INMC News |
Winter 1978 · Issue 1 |
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Zeap is an excellent in-store assembler, produced by Paul Chapman and Geoffrey Roughton. Its main features are
Cassettes are available at £32.00. A brochure is enclosed with this newsletter.
Nascom Tiny Basic is a version of Palo Alto Tiny Basic with some useful extensions. In particular it allows storage and retrieval of programs from cassette and includes a machine code subroutine call facility which allows you to extend it to do things like address vdu RAM directly, control PIO’s etc.
This makes it ideal for games and control applications requiring no floating point. It is being distributed on two EPROMs and will be released in December with the memory boards. We’ve been using Tiny Basic on a prototype extended Nascom for sometime now and it is amazing how quickly you can get quite complicated programs working.
A Centronics printer can easily be interfaced to the PIO by making up a cable as follows:
| Nascom | Centronics | |
| Port A | ||
| Data 0 (1) | ______________ | (2) Data |
| Data 1 (2) | ______________ | (3) Data |
| Data 2 (3) | ______________ | (4) Data |
| Data 3 (4) | ______________ | (5) Dat |
| Data 4 (5) | ______________ | (6) Data |
| Data 5 (6) | ______________ | (7) Data |
| Data 8 (7) | ______________ | (8) Data |
| Data 7 (8) | ______________ | (1) Strobe |
| GND (9) | ______________ | (14) GND |
| Port B | ||
| Data 7 (8) | ______________ | (11) Busy |
| GND (9) | ______________ | GND |
| BSTB (11) | ___| |
A software routine to drive the printer is listed below. We are reproducing it here since it may also be of interest to those with other types of printers or driving other devices via the P.I.O.
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