68K-MBC

[Sparrowhawk]

So last week was tough at work, long hours, not much joy to be had. In a moment of weakness, needing a pick me up, I hit Buy on eBay...

Apologies for the reflection - my Windows laptop has a very glossy screen. I've taken a screen grab of the serial session, below:

With regards to how it compares to the Z80 based board by the same designer: it's faster, there is oodles of RAM (512K, upgradeable to 1024K), and hardly any software!

It does come with Digital Research's CBASIC (Compiled Basic), but no full screen editor so I am now on a quest to find a 68K Emacs or even Wordstar. I can transfer files to the disk images using cpmtools on the laptop, but I have as yet no idea how to transfer files over the wire. One of the diskette images includes kermit, but beyond knowing that that is a comms protocol and supporting client software, I would not know where to start.

Alas the support forums for the MBC range of computers is on facebook, which i avoid like the plague, so getting support is tough. There are articles starting to appear on techy sites though - seems like these little beasts are becoming quite popular. For example:
https://www.instructables.com/member/co ... ructables/

The guy who assembled this one ("dead_eric" on eBay) did a fantastic job - to my layman's eye, the soldering looks top notch, board is clean, all very nice really. See below:

I paid £55 + £5 postage for it which is a night out in town, so given that I'd rather stay in a play with obsolete OS's and languages from the 1970s and 1980s, that's a win in my book

[Sparrowhawk]

I've just installed Pascal - thanks to one of the sub-links on the page I linked in previous post. Fun, fun, fun!!!

[Sparrowhawk]

So there is also, in another sublink, instructions for installing an 8080 emulator so that you can run software for 8080 based CP/M. So now I have a bunch of text adventures too.

All of which I canplay on my Mac, Linux or Windows machines, or on a QL/C68 for that matter. But... it's CP/M on the QL's chip emulating CP/M on an early PC chip piped though a serial connection to a terminal window... Why wouldn't I want to play adventure games this way?!

[NormanDunbar]

I am now on a quest to find a 68K Emacs

I remember briefly, very briefly, using Emacs for the QL years ago. That was when I had a Trump Card and two 720k floppies. I remember printing out the source code and manual on my Star colour dot matrix printer. Many pages, many hours!

I think it came from the Quanta library. But microEmacs 4.00 is here http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/editview/index.html.

I didn't like it!

Cheers,
Norm.

[Sparrowhawk]

Yep, I've used Emacs too, and not a huge fan. Mind you that was years ago.
But I'll take whatever I can lay my hands on as a useable editor. I think Wordstar has a raw text mode, hence why I am looking for that.

Actually, I may actually be able to use the Pascal/MT editor to write CBASIC code. Or, you know, I could just write some Pascal!

Ideally though I'd like to write the code on the laptop, and pipe the files across for compilation.

One oddity of the board is that one of the boot options is the native (ie not running on CPM but direct-boot) Enhanced Basic. This seems quite powerful from the manual I found online, but SAVE and LOAD don't work, so not really of much use as yet.

[Sparrowhawk]

Got Kermit working - line endings need work as I'm getting extra whitespace characters at the CP/M end.

OK, I actually cheated and used my Mac as there is an app on that that has both the USB to serial driver and Kermit (plus XModem etc) already baked in. But still, a step forward into making these boards a lot more fun to play with and also sparing the sd card spring mechanism wear and tear.

I'd forgotten how slow serial data transfer was!

[Derek_Stewart]

I am now on a quest to find a 68K Emacs

I remember briefly, very briefly, using Emacs for the QL years ago. That was when I had a Trump Card and two 720k floppies. I remember printing out the source code and manual on my Star colour dot matrix printer. Many pages, many hours!

I think it came from the Quanta library. But microEmacs 4.00 is here http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/editview/index.html.

I didn't like it!

Cheers,
Norm.

Hi,

I think you find the QL version that Thierry ported, is MicroEmacs v4.00, which is does have some differences.

I use MicroEmacs a lot, it does things a little different, but a very good.

[Sparrowhawk]

I wonder whether anyone with CP/M knowledge could help out. I have now successfully managed to transfer files to and from the 68K-MBC using Kermit.

When I list the programs, they seem to have transferred fine (e.g. simplest test file I could think of):

Code: Select all

B>a:more hello.bas
10 PRINT "HELLO"
B>

However, despite these files being nothing more than the most rudimentary BASIC programs, the C68 BASIC compiler chokes. For example, the above single line program reports 95 errors! Frustratingly, those errors are not actually listed:

Code: Select all

B>cb68 hello.bas
--------------------------------------------------
CB68 CBASIC Compiler                   Version 1.0
Serial No. 3123-0000-000061    All Rights Reserved
Copyright (c) 1983          Digital Research, Inc.
--------------------------------------------------
end of pass 1
end of pass 2
    1:     10 PRINT "HELLO"
>
*** error                 ^1
*** error                  ^1
*** error                   ^1
   ==> THIS GOES ON FOR AGES, SNIPPED FOR CONCISENESS <==
>^1
end of compilation
95 errors detected
symbol table space remaining: 50371

B>   

I have tried with and without a trailing empty line. I've set line endings to CRLF which the interwebs tells me is the right choice for CP/M, but I suspect that the file encoding might be the issue - I have tried several, the "oldest" I can find in VS Code is "Western European DOS CP 850".

The supplied sample programs all compile and link fine.

Any thoughts on what I might try? Is it likely to be the encoding, or something else perhaps?

[mfro]

...

Code: Select all

B>cb68 hello.bas
--------------------------------------------------
CB68 CBASIC Compiler                   Version 1.0
Serial No. 3123-0000-000061    All Rights Reserved
Copyright (c) 1983          Digital Research, Inc.
--------------------------------------------------
end of pass 1
end of pass 2
    1:     10 PRINT "HELLO"
>
*** error                 ^1
*** error                  ^1
*** error                   ^1
   ==> THIS GOES ON FOR AGES, SNIPPED FOR CONCISENESS <==
>^1
end of compilation
95 errors detected
symbol table space remaining: 50371

B>   

I have tried with and without a trailing empty line. I've set line endings to CRLF which the interwebs tells me is the right choice for CP/M, but I suspect that the file encoding might be the issue - I have tried several, the "oldest" I can find in VS Code is "Western European DOS CP 850".

The supplied sample programs all compile and link fine.

Any thoughts on what I might try? Is it likely to be the encoding, or something else perhaps?

To me, that looks like a line endings problem (but might be wrong, anyway).

The CP/M "dump" command might help - it dumps file contents in hexadecimal form ("dump hello.bas"). For CP/M to be happy, the sources should be pure US ASCII (7 bits, nothing > 7Fh) with CR/LF line endings (0Dh 0Ah in the dump output).

Note that CP/M "fills" files with ^Z (1Ah) to the next record length (128 bytes) boundary, so you'll probably see lots of 1Ah bytes at the file's end (which is fine). At least one single 1Ah byte *must* be there to mark EOF, however.

[Sparrowhawk]

Thanks for the info - the sample files did have some padding at the end, which makes sense now.

Will investigate further.