80-Bus News

Letters To The Editor

Nascom Screen Mod.

Further to Dave Hunt’s screed in the last issue of 80-BUS News where he answered someone’s query regarding the graphics conversion for Nascom 2 to display full characters. The more complicated mod. is detailed below which also has the added benefit of stabilising the whole display screen (no more screen weave). Readers not familiar with the mod. may find this interesting.

Bend the pins of the indicated integrated circuits at right angles so they do not make contact with the socket and can have wires soldered to them:

IC53 pins 1 and 11
IC56 pins 5 and 6
IC68 pins 1 and 10

Now link the following points with thin wire:

IC68 pin 1 to 8
IC68 pin 10 to 16
IC53 pin 11 to IC68 pin 5 to IC56 pin 5
IC56 pin 6 to IC44 pin 11
IC53 pin 1 to IC68 pin 11

R. Dowling, Welling, Kent.

DISMAY

I am yet again dismayed when I receive your excellent magazine. I say dismayed because page upon page contains references to disks and things such as modifications to your BIOS etc.,​etc.

My poor old Nascom badly needs financial help to enable it to emerge into the wondrous creature that it really is. The problem to be quite frank is that I have a wife and a money-gobbling house to support as well. Can you imagine the complaints when I finally gave in and purchased a printer – No, not a Qume Sprint 5 as you may have noticed. [Ed. – this looks like a Qume Sprint 5 to me! (Oops!)] One good thing in my favour was the purchase of an official NAS-CASE, which did at least give us back our dining room table, let the card frame go for a rest in the loft, and made the Nascom look attractive.

All this brings me to the point. There are many of us out here in Nascom/​Gemini land who will probably never own a 5.4 MByte Winchester with an 800KByte floppy, so why bother rubbing salt in our wounds and raging on about them. It’s bad enough going into H****S Computer Store and seeing D*** H*** leering at you from behind his green screen when you are cheerfully told that they don’t have a Licon keytop or switch.

It is high time that some dealers and your magazine support the people who have spent sums of money in the past and still require support on their somewhat down market equipment until funds are available to buy the good stuff.

R.D. Madge, West Wickham, Kent.

[Ed. – It’s very difficult to know just where to pitch the content of the magazine, and so the policy to date has been to publish material on different subject matter in proportion to that received.