80-Bus News

Because many Nascom users, who, like myself, started with cassette systems, would have bought and installed NASPEN, it was felt that a Polydos compatible version might be more acceptable than a change to say Polytext. Personally, being mean, and having spent my pocket money for this month, I wanted to get my cassette text files onto this excellent disk operating system. The advantage of Polydos is a good manual, with some very useful examples of how to use the PolyDos subroutines, and a relatively simple guide to producing purpose-built file-handling overlays. Armed with these tools and a trusty Nasdis listing of my Naspen, I set to work to try and produce a usable system.

First Naspen was copied to disk, and the ROM was removed to leave RAM at B000 to BFFF. A careful investigation of the Nasdis listing showed that the NASPEN command decoding table started at B999H. The table consisted of a three byte entry for each command, the table being terminated by a catch-all jump to a ‘command error’ subroutine.The first byte is the ASCII value of the command symbol,​the second and third give the address of the routine to execute the command (bytes reversed, of course). I determined to reallocate the “R” and “W” commands to the new disk routines to retain some compatibility with the original usage. I further decided that I required to keep the cassette routines to retain compatibility with several other local ‘Nascomaniacs’. A skim through the handbook for Naspen will confuse by offering duplicate commands for cursor-up and cursor-down, “+ & –” as well as the normal cursor keys. Thus I determined to replace the “+ & –” with commands “r & w” for cassette read and write, and altered the “R & W” entries in the table to point to the new disk routines in the overlay. This means that only a simple patch is required, rather than a full re-assembly job. A further modification that was found necessary was to re-program the “return to Nas-sys”. The original Naspen return reinitialises Naspen by jumping to 0000H rather than that well-loved line, DF 5B. Unfortunately it was not sufficient to add the “DF 5B” code, as the rentry to PolyDos leaves the keyboard in “typewriter” mode. So a few more bytes of code were required to reset “K0”. First, a seperate file was written and debugged. This file contained the code nessessary to access the PolyDos routines, and had to be loaded before Naspen was called. The ploy worked quite well, but flushed with success, I decided that it would be far tidier if the extra file was loaded automatically when Naspen was called. The proceedure used was to rename Naspen with an extension “NP” instead of the more usual “GO” machine-code extension. An overlay routine was then written and called “NPfh.OV”. The overlay program is loaded and executed automatically when you type “NASPEN”.The overlay loads NASPEN at B800 and the extension file “NASPEX” at B000. It then initialises the printer and cold-starts NASPEN. The sequence of operations is then as follows:–

1. Call Naspen by typing ‘NASPEN’ after the “S”prompt
2. PolyDos sees that NASPEN has the extension “NP” so it loads the file ‘NPfh.OV’ into the overlay area (C800 onwards), and executes it.
3. NPfh.OV loads the NASPEN file and the extensions “NASPEX.GO” and jumps to the start of NASPEN at B800H. If this confuses, read the Polydos manual on overlay file handlers.