Nascom News­let­ter

NAS-SEMBLER News

1. A fault occurred in the automatic serialisation of some copies of NAS-SEMBLER which can result in errors when using the /Z80 command in edit and the EDIT command in Z80. Fortunately this can be corrected quite easily. Simply execute EDIT in the normal way and then use the COPY command to re-save the program. Do the same for Z80. This ensures that the programs are saved with the correct length, so as not to conflict with the data area.

2. The manual (Rev 1.2) refers to the DELETE command on page 10 and in the summary on page 14 an being used to delete lines. The DELETE command in fact is used to delete files (as described on page 8 of the manual). the command used for deleteing line in ERASE x y where x is the line number of the first line and y is the line number of the last line to be deleted. This error crept in when the meaning of the two commands was reversed at a late stage of development.

NAS-DOS News

Very surprisingly a fault has come to light within the last 3 months. This can occur when there is an error on the disc and the head is not returned to the initial point. Unfortunately the error procedure does not issue a command to return the head to the first track, but rather to step back and out again. In an extremely small number of cases (about 6 to date) this can result in a situation where the drive apparently becomes inoperative. A few drives have been returned as faulty for this reason, when in fact no fault existed. There is just one command which does initialise the heads on the disc and this is the ]F – format – command. In the very unlikely event that you should get an apparent failure of one of your drives, witch will not read a disc, it is worth trying issuing a ]F command to reset the heads. Don’t do this with a good disc in place though &ndash either put a blank disc in or issue the command with no disc in place

This problem is being corrected in Rev 1.4 of NAS-DOS. If you wonder what Rev 1.3 was, this was used in the Networking systems and offered, in that application, a slight speed advantage over Rev 1.2. This change is also incorporated in Rev 1.4

Manor News

When the last newsletter was written the release of Rev 4 of MANOR war predicted. Since then a number of additional improvements have been implemented, and the next release after Rev 4 will therefore be Rev 6. In addition to the speed increases this offers records of up to 510 bytes, 42 fields, upper or lower case commands, access to two disc drives doubling the maximun number of records to 4000 and a CHange command