INMC News

“The program is listed in Z-80 assembly language”

The quotation comes from the advertising material for a program called SARGON, which is a very good chess program, probably. What they should have said was, “listed in A Z-80 assembly language”. It is in fact in something called TDL assembly language, and would run instantly on a Wave-Mate Jupiter III, which is probably a plastic box we haven’t had washed up on our shores yet. There are some amazing mnemonics, for example ANI or LIYD and what on earth is MOV BOARD(Y),​E ? To be as fair as possible, I should say that they do give a list of the more normal equivalents, but the program is very long and will take me years at my present rate of translation. Anyone got a program that could do the job???

“One of you is dead right, the other is less right”

If the 8K Basic works best with NAS-SYS, then I would like to use NAS-SYS, K*** B****** (the one who swore on page zero!) please note. At present, I am using T2, with Darkbug in the spare ROM socket. Darkbug? That is another story entirely, and one I propose to tell next time.....

Little Known Facts That No One Seems To Care About (6)

Did you know that Nasbug T4 and NAS-SYS 1 are specifically designed to ignore nulls output to the CRT routine. Therefore any program which is designed to output nulls via SRLOUT, using the ‘X’ command will not be able to do so, as CRT is called as part of SRLOUT, before the character is sent to the output port, and (of course) CRT throws the nulls away.

So, what to do? Well the simplest way is to write a routine which will:

1) Push AF
2) Call SRLX
3) Pop AF
4) Jump to CRT in T4
4a) or do a return if you don’t want to print on the screen

Don’t set any ‘X’ command, but manually change $CRT to the start address of the routine (don’t forget this must be a double byte change).

Using NAS-SYS, put DF 6F at 0C79 and activate the ‘U’ command.

Of course this need not only apply to printers, for instance, if you wanted to change a tape recorded for Nascom ROM Basic to run on Nascom Tape Basic, you would have to make a ‘LIST’ to tape and output about 20 nulls between each line (to allow the text buffer time to clear before the next line appears), and this is the only way to do it.

Little Known Facts That No-One Seems To Care About (7)

Did you know that Nascom and CC Soft (level B) Tiny Basics are quite compatible. The only difference is that whereas the Nascom uses the pound (or hash) sign to mean ‘not equal to’, the CC Soft uses the <>.