day a few years ago when it crashed three times in a couple of hours, but that was because the power was flaky from a raging thunderstorm in the area. There seem to be three different types of crashes: The first is the black screen of death, and seems to be triggered by external glitches, from the line power or the dynamometer lift and/or RPM probe. The second is a simple freeze-up. This usually happens when exiting the exhaust manual sampling mode screen. The third is the most interesting, and usually happens after the machine has been up for a few weeks. The routine that is supposed to render the screen fonts starts to malfunction, dropping letters, and getting quickly and progressively worse, until the screen is almost blank except for the highlighting cursor. I know the menus so well that I have completed an inspection with almost nothing but a cursor remaining. This seems to be from corrupted font data, probably due to a (very gradual) memory leak in the code somewhere. In all three cases, a power-down and reset works like a charm. The application software is designed to discourage any snooping around, so it's hard for me to give any details of the operating system specifics (no command prompt available). About eight years ago, a software update was force down-loaded overnight, but an error in one of the download scripts froze the machine, making it unusable. ESP had to scramble through the s**t storm of complaints from hundreds of customers, and sent field techs out to each machine to manually unlock them and fix the software. Other than a few problems with the sampling bench pump and sensors, and the tamper detection battery, the machine is a joy to use, and I don't see a replacement showing up anytime soon. There is some talk that 1995 and older model year vehicles will eventually be exempted from the California smog check program, in which case the machine would only be useful for diagnosis and repair verification, but that might not happen for several more years. Mike
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