Altair Emulator enhancements - progress report - questions

From: James Willing <jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com>
Date: Tue Sep 12 10:45:06 2000

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Cini, Richard wrote:

> ... I also have some questions of actual users of the Altair. I wanted
> to use a copy of Palo Alto Tiny BASIC on the emulator (because that's the
> BASIC that I have), but TB relies on CP/M for console I/O. Regarding the
> original Altair BASIC, did the BASIC code provide its own I/O services or
> did it use CP/M also?

The paper-tape based versions of Altair BASIC polled the 'sense switches'
to determine the type of I/O to be used, and by inferrence the port
numbers. It contained its own I/O routines.

> What port locations were generally used to service
> serial ports used for console I/O?

The closest thing to a 'standard' selection (also used in the disk based
versions of BASIC) was for the 2-SIO board which was located at ports 20
and 21 (octal).

> Does anyone have a working set of CP/M
> binaries that I can load into the emulator?

For what disk sub-system? (Mits, Tarbell, etc...???)

-jim
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Received on Tue Sep 12 2000 - 10:45:06 BST

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