Ed in SoDak

Yeah, hmmm is all I got, too. Maybe this thread could be moved to the development sub, since I'm about out of ideas on altering the program to accept and properly sort 7 places. It works fine with the original six. I tried to emulate/modify the original code to add the seventh character, but at this point, it thinks awhile, then skips over the first sort level and just prints duplicate characters. -Ed

The TI is tank-like in build quality, for the most part. But some weak links have been known for years. Weak keyboard designs for some of them (Mitsumi) or just dirty key contact fingers on the good designs. All stock TI joysticks suck on so many levels. Foam used as a dust wiper for the cart port turns to dust itself over time. 4116 RAM is used by several vintage machines and is another known fail. Some console power regulator boards are much better-built than others. Wear and tear to port connectors. On my setup, I placed a loose small 12v box fan on top of the ventilation slots in the case, which quickly cured any lingering heat in the console and heat-related lockups. I ran it on a lower voltage which was quieter but still cooled the console. No more coffee warmer! Whenever I had a failure, I had enough spares laying about I just swapped in another and kept going. Bad electrolytic caps. They age and dry out and are becoming an increasing problem in most any older device. TI used good parts, so we've had a better run than other things as old or newer. But still, our time is coming. -Ed

All these old/new TI options coming to fruition these modern days with all the mature tools to implement them. It seems even more active than back in TI's heydays when it was a relatively state-of-the-art system. It's easy to say today's very active TI community has far surpassed anything done back then, but also preserving all the most relevant and even obscure hardware. Just like back then, it's getting hard to choose which hardware upgrade to lust for the most! My dad had a Foundation card, when he passed his system went to a stepson. I already had dual PEB setups, a third would have been overkill, but I did so want that Foundation card. The Horizon seemed like the best upgrade back when, but just too much money when the cost was a week's paycheck and not really necessary for my TI-related business uses to justify it. But still the Horizon itch remains... just because. One of many TI jewels I've never had the chance to possess but now I have a second chance to dream anew. -Ed

The easy way to isolate those power-bearing wires is with a bit of heatshrink over the connector. Easily cut off and it won't fail over time or leave residue like tape. Like Greg, I went with an AC fan, mostly because I had several 120v fans on hand when I did the swap some three decades ago. 12v fans were not as common back then and 120v AC fans were plentiful and cheap in surplus. Rather than have the big PEB hogging the desktop, I had it on a low platform next to the desk. That kept the fan noise level even lower. A power bar handled the whole system with one switch. My dual-in-the-PEB drives were already taxing the 12v line, so I ended up powering only one drive at a time from the PEB supply. My "stock" TI had four drives, though the TI controller only allows three. The two in the PEB were drives A(1) and A(2), with a simple SPDT switch to send the 12v line to enable either drive singly. Drives B and C were outboard with their own beefy supply. Worked great to have two boot disks to choose from with B & C used for data, files or more programs. I tended to keep the same disks in each drive, which made it more of habit to know which one I wanted to boot with. It helped a lot with eliminating disk swapping to run another program for some little thing, then returning to the main task at hand. When writing programs, a flip of the switch and I could make a backup copy on another drive and floppy without changing the DSK# or filename. The switched power concept could be extended to have B(1), B(2) drives and so on. In my stash was a long ribbon cable already made up that held more drive connectors than I ever needed. All I needed to do was wire up the switch for the 12 v lines to the drives. -Ed

100 CALL CLEAR :: PRINT TAB(5);"TIGERCUB ANAGRAMMER": : :" by Jim Peterson": : : :" Mod by Ed G 2/10/2018 101 PRINT : :" Gives all possible combin- ations of any 4- to 7-letterword, without duplication*":;:;:;:"(*Once the bugs are fixed!)": : : 105 INPUT "Press Enter ":YEAHBABY$ 110 CALL CLEAR :: INPUT "Type 4-7 Letters: ":A$ :: W=LEN(A$):: IF (W<4)+(W>7)THEN 110 :: PRINT : 120 PRINT :: FOR J=1 TO W :: B$(J)=SEG$(A$,J,1):: NEXT J :: FOR J=2 TO W :: IF B$(J)>=B$(J-1)THEN 160 130 T$=B$(J):: FOR L=J-1 TO 1 STEP -1 :: B$(L+1)=B$(L) 140 IF B$(L-1)>=T$ THEN 150 :: B$(L)=T$ :: GOTO 160 150 NEXT L 160 NEXT J 165 INPUT "0=New Word or Start at 1-7? ":Z :: IF Z=0 THEN 110 :: IF Z>W THEN 165 :: PRINT : : 170 FOR A=Z TO W :: FOR B=1 TO W :: IF B=A THEN 340 180 FOR C=1 TO W :: IF (C=A)+(C=B)THEN 330 190 IF W=3 THEN 247 200 FOR D=1 TO W :: IF (D=A)+(D=B)+(D=C)THEN 320 210 IF W=4 THEN 260 220 FOR E=1 TO W :: IF (E=A)+(E=B)+(E=C)+(E=D)THEN 310 230 IF W=5 THEN 270 240 FOR F=1 TO W :: IF (F=A)+(F=B)+(F=C)+(F=D)+(F=E)THEN 300 ! ELSE 280 243 IF W=6 THEN 280 247 FOR G=1 TO W :: IF (G=A)+(G=B)+(G=C)+(G=D)+(G=E)+(G=F)THEN 300 ELSE 285 250 W$=B$(A)&B$(B)&B$(C):: IF W$<=V$ THEN 330 ELSE 290 260 W$=B$(A)&B$(B)&B$(C)&B$(D):: IF W$<=V$ THEN 320 ELSE 290 270 W$=B$(A)&B$(B)&B$(C)&B$(D)&B$(E):: IF W$<=V$ THEN 310 ELSE 290 280 W$=B$(A)&B$(B)&B$(C)&B$(D)&B$(E)&B$(F):: IF W$<=V$ THEN 295 ELSE 290 285 W$=B$(A)&B$(B)&B$(C)&B$(D)&B$(E)&B$(F)&B$(G):: IF W$<=V$ THEN 290 290 PRINT W$&" ";:: H=H+1 :: V$=W$ :: GOSUB 400 :: ON W-2 GOTO 330,320,310,300,295 295 NEXT G 300 NEXT F 310 NEXT E 320 NEXT D 330 NEXT C 340 NEXT B 350 NEXT A 360 PRINT : :" ";H;"TOTAL COMBINATIONS.": : :: H=0 :: V$="" 365 INPUT "Z=Repeat N=New Word ? ":GO$ :: IF GO$="N" OR GO$="n" THEN 110 ELSE 165 400 PN=PN+1 :: ZN=ZN+1 :: IF ZN=3 THEN PRINT " ": : 410 IF ZN=3 THEN ZN=0 :: IF PN=15 THEN INPUT "Enter or eXit ":Z$ :: PRINT : :: IF PN=15 THEN PN=0 :: IF Z$="x" OR Z$="X" THEN GOTO 165 420 PRINT : : :: RETURN Today's efforts. Found a typo in line 247 which changed the bug. It works with 6 characters, but something's still wrong with 7.

The ante has been upped! Now there's a game with 7 letters, that's 1680 scrambles. I've been messing with Tigercub's version so it lets the user navigate the screen display and options a bit better. You can choose which letter to start the listing with and go back to edit that or use a new word. I even have seven letters displaying... sort of. It's easiest to see if you type in numbers instead of letters. Makes no difference to the program as it's written. It will sort and scramble up 7 numbers as easily as letters, but it's easier for me to see how well it's working if I type numbers in. With a "word" length of 7, the first two iterations repeat characters, which I haven't figured out why yet. If you type in 1234567 and start it out at 1, every combo has the number 1 repeated and one of the seven is skipped, which changes as it goes. When 2 begins to list to the screen, now, every other set has two 2s. The others are correct, so far as I can tell. Once it moves into the 3rd go-around, all seems well. How odd! I'm sure I just have the entry into the many loops wrong in one my edits. I spent most of time making the program display better and provide more options. Another glitch that popped up at the same time, when I added the 7th place, is the program no longer works with words of three. Since that's only a dozen results, is just skipped that as an entry option, so the minimum number is 4, on up to 7. So, for what's it's worth, here's my humble modification of Jim Peterson's original Anagrammer. It's in V9T9 format. I tried to create a text listing but I failed to get the DOS V9T9 utils to give me results. Heck, I can't even get the V9t9 file to attach! "Error, you're not permitted to upload this kind of file." Here's a workaround, I added ".txt" to the end of ANA7. You'll have to delete the .txt and then put the file in your V9t9 folder or convert it to TIFILES format. Best I can do at 1:30 AM! -Ed ANA7.txt

Other than dropping the Tigercub byline and adding an exit to DSK1.LOAD, it appears the same. Who knows who copied whom, it was likely submitted by a member who made one small change and submitted it to the Lima library. Or just found online or on a disk and added to the endless other "anonymous" routines that are in everyone's collections. I added my own sub to the mix to add a space between lines and pause after 20 "words" to stop the endless scrolling. It can be added to either version. Hardly as elegant as the logic of the letter sorts, but at least I can better peruse the list to spot any possible hints. It's been more than awhile since I did much TI EXB programming. I'd even forgot there is no keyword for PAUSE! Took me awhile to deduce that "SYNTAX ERROR in 410" I kept getting. Or putting SUBEND on its own line, and getting PRINT to actually insert the blank line, etc... I tried to guess where I could insert something to begin the list at a given start letter, rather than having to wait for the program to get there a page at a time. Usually I add in some code to display the variables onscreen as the program runs to help understand the flow. I'd probably have to rewrite it a bit to use Display At for everything instead of Print statements to control the display and stop the scrolling. At least I can speed up MacV9T9 to make it run a lot quicker. Meanwhile she keeps dropping coins in the slot when she hits a wall. I don't expect this "cheater's" solution to solve the whole puzzle for her, but helping on the tough ones would be enough to pay for the effort.

Thanks Opry99er! The Lima UG listing is nigh identical to Tigercub's as posted by sparkdrummer in post #4.

My thesis is based on the fact it's easier to search around than it is to actually write something new. Here's something from Macintosh Garden from '95. Might be fun, but not what we're looking for: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/david-pogues-premium-utilities-macworld "• KARMA MANAGER
 An anagram is a phrase created by scrambling the letters of another phrase. We at “Macworld magazine,” for example, are either an “amazing lame crowd” or a “magical warm dozen,” depending on how you scramble it. Or you might discover the secret sub-message in the term ‘information superhighway:’— “New utopia? Horrifying sham!”
With Karma Manager (which itself is an anagram), you can create your own anagrams — of your own name, for example. You may have to hunt through the program’s thousands of candidates before finding the really funny ones — but be persistent. It’s worth it! --> Installation and Setup: Open the Karma Manager folder; double-click the Karma Manager program icon. Choose “Capture to file” from the File menu, type a name like “my anagrams,” click Desktop; click Save. Finally, choose New from the File menu and type in whatever phrase you want to anagram-ize. Click OK, and stand back! (When it’s all over, open your “my anagrams” text file in your word processor.)" And a dedicated anagram website, designed more for Scrabble players, but somewhere in the options might be the answer: https://www.anagrammer.com/

I was just picturing the same thing. Display S***S or T***** or whatever the combo happened to be and fill in the blanks for me to pick a winner from. Pop up each possible in the same spot to see one at a time or display a columnar list, paged if needed with forward/back keys. Great minds do think alike! After you get the easy ones, the few left can be staring you in the face but you just don't see 'em. Taking the easy way out buying hints a letter at a time adds up. FB is cleaning up a few bucks at a time and this is just one of the games wifey enjoys playing. I admit to having a minor fiduciary interest in reducing her need for in-game hints! -Ed

Oh, so now we insult the intelligence! That just happened to be when I took the screen shot, OK? Hey, I did come up with THESIS and HEISTS all by myself!

Lee, that's a lot like what I had in mind to whittle down the field. Tigercub's program will eventually chance upon SITES, but it would be found soonest within the other two letters, or wait till it happens to be the first 4 characters to make it stand out among the nonsense. I don't really recall any specifics of the program in my distant memory. What I sorta had in mind as useful would be a list of all three-letter combos, next all 4-letter,,, rinse repeat, but that would be a huge list. Probably closer to the 720 possibles I mention above, while Tigercub claims to have show 360 in my test run of it with the same letters THESIS. So yeah, waiting till you hit a snag, then enter the subsets of what's left to choose from and the space allowed. It would fit on one screen if two letters were known, only 24 results using the 4 letters available. A 5 letter hunt results in 120 possibles. It's cheating in a way, but I think writing and honing the program will be more of a mental exercise than simply guessing till you hit it.

For the win!

Going back to my roots with the TI, graduating from a 16K Timex TS1000, I had a definite professional goal in mind. First on the agenda was porting my TS Darkroom Timer program over to the TI. My dad equipped both of us with identical TI systems, scored from the huge flea markets down in Arizona back in the mid-80's. Cassette only systems to start, but lots of pre-filled cassettes, games and other carts, including EXB. Later came the PEBs and all that sorta stuff. I'd have to say the inclusion of a speech module in the initial package made the biggest contribution to my first "real" TI program. I no longer had to have the TV screen lit up or look at it to know where I was in an 11-step developing process. The Timex version of Timer, while short and elegant, had no sound at all. All it could do was invert/flash the screen at the end of a step, so the TV had to be constantly lit. My only workaround was to place a sheet of red acetate on the screen to turn it into a makeshift B&W safelight. No color paper or any film allowed. It crashed so often I had to keep a mechanical timer as backup and go back to old-school methods. Not much else to do besides thumb through a magazine and watch the seconds tick by. Although I processed using light-safe drums or tanks, by using TI's speech I could go dark and expose more prints while the last batch was developing. That one "feature" freed up 20 to 30 minutes of time otherwise spent mostly clock watching, filling and draining. Boring stuff to most people, but it almost doubled my production and hence income for an evening's work! -Ed

Hey, Spark, that's a lot closer! So it's called an Anagram, eh? Who knew? I guess it's bigger than a 6-letter word, so beyond my vocabulary. Looks like there's around 720 combinations of any 6-letters. Of course, the majority of those are not words or would not fit into their crossword. But I could sure hack this into something that might help with hints. -Ed She's playing it now, so I grabbed a screenshot. And no, "dirty" words not allowed for the otherwise obvious answer to the last word in this puzzle.

Thanks! I'll check it out. Typing might still be easier than coding one up myself, rusty as I is! Edit: The one you link to is a word search, that "hides" correctly spelled words amongst gibberish letters. I seek one that makes a list of all the possible combinations made of just 6 letters. Here's a poor attempt at showing how the FB word scramble game is played. Puzzle: ETKEIS Answers: (Imagine it as a crossword using the letters above to form different words going across and down, the puzzle shows how many letters you have space for. The hard ones use all six letters, usually the words are three letters or longer.) SEEK E ITS K I T EKES I SKEET and so on! -Ed

My wife's gotten hooked on some online FB word scramble game. You get 6 letters and fill in the crossword puzzle with words using those letters. Most of the words use fewer than all 6 letters. Score points or when you hit a wall you can buy hints (with real $$) to help solve it. It's fun to look over her shoulder while I'm enroute to grab a beer and offer any suggestions that I happen to see. You can stare at those letters and simply draw a blank, but rearrange them and bingo! I remember somewhere in my dusty TI disk collection I have a program that gave you every possible combination of letters fed to it. It was either a cheat program or one that helped you create scramble puzzles. That would be perfect for hints with this FB game. Only problem is I don't recall its name or which of 200-some disks it might be on. And my TI is boxed up anyway. Searching through the emulator programs I have on the Mac, the only "Scramble" games I show are all versions of the same shoot'emup arcade spinoff. Anyone familiar with such a program? One strategy she uses is to just pick 'em out at random and that will often help. The program I'm thinking of would automate that and give a list to pick from. Thanks! -Ed

What is it you're trying to get onto a floppy? Something for a non-HD Mac? Or is this just a way to get something onto another Mac, both having hard drives? Can you expand the disk image on the Pismo hard drive or at least copy the files from the image to the Pismo HD? And initiialize a floppy? Just extract the files to a folder and do a drag and drop to the floppy. If it crashes on eject, can you shut down the Pismo with the floppy still mounted? Then hold down the mouse or button on restart and that ejects the floppy before it's mounted again. But reading a PC disk directly might be the simplest. You can always add a null-modem cable and send it the way we usta had to with porting between different systems. No floppy needed. Me being an AOL member still paying for (but not using) their dialup service, I can run an ancient os7 version of AOL and check my email and accept a download (at dialup modem speeds, of course) directly to most any old Mac I own newer than the Mac Plus. Ok, probably not an option, but one I've used for small files. (Try finding an old AOL free floppy, for one thing, lol!) When I had a bunch of stuff to move, I had several SCSI drives I'd move around as needed, some of them even had a PS and even an enclosure! Or I used an external SCSI CD drive. Then there's AppleTalk, again very slothlike, but it worked with only a cable and some sharing settings. Appletalk might be more of a challenge on a Pismo though, no ADB serial port for one thing. Just some random thoughts, since I've used all of those over the years when the floppy method failed due to a bad drive or for whatever reason. -Ed

Oh, the hours I'd spend just coding and recoding my own programs on the Timex and the Texas Instruments. And I did my share on the hardware side to keep costs down and just enjoy seeing it work (eventually). I still have all the hardware, but "run" them most of the time in emulation. Too many years on the Mac that's always been a bit beyond my grasp to do much programming or hacking on. Besides, the Macs ran well enough I didn't feel the need. Oh, I sure had the Macs apart and kept 'em going ang growing. But other than the usual internal/external upgrades and a few repairs, MB swaps or accelerator installs, I generally left well enough alone. A couple years ago, I came across a TS1500, but it didn't work. Man, I wish I'd had that model instead of the TS1000 back when I was getting into computers. It works well enough as it sits I might not have been driven to hack on a keyboard and solder the RAMpack so it would no longer lose data, built into a bigger case to eliminate the heat buildup. I might instead have delved into more ML programming. Especially so, since just adding an external 16k RAMpack to the TS1500 makes that so easy to "hide" machine code. What I discovered while repairing the balky TS1500 was that the fixing was the most fun of all. When I finally got it going, I kinda lost interest in using the thing! My interests come and go, and I'm kinda gettin' the bug again to drag out some vintage iron and revisit the ol' Timex machines. I have several BW Macs sittin' around. Here's a crappy pic of my Classic II, an SE20 and an SE dual floppy with '03 accelerator card and HD stuffed inside. Back in the 80's and 90's, the SEs were my main machines along with my TI99 till in '95 I bought my new 636 '040 Performa and went color with scanners and laser/inkjet printers and all that. The Classic II was my brother's. I don't really use any of 'em these days. Send me a PM, maybe I can help ya out. -Ed

It can be frustrating between different hardware. On my TI99, the lines are opposite of the PC "standard." I hardwired my own cables and adapters to match my Mac when they changed their own serial connectors on newer models. Then I had to add a serial to usb adapter when the RS232 port was deleted. Each time it took some finagling. I looked up the connector wiring diagrams and wired TX on one to the RX on the other. Then the term software also has to match. Local Echo lets you see what you're typing on the machine you're at. When it works, you'll see the same text on both. Local Echo with Remote Echo both on gave a never-ending stream of the first letter you typed. I still have the same cable/software matchup problems now trying ethernet, firewire and such. Some things never change I guess! -Ed

Here's mine in a couple of iterations. Bought used in 1984 for fifty bucks and it included the 16k. Within a year or so, I had a TI99 keyboard kludged on in a lovely plywood enclosure with added LOAD meter. Much, much later, I added a 32k chip on-board (only 16k enabled). Best was getting a dead TS1500 brought back from the dead a couple years ago. Muahaha IT'S ALIVE! I did freelance photography and darkroom work for many years. I wrote a darkroom timer to run on the TS1000 that rivalled commercial timers and was probably much more flexible, since it allowed me to stop, speed up or skip steps to help recover from various processing missteps, temperature changes or reusing old chemistry. Some processes took 11 steps, subject to change as chemicals aged or my whim dictated. I could choose several different processes from a menu or jump into or out of a sequence already in progress. The timer routine itself was just a few lines of code that read an internal counter and converted that to a digital clock display under my control. Even if the program crashed, the counter kept ticking where I could continue the process and save the expensive color slide enlargements. Reliability issues over hours of running the program nonstop led to my IBM hack. The initials stood for "I Built Mine" LOL. Before that I kept two TS1000s running my timer in case of a lockup. One was on channel two, the other on three. In a developing crisis, I'd simply switch channels and quickly get it back on step. In off hours, I would program or game on it. The TI99 keyboard and sturdy enclosure made it into a whole new machine on a miniscule budget. I later wrote a more advanced port of it to run on my TI99 and used that for a decade or more. That was really fancy, with color, sound and speech to call out the processing steps. But the simplicity of the old TImex Timer program couldn't be duplicated on the TI. The TI had no internal counter so I instead used a series of nested for/next loops. That took a lot of testing to adjust for accuracy, but it was ultimately much more flexible than what the Timex could accomplish. The open-board pics show my old TS1000 with internal 16K. 16k rampack and 16k memotech for a total of 48k. Pretty much a hardware exercise, I never did much with the expanded memory. But I sure woulda, if I had that capability back in the 80's when it was my main "confuser." -Ed

Some good info here and you can compare yours to other models. http://lowendmac.com/2001/400-mhz-imac-early-2001/ I have a Summer 2001 G3 iMac 500mhz/1g/20gHD/CD-RW, only the second Mac I've owned that was brand new. I think it shipped with 10.1, which was nothing special to me. Most all my apps were for os9 anyway. I did eventually switch to osX, but still use many of my old os9 mainstay apps. It had 10.3.9 installed when I parked it after getting a used G4 1.25ghz MDD. The G3 iMac will run some quite ancient Mac software using Classic or natively under os9.2.2. TenFourFox is definitely better than FIrefox. It would be fairly simple to swap in a larger hard drive and better CD or DVD. MB swaps aren't too difficult either. The one gig memory ceiling is probably the biggest bottleneck. Eventual resale value? Not much. Free to maybe $50. In a pinch, I could still get by with mine, but I would feel pretty cramped and impatient most the time. But I published a few books and CDs with it, created/maintained our website and did all our business printing and bookkeeping. -Ed

Cool! I bought one of those Atari trackballs years ago for my TI but never got it hooked up correctly to work. I didn't realize all it might take is outboard power+diode to get it going. Disassembled and parts scattered years ago. I think I saved the cue ball if I everr found a pool table cheap that needed one. Power needs can't be too great, since it was normally provided by the Atari joystick port. How many hours straight would you play Buck Rogers anyway? Wire one up and find out. If it's an issue, switch to D-cells. For that matter, if cheap battery power is an issue, buy a Harbor Freight 18v drill battery and remove the sub-C cells. You get 15 of them from one pack, good for lots of experimenting and cost under a buck apiece in 1200mA and about a buck-twenty in 1500mA size. Four of 'em would provide about 4.8v, perfect! Don't even need a holder, as they're solder-tabbed. -Ed

Well, he pulled the trigger and bought it while at a football game. Got his priorities in order, I'd say! Thanks for the headsup on it. He's been checking ebay but missed the new listing.

I plopped a small 12v computer fan on the vents behind the cart port. I ran it off a multi-voltage wallwart from Radio Shack. 6 or 7.5 volts output was less noisy and did the job. Had to buy a separate coffee warmer afterwards, the TI quit keeping my cup warm. My guess on the fail is a RAM chip. It takes all 8 to make a byte, so a single bad chip can scramble the works. The 4116 is a pretty common fail, it was used in a lot of older computers. A bad one scrambled the screen on the Timex TS1500 I bought. On that one, we used the add-on RAMpack for some working RAM to load and run a memory test program and figured out which bit was failing and traced the data line to figure out the chip to replace. Piggybacking a known good chip on each 4116 may not uncover a bad one, but might change the behavior enough to show the problem is in the RAM. YMMV, I had a couple bad TI boards I never did fix. One I pulled all eight RAMs and socketed them for swapping other chips to no avail. -Ed