z80 assembly

[Moru]

The simplest tinkering I did with my Atari STE was soldering a single-lead cable to a paper-clip and pushing it into the analog port and running the cable in front of my keyboard. Then I wrote a small screensaver that reacted to the fluctuating analog signal and blacked out the screen as soon as the interference was gone. Humans hovering their hands above the keyboard made real high interference in that cable for some reason, sort of the antenna on a radio when you touch it, except you didn't need to touch it at all.

Sadly I couldn't get the same result in assembler, only had a proof of concept in STOS basic. When I used assembler, the signal didn't change at all so I guess I was on the wrong address or something else in STOS caused the interference together with the human.

[Paul Smith]

Never used my ST for anything except running demos,got it for £20 from a friend who had everything.
Also my other friend used his for STOS programming and written this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGHQ70MZwgc
I know he lost most of his code but I had a copy  so I youtubed it years ago

Hated STOS at the time because I used to write stuff on the amstrad and he would copy it and make it better.
Amstrad rasters in z80 (3 days work ) vs  stos dedicated raster command ( 5mins work), then he got the 3D extensions and it was game over.

[erico]

me late here!

Behold my borrowed...nevergavitback manual of COLOR EDTASM , assembler for motorola 6809 in brazillian portuguese.
Notice the rich colors of age corrosion on the more used parts of the sume.
I think it is a pirate book of that manual, it has this cheap xerox look and really bad re-framing.

Look at those fonts!


   

[MrPlow]

not pirate version i suspect - I have seen similar poorly published manuals in the past!!

A lot of software houses did not product commercial quality manuals for their apps

Bit have to say those FONTS are special!!
Looks like it was printed on old Oki dot matrix or dare i say something even older!!!

9-Pin Printing technology

[Paul Smith]

Can't beat a good 9 pin printer.
My first was a  colour  Star LC200, ready to print in 5 seconds from cold start.
My latest Canon MG6350 can take 7 min to warm, no good if you need a print quickly.
.
For my last year in high school I wrote a program in Qbasic that printed them Record of Achievement forms,(UK school thing)
using printer commands it would double strike or quad strike the same letters making the ink darker.my cheap school could not afford new ribbons .
still have the source code printed with the Star LC200..

Does any one remember networking Archimedes, think it was called Econet, anyway always remember sending chr$(7) to different terminals in the adjacent room pissing off the class.

[Moru]

Ah, memories :-) I still have my Star somewhere. I bought cheap pirate ribbons for it. The ink was much better than the original expensive ink which turned brown after just one or two years. And yes I did the double and tripple-strike too to save ink :-)

At my first job we had a 9-pin matrix printer that had three or four heads each doing a small part of the page. Think it was A2 or A3 size ribbon paper, magazine had space for 4000 pages. It had it's own room with sound-proof doors but you still could hear when someone started a big run :-)

One of my first memories of getting an if-statement wrong in RPG/400 code. Only print changes became "Print all except the changes..." Ended up with a nice 5cm pile of paper on my desk a few minutes later.

[erico]

I still have a good amount of those papers...they were great for drawing.

Within the ´symphony' a computer used to produce, these type of printers sure have their spot.

[bigsofty]

You still can't beat a dot matrix printer for listings IMHO. Pricd a new one up last year out of interest, damn there expensive now! 

[MrPlow]

Omg Star printers takes me back!

I used to sell and repair them long with all other types of Char and Line printers

Remember Wide-carriage 136 columns I think?

Kyoceras etc