Willsy

Wow I'm so glad I didn't upgrade to Win10. The icon is still there next to the clock. In fact, just today a pop-up came up and said that I could still upgrade to Windows10 for free, "for a limited time". Thanks Microsoft but after reading all the reports on how it spies on users and sends data back to The Deathstar Microsoft, my next change of OS will be to Linux.

Whoa! Brilliant!!! Love it! Next: Don't Fear The Reaper!

I've already produced a stripped-down TF cart image (just 16K at the moment) that has a single Jetpac entry on the cart selection screen. It boots straight into TF. The auto boot code has been removed. It will simply execute a single word in the dictionay (i.e. JETPAC) upon startup and the game will start. I'll probably finish it this weekend. If the game had some sort of secret keypress on the game selection screen to drop out of the game you'd land in the full TF environment and would be able to write Forth programs! Too cool :-)

Yes, that's how I'd do it. If you look at the various source listings in publications such as Forth Dimensions, all the Forth systems of the day exported their block output in this way.

@Tursi, You're correct of course, however, in TF, the cartridge has two entries on the cart menu - one for 40 column mode and one for 80 column mode. Each bank would still have two identical cart headers, but with only one entry (the 40 column entry) defined in each bank, rather than two.

Okay thanks guys. Nothing exciting Omega, just looking at ways of saving code. If the power-up address was honoured in ROMs in cartridges then multibank carts could be simplified. For example, in an 8 bank cart, banks 1 to 7 could have power-up routines defined that actually changed the bank to bank 0 and did a cold reset. It would be a nice means of dealing with carts that don't start in bank 0.

Is the power-up routine address in cartridges actually honoured by the TI OS, or is it only relevant in device DSRs?

There's code in TF which scans the keyboard at start up and loads BLOCKS from a drive according to the key pressed, or bypasses booting if enter is pressed at startup. I guess I'd strip that out first. That might be enough. Also only one cartridge header is required. Probably all the block related words could be removed since it wouldn't need to do any disk access. Plenty of scope to do it.

If you want a splash screen then you're looking at an additional 12k on top of the 22k!

As Lee says the first thing to do is remove some stuff from TF that Jetpac doesn't need to make room for the bootstrap code. The bootstrap code will copy a routine into pad ram which in turn banks in the appropriate banks in the eprom and copies the contents to CPU ram.

Ah yes! 64! My bad!

It's probably possible. You'd need an (at least) 32K cartridge EPROM - 16K for TF and 16K for the compiled Jetpac Binary. The version of TF in the EPROM would be modified to copy the binary out of the EPROM into the 32K and then run it.

Ha! LOL!

Love it! I see on later levels the nasties actually home-in on your location. Love it love it love it! I feel like a proud parent It gives me a big buzz to see someone use TF and get really great results with it! Top job! :thumbsup:

You can toggle headers with HDR. As you noted, my code truncates incoming DV80 lines where they are > 80 characters.

If you're in the states, this guy's got one: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/TMS9901NL-Programmable-System-Interface-/311492836399?hash=item48866b7c2f:g:CBEAAOSwxN5WVlvp Looks like its from 1986, so it should be genuine. He has 7 of them.

Start with the buffers. They'll normally be at the bottom of the board, next to the edge connector. I'm assuming of course that it has buffer chips! Also, the voltage regulators. Lastly, any "can" type capacitors should be changed. 30 year old electrolytic capacitors are going to be way off spec by now. I see this in guitar amplifiers and vintage guitar effect pedals all the time! There's probably not much wrong with it at all.

In classic99? It always starts in bank 0.

This is a great game!

Yes. The spectrum and the TI have the exact same screen resolution: 256x192. That makes things a lot easier.

Damn! That's awesome man. You really nailed it! Level 2 seemed faster than level 1. Did you hit CPU overdrive on Classic99 or something? Really impressed! :thumbsup:

Rasmus may be able to develop an API to allow you to supply the program/object. That way you don't end up forking the software, and save yourself work when you want to use the latest version of JS99er.

Without wishing to derail the thread, TurboForth takes about 0.5 seconds! Wanna see it? Load TurboForth from Classic99. After it has booted type DEMOS You'll see "Prime numbers to 1000" on block 15. Type: 15 LOAD It will show you the prime numbers to 1000 (which takes ~2.5 seconds) Then type: PAGE (this will clear the screen) Then type: 100 primes Ta dah! Okay. As you were....

Yes there is. Certainly in the console, and, from what I remember, in the flex interface too.

The Currah Microspeech for the ZX Spectrum used the same chip! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Y0tW2HcB0