It has been about 11 months since the last update, but my Sol-20 site
now has a ton of BASIC programs read to run on the two different
dialects of PT BASIC.
A gentleman by the name Ralph Hopkins sent me >500 files that he
extracted from disks he had from the days of old. About 400 of them
were BASIC programs. The only hitch was that he wasn't sure which
programs ran or not, and in fact, which were even for the Sol.
Complicating it was that Processor Tech. had two different dialects of
BASIC of their own (BASIC/5 and Extended Cassette BASIC).
I tried running all 400 programs and pulled the weeds (about 1/3 of
them). Like a lot of BASIC programs of the era, the vast majority are
turds, but there are certainly more than a few gems in the mix.
The results of this effort are these two new web pages:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/bs5_pgms.html
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/ecb_pgms.html
The front door to the Sol website is, as always:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html
About 100 of the programs that Ralph submitted to me are various machine
language programs and ASM. I have already gone through a lot of them,
but the difficulty is in making sense of it all and organizing it in
some fashion. A typical problem is that assembling the source code
doesn't match the supplied binary. Eventually I'll sort it out and most
of it will make it online.
And Bob Stek, if you happen to read this, yes, I still have your PTDOS
disks, and I haven't forgotten them. I haven't made a lot of headway on
getting a helios system running, so I went and bought a catweasel card
and hope to scrape the bits off the disks one way or another. That is
the next project in my queue.
Received on Tue Nov 04 2003 - 04:03:35 GMT