> The PC6 was a disapointment :-(. It's a Casio clone, of course (I forget
> which model). It's got the same BASIC (essentially) as the PC4, with the
> same 10 'program areas' and common variables for all programs. It does
> have more memory (8K IIRC).
>
> The 'assembler' is a cheat!. It's not an assembler for the PC6's CPU,
> it's an assembler for a mythical 16 bit CPU. There's also a simulator for
> said CPU in the machine so you can run your 'assembly language' programs.
> But it's pretty limited in what it can do, and you certainly can't access
> hardware features of the PC6.
Well, heck, that *does* suck. I take it back. What does the "assembly
language" look like, though, just for laughs?
> The PC2 on the other hand (Sharp PC1500 almost-clone) is a very nice
> machine. A decent 8-bit CPU (similar-ish to the Z80, it's a custom Sharp
> chip called an LH5801). A proper expansion bus (16 bit address, 8 bit
> data, etc). PEEK, POKE, CALL in the BASIC so you can load machine code
> programs (real machine code for the LH5801) and run them. An optional
> RS232 interface, etc. Incidentally, the Sharp interface is
> RS232/Cetronics, the Tandy one is RS232 only. The only difference is that
> Tandy missed out the 3rd circuit board containing the buffers for the
> Centronics port -- the I/O chip (LH5811) and ROM code to drive it are
> there. The little 4 colour plotter is fun too :-)
I had nothing but trouble with them. The first one I got, the plotter's
range of movement was an imperceptible twitch. Since you can't get the
rechargeable batteries anymore (what a dumb design -- why not just have
it directly driven off a wall-wart or a proper battery pack?), I tried
jury-rigging my own with one matching the specs from, of course, Rat Shack.
I got the printhead to move a whole line and *then* go back to twitching.
The second one I had was actually a Sharp PC1510? (I think) and it quit
working after two days!
To be fair, neither came with a manual, so I didn't know about the
advanced features. At that point the only Tandy Pocket Computer I had
personally owned was my trusty PC-4.
The thing I really liked about the PC-4, and missed on the PC-2, was the
segmented program space. Only having one big program on the -2 was annoying.
Too bad the PC-4 has a max RAM size of 1,568 bytes, but it's impressively
economical with it. I was using it last year to do concentration gradient
calculations in the bio lab when I was doing research, a facility in
which it did admirably, and still had enough space to do atomic weights and
a game of blackjack. :-)
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn? -- Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
Received on Tue Aug 22 2000 - 14:57:11 BST