FreeDOS

I keep wanting to get a "modern" MS-DOS system.  I've gone to Monotech and was desiring their NuXT. But the price was restrictive.  $320 for just the motherboard.  I'd still need to get a case and power supply - which, while less than $320, was still a good amount of money.

I noticed that I had a spare HP EliteDesk G1 SFF that I had purchased as a "burner" PC for the Man Cave and decided to give FreeDOS a try on it.

FreeDOS is basically MS-DOS made for more modern PCs.  So it's actually DOS, but you can run it on more modern PCs and it will work nicely.

Problem 1:  Getting software on it.  The EliteDesk had no floppy drives and FreeDOS doesn't support USB sticks (sort of).

Solution: FreeDOS does support USB drives only if it's set as the boot drive.  So, you have to plug it in, set the BIOS to boot from it - but here's the workaround - you have to tell the BIOS that, for this boot, you need to boot from the hard drive.  Weird, but it works.

So software loaded.  Yay.

But I still want that "real" MS-DOS experience.  I need to have a floppy drive in it.

So I went into the display case and pulled out the last floppy drive that I had installed in a PC.  1.44MB 3.5".  Good.  But how to hook it up?

The EliteDesk has no floppy controller (no surprise).  So I found this on eBay.  I simply ran the USB cable out the back of the case and into one of the USB ports.  And it works.

Some software isn't compatible, though.

The CPU is a quad core 4.2Ghz, so software that relies on clock cycles for timing just run wayyyyy too fast.

The system is naturally a VGA system, but it's not old VGA, so some video stuff just crashes.

But, overall, most stuff works and works nice.  I had fun playing Duke Nukem 1 and other games.

I have the Wifi modem hooked to the serial port, so I can BBS.

But I don't have a mouse (and don't really want one), so some software fails there.

I'm still working on getting the CD-ROM working in FreeDOS.

Review: The Modem World - A Prehistory or social media by Kevin Driscoll

As some of you know, I'm still active on the BBSs (Yes, they still exist).  So when Kevin Driscoll posted that he wrote a book on BBSs and how they inspired the current social media platforms, I was interested.  Now that I've read it, it's time for a review.

The tl;dr:

It completely fails on the "prehistory of social media" part.  There was no direct link from BBSs to something like Facebook other than "BBSs were places were people with common interests could post messages."

However, it is a well researched book on the evolution of BBSs from the first BBS in Chicago, through FidoNet and into the Internet.  He didn't cover enough of the BBS history, but that's a bunch really big topics, each well deserved of its own book.

The down side is that the information that was researched was filtered through the Reality Distortion Field that the Woke seem to live in.  So the view you get of what BBSs were, and still are, is very skewed.

OK.  The longer explanation.

First off, the "woke-ness" of the book really left a bad taste in my mouth.  Just little things like "The demographics or BBS users appears to have tracked with the broader adoption of personal computers in the United States..." - which is true.  But then he had to tack this on: "skewing in favor of white men."

Later "While there was little variation by age and income, single white men were nearly twice as likely as other groups to report using bulletin boards."

Why the need to call this out?  On the BBSs there's a very old saying "No one knows you are a dog."  Meaning that race, sex, religion, etc. mean little.  All people can see of you is your words in text.  People judge you by those words - and nothing else.

In other places, he focused on BBSs that catered to the LBGT community, yet completely ignored the BBSs that were dedicated to ham radio, science fiction, and the other large interests of the geek community.  If there was a "group" that BBSs identified with the most, it was the geeks, but he completely ignores that.

While not every section had such woke BS, it was scattered through out the book.

In the final chapter, he laments that some of his students came away with a "unexpected misunderstanding of early online culture."  Well, duh!  The book highlights the fringe groups and doesn't really talk much about the majority of interests on the BBSs.  No wonder the students had a misunderstanding.

Most of the information presented was accurate, but woefully incomplete.  ex: In one place, he posted a list of FidoNet message groups, but the list was heavily lopsided toward the groups that the ignorant woke people would like to see and it was not even close to representing reality.  Reality was more heavy on the geek topics.

Unlike Kevin, I actually lived in the "The Modem World".  I was heavily into the BBSs from the 1980's until the Internet killed most of the BBSs off.  The world in this book is not the world that existed back then, but rather a Leftie-skewed parody of the actual "Modem World".

Bottom line:

Not really worth it.  You'd be better off viewing some YouTube videos on BBSs (Like Al's Geek Lab's Back to the BBS) or getting Jason Scott's BBS Documentary.  They would be much more accurate than the Left-skewed "information" presented in this book.

As for me, the book is going into the Goodwill bag never to be seen again.

Commodore 128

I got a good deal and picked up a working Commodore 128 and have been playing with it lately.  But I'm very unimpressed with it.

The C128 is actually 3 computers:

1. A Commodore 64.

2. A Commodore 128 with 40 or 80 columns.

3. A Z80 (usually CP/M) machine.

By the time the C128 came out, CP/M and the Z80 were on the decline - close to being not sold at all.  I understood why they wanted to add the Z80, but their timing was way off.  And unless you also purchased the new 1571 floppy drive, disk access was WAY slower than the other CP/M systems.  Useless.

In C128 mode, there's a problem.  There are 2 video outputs.  The old style C64 one - which only does 40 column mode and the IBM-PC CGA-like one - which only does 80 column mode.

The problem is that no one wrote code for the 40 column C128.  It's all 80 column.  99% of the software is targeted at the C64.  Which means you will need 2 monitors - or a brand new monitor that can do both the old and new video plugs.  Yuck!

The end result is that the C128 is pretty much a C64 with some useless added hardware.  Oh, it does have a better keyboard with a modern layout, though.  So that's a plus.

But over all, it's just a C64 and that's a disappointment.

I find myself enjoying using my Plus/4 over the C128.

More new toys

On a whim, I picked up a Commodore Plus/4.

This was Commodore's attempt at breaking into the business/productivity market, but it was too little, too late.

Only 64K max - when the IBM compatibles could go to 640K

40 column screen - when the standard was 80 in this market.

But they did correct some of the glaring issues that the Commodore 64 had: Mainly BASIC 4.0 that the Commodore PET had before discontinued (The C-64 had BASIC 2.0).  BASIC 4.0 had disk commands (like DIRECTORY and DLOAD).  But they enhanced it even further to allow you do to graphics and sounds from BASIC - as opposed to programming the SID and VIC yourself with POKEs.

Unfortunately, there was no SID or VID.  Meaning lower quality sound and no sprites.  So the Plus/4 wasn't a gaming machine.

And the market was moving to desiring IBM compatibility.  So the Plus/4 wasn't around long.

And I finally found my Holy Grail: A TRS-80 Model I.

I was able to pick one up locally at a reasonable price with working monitor!

No power supply, so I have those parts on order.  I hope I can get it working again.

But the hatch over the reset button was intact!  Usually these were lost over time.

New Toy - DevTerm

My latest toy arrived this week:  A DevTerm A04 from ClockworkPi.

Quick description (if you don't want to follow the link and read for yourself):

This is a small computer with a TRS-80 Model 100 form factor.  It runs Linux (Armbian) and uses a Raspberry PI compute module.

It comes as a kit (pretty much all snap together) that you have to assemble, but it's simple.

Even before it arrived, I was a little disappointed.  When I purchased it, I thought I would be buying something about the size of my Tandy 102.  The reality is that it's about 1/2 of that - meaning mostly that the keyboard is very cumbersome for my adult-size hands.  No touch typing.  All hunt-and-peck.  So much for using it as a little laptop.

When it actually arrived, I was impressed by the ease of assembly and it worked right away.

So I copied over a bunch of stuff that I use on my other Pi's and found that many of the programs just don't work.  "No problem," I thought.  "I'll just recompile them."  But no.  I got some really strange compile errors (like duplicate definitions of objects).  I didn't want to deal with those right now, so I just deleted them.

Unfortunately, some of them were the programs that I use to call BBSs and read BBS messages off line.  So another thing that I can't use this toy for.

One cool thing it came with was a little thermal printer (think store receipt printer) and the paper that I bought for it came yesterday.  So I gave it a shot.  I didn't expect too much from it and it met my expectations.  You won't want to use this for program listings, that's for sure.  But it works and prints clearly.

It's a little frustrating.  On one hand, I can't find any fault with what I purchased.  It does exactly what it promised it would do.

On the other hand, I'm really struggling to find a place for this in my normal computer use.

Abusing FORTRAN

I've been having fun with Microsoft FORTRAN-80 and Nevada FORTRAN on my Kaypro 4/83.

When I was in college, we did a class on FORTRAN abuse - mainly using some design decisions in FORTRAN that cause interesting things to happen.

Consider this code:

c bad program
      integer i
      i=3+5
      write(1,5) i
      call xxx(5)
      i=3+5
      write(1,5) i
    5 format(1x,i4)
      end

      subroutine xxx(n)
      integer n
      n=3
      return
      end

Under Nevada FORTRAN, this prints:

8

6

Why?  Because "5" was passed in to xxx by reference, which was changed to have a value 3.  Yes, under FORTRAN, I could change a constant.

Under Microsoft FORTRAN-80, this did not happen.  Both values stayed at 8.

Kaypro "1" set back (momentary)

Background: I call this machine my Kaypro "1" because the case says it's a "1" on the outside, but there's a sticker on the back that says it's a 2/84 and it has the 2/84 ROM, not the 1's ROM.  This machine was one of the "slap together out of the parts we have" as Kaypro was going out.

I don't have desk space yet for all my vintage computers, so when I rotated the Kaypro "1" onto the desk to use, I noticed that the B: drive was no longer working.

The first thing that I did was power off and pull the USB stick that was the B: drive and it was warm - abnormally warm.  Red flag time.

When I tried to read the USB stick in my PC, it wouldn't recognize it.  Uh, oh.

So back the Kaypro "1" goes back on the bench and time to take a look.

First thing I checked was the MOLEX to 3.5 floppy power cable.  It was pinned correctly.  Everything looked good.

Next, the multi-meter comes out and I check the voltages.  To make sure that everything was correct, I removed the MOLEX pig tail and checked the voltages at the MOLEX end.  The 5V line had 10V and the 12V line had 4V.

This power connector had the lines swapped!

I swapped the pin on the MOLEX pigtail and pulled the now 10V pin completely out of the pigtail so there was no connection to the OpenFlops.  I verified the voltages and plugged everything back in.  It works.  The old USB stick is toast, though.

Kudos to the OpenFlops guys for building something that takes twice the voltage and still works.

But this is a lesson with the "newer" Kaypros:  They weren't exactly the best made and there are surprises everywhere.

The "1" is still on the bench.  I'm getting better 5.25-3.5" bay adapters that fit better.  I'll swap them out this weekend.

Compaq Portable 386 - adventures in FreeDOS

I had a spare CF card, so I decided to give FreeDOS a try.

They had a set of floppy images that I could use so I popped in the CF card and booted the boot image and started the install.

Issue: The setup formatted and set up the non-active DOS partition to be bootable.  It took me a bit to figure that out and why it wasn't booting from the CF card, but that was easy to fix.

There are some more things I need to configure about it to get it 100%, but I decided it wasn't worth it at this time.

Bottom line: I saw no benefit to using FreeDOS over DOS 3.30 for the Compaq (at least for my use).

FORTRAN on the personal computer

For the last few months, I've been binging on FORTRAN.

FORTRAN was the first language I learned after BASIC.  I actually did a little FORTRAN in high school - before they kicked me off the school system's IBM mainframe.

FORTRAN was the first language that I did in college.  My year was actually the last that did FORTRAN for Computer Science.  But that FORTRAN "experience" got me a job at the GM Proving Grounds working on the FORTRAN programs that process data from crash tests.

Later, after some years of COBOL and then C, I went back to FORTRAN in GM on the HP 1000 at Powertrain (Systematic Engine Calibration).

So I've spent plenty of time with FORTRAN.

I picked up Microsoft FORTRAN 5.1 for the MS-DOS.  This is based on FORTRAN 77.  I was also able to locate Waterloo FORTRAN 77 too.

But I wanted to experiment with FORTRAN for CP/M and what I found was interesting.

I got Microsoft FORTRAN-80 for CP/M and LDOS (TRS-80) and it's based on FORTRAN ANSI standard from 1966 and there are "differences".

I'm going to call this version FORTRAN 66.

First, FORTRAN 66 has no character data type.  You store characters in other data types.  You can print a character type, but you are storing it in something else.

Print is another one.  FORTRAN 77 supports the PRINT statement - which is basically no more than a shortcut for WRITE to the console device.

Unformatted output doesn't work under FORTRAN-80 (I don't know if this is a FORTRAN 66 issue).  If you don't specify a FORMAT statement, the data is printed as a "character" type!

Compiling FORTRAN-80 is multiple steps:

1. Edit the source in the text editor of your choice.  I'm so glad that I have TE (a modern CP/M program) with a full screen editor.  But back in the day, they probably used Wordstar.

2. Then run the compiler, F80.  But you can't just pass a command line parameter.  It's run F80, wait.  Then enter <program rel>=<program source> and wait some more.  Control-C out of the compiler.

3. Optionally fix any compiler errors.

4. Run the linker, L80.  But, again, no command line parameters.  Run L80 and wait.  Since I just want to run the program, I just do <rel file>/g to link (and wait) and run.

Edit: F80 and L80 do take the commands as parameters.  They didn't under the TRS-80, but they do under CP/M.

It's no wonder FORTRAN never took off on the PC.  BASIC works so much better.  Then, after testing your program, you can compile it into an executable.

And keep in mind that, at this time, Microsoft was a premier software developer.  They usually did a great job compared to other companies.

Now, to get some time to test Nevada FORTRAN.

The Saga of the Floppy Emulators

I was playing with my Kaypro "1" and I was thinking about what I'm going to do with it long term.  Using real 5.25" floppies in it was a pain, and I know that the life span of those floppies were getting toward the end.

So I decided to to put a floppy emulator in.  Since I had already done OpenFlops I decided to do something different.  Lotharek has a nice floppy emulator.  The difference is that this one can emulate 2 floppy drives in 1 unit.  So I purchased it and waited.

When it arrived I started to get it hooked up.

Problem: the floppy emulator wouldn't power on.  On inspection, it looked like the Molex to 3.5" floppy power cable was wired backwards (spoiler: it wasn't).  It powered on, but the display only showed 2 rows of "blocks".  I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the issue was.

Solution: What I should have done was was checked the power output from the floppy power cable in the first place.  The 5V line was only 4V.  I thought the other line was "unused", but it wasn't.  It was the 12V line (really only outputting 10V) to run the floppy drive motors.  Yikes!  I was running that down the emulator's 5V line.  Lucky for me it was well made and suffered no problems.

But what to do?  There's certainly something wrong with the Kaypro "1"s power supply, but visual inspection shows nothing (i.e. no bulging capacitors or such).  I'm really leery about messing with 110V electronics without someone telling me what to do.  If there was a visually bad component, I have no problems replacing that, but I'm not poking around in something running at 110V.

As an experiment, I put the new floppy emulator in my Kaypro 4/83 - and it worked!  So I did some rearrangement.  The images I use on the OpenFlops just copied over - no conversion needed.  I replaced the B: drive with the original 5.25" full height drive - but it's not hooked up, decoration only.

Then I took the OpenFlops and put them into the Kaypro "1" and they work!  I had to rebuild all the images since the floppy images that I had were for the Kaypro 4/83, but that was mostly wait time and I could do that in between other things.

So that's done.  The 5.25"-3.5" adapters are supposed to arrive tomorrow, so hopefully I can get that a buttoned up.

Compaq Portable 386 - Done

Final pictures are here.

2 of the common problems for this computer were the keyboard cable disintegration and floppy drive failure.

The insulation around the keyboard cable literally disintegrated.  Moving the cable makes pieces fall off.  There's no way that I know of to replace the insulation, so the cable needed to be replaced.

The keyboard connector is standard.  But the problem is that a standard keyboard plug is too wide to fit into the hole.  I had to look around for a cable with a "thin" connector so that it would fit.  I ended up getting a keyboard extension cable and cutting off the plug end.  It was then a matter of pinning out the cables (old and replacement) to see what wires go where.  Overall, about 30 minutes of work to replace the cable.

The 1/3 height 5.25" didn't work.  I decided it wasn't worthwhile to fix it and went straight to the Gotek.  This made getting boot media much easier.

The device I bought was something someone created on eBay.  It combines a Gotek (already set up with FlashFloppy) with a CF-IDE adapter in one half-height 5.25" 3D printed tray.  It fit where the hard drive used to be.  I only had to make a slight case modification for the CF card.

The hard drive set up was interesting.  I have to choose a hard drive type that the Compaq supports.  If I chose the 110 MB one (which Compaq had a real hard drive for), everything worked.  But if I chose a larger one (like the 320 MB), I get a 1790 drive 0 error - but after hitting F1 gets me into DOS.

One more interesting thing.  You can't "not select" a floppy in the Gotek.  So you have to have the USB drive out to boot from the hard drive.  Otherwise it tries to boot from the floppy chosen in the Gotek.  I did have an idea to make a switch and wire it into the Gotek power, but the only thing I need the Gotek for is loading diskette images, so I didn't see the value.  And it causes no problems to insert the USB drive after you've booted up.

Compaq Portable 386 - 2

CMOS battery replaced.  Now just letting it charge.

Keyboard reassembled (mostly).  I'm still sourcing a cable replacement.  The one that I got had a plug that was too thick and wouldn't fit in the hole correctly.

I was able to pick up some setup disks from a reliable source, but none would read.  I think the 5.25" drive is bad (no surprise).

Someone on eBay 3D printed a 5.25" half-height case and put a CF-to-IDE and OpenFlops into it (with rotary switch and OLED).  So waiting on parts to be able to hook that all up.

But things are moving.  I was able to use the OpenFlops to boot a setup disk image and configure the CMOS - but the battery wasn't set up correctly so it didn't save.

Compaq Portable 386

I picked up a Compaq Portable 386.

Triage done.

It's in pretty good shape.  CMOS battery is done (no surprise).  That means I need the setup disks before I can do anything.  So those are on order.

Surprisingly, the company that makes the CMOS battery is still in business and the battery was in wide use.  So getting a replacement was very easy.  That's on order.

I pulled the floppy drive to clean it, but inside the case is very clean.  So I just think I need to put in the 5.25" cleaning disk before I try out the setup disks will be good enough.

The hard drive is IDE.  So I hooked it up to my Rosewill IDE to USB setup.  No go.  The drive spins, but the heads don't seek.  No surprise there either.  That was getting replaced by a CF card anyway.

The main thing that I'm tackling is the keyboard.  While the keyboard itself is nice, the cable is disintegrating.  This is a known problem.  I have a cable on order that I'll have to pinout and solder in its place.  But I can use the keyboard from the failed lunchbox portable as a backup.

C-64 troubles solved

One of my C-64s developed an issue with the keyboard.  The "E" key stopped working.

So I set it aside to be repaired and pulled out the "backup" C-64.  Boot up and...  Out of memory error - and I didn't load anything.  Diagnostics showed 6510 or RAM issue.  *sigh*

The "E" key issue went away when I swapped the plungers for the "E" and "R" keys.  But that issue will probably come back.  So when I had it open, I changed the Caps Lock key to be a plug that I can disconnect.

The replacement 6510 and RAM arrived for the "backup" C-64.

Now, I've been inside of C-64s before, but this one surprised me by having the 6510 and **some** of the RAM socketed.  That means that this system had issues before.

I tried the easy stuff first.  I replaced the 6510.  No change.  So it's a RAM issue.

I pulled the socketed RAM and one of the chips was highly oxidized.  So I replaced that chip with one of the new ones.  Everything works.  The Dead Test cartridge showed everything passed.

I think that this C-64 had been bought first, had a problem and was repaired.  Later, the guy got a new one and stored the old one in a more humid area, which caused that RAM chip (near to the edge of the case) to go bad over time.

So I'm back to 2 functioning C-64s.

Lunch box portable - R.I.P.

The power supply blew.  This time there was smoke and it no longer works.

I'd like to fix it, but I think it's a lost cause - but mostly I don't want to experiment with high voltage stuff.

I examined the power supply closer trying to see if I can find the smoked component (no luck on that).  There's actually 2 power supplies there.

One is the standard PC power supply providing power to the motherboard and peripherals.  The other is just to supply power to the gas plasma display.  There was an extra power switch on the back of the PC that specifically controlled the display power supply.

I tried to source a replacement, but no luck so far.

It's not in the trash, but it is in storage for now.  I might find the parts useful for something in the future.  Or I may luck out and find a power supply.

Lunch box Portable

So another neglected PC showed up on my doorstep recently.

A 386 "lunch box" portable.  The "lunch box" form factor was short lived as computer hardware and batteries got better and the "lunch box" was dropped in favor a regular laptop.

This old guy has an 80386, 80386sx co-processor, 5 GB RAM, 1.44 MB floppy, 40 GB MFM hard drive, red plasma monochrome display.

It actually started up (but the first power up shot out a spark but didn't seem to cause any problems - more on that later) but would not boot.  As expected, the hard drive was done.  So on to the disassembly.

It was obvious that this had been stored on concrete.  Concrete is porous and allows moisture to flow through it.  If you need to store things on concrete, it needs to be on top of something between it on the concrete.

Rust.  Lots of rust and oxidation.  I had to completely dissemble the power supply and de-rust the housing.  Even then, I had to end up spraying it with Rust-oleom just to keep the rust down.  That's where the spark came from - a piece of rust across some high-voltage lines.

So, that done, I moved on to spraying some of the places with deox-it, reseating several chips.  The 386sx had lots of oxydation - which caused issues with booting and even getting into the CMOS.

Oh, that's another thing.  The CMOS battery had died long ago and the previous owner had replaced it with regular alkalines - which he never removed before storing.  Ya, that toxic mess went into the trash.  I've made another alkaline pack, but I'll figure out how to handle the long term after I get it all working again.

Now I get a consistent boot and into the CMOS.

The MFM controller is gone.  It was too hard to find an MFM replacement, so I got a IDE/floppy controller card.  I have an IDE/CF card adapter coming soon to replace the hard drive.

The floppy drive had issues.  I didn't look too far into that yet.  I just grabbed my old 1.44 floppy drive from the display case and tested that out.

I tried DOS 6.2 and no go.  I kept going down until I found that DOS 5 will work with some issues (but they seem disk drive related).

So at this point, I have a consistent boot from floppy.  I'm going to try to removing the external floppy setup to see if I can get more reliability from the floppy drive.

I also disassembled and cleaned the keyboard.  So reassembly is next on the list today.

Kaypro "1"

I picked up a Kaypro 1 on eBay.  I bid bare minimum and got it (which means no one else wanted it).

When it arrived, I did the usual tear down and evaluation.

• Disk drives in good condition.  Cleaned.
• RIFAs replaced - because you know they will blow up.
• Deoxit in the brightness POT.
• Replaced the keyboard cable since it had gone bad.  Interestingly, the cable from my 4/83 worked, but the replacement didn't.  But the replacement worked on my 4/83 so all is good.
• Keyboard good.
• Replaced the case screws.  The previous owner(s) had replaced many screws with mismatched versions.
  

But what was strange was the ROM chip.  Instead of being labeled with the version number, it had "2.2G" on it - meaning CP/M 2.2G.  Also, there was a label on the back of the case that said "Kaypro 2".

More research showed at least 2 other Kaypros in the same state.  It seems that kaypro offered a service to "downgrade" your Kaypro 1 to a Kaypro 2/84.

The next step was boot disks.  I stole an OpenFlops out of the 4/83 and got several disk images from the Internet.  One of those images worked perfectly, so I use that to make several boot floppies.  Then I put the floppy drive back in and the OpenFlops back in the 4/83.

tl;dr I made several more disks, copying what I had from other sources and downloaded many files.  So I now have a nice disk library for the "1".

I'll probably do a Gotek upgrade to this at some point.  But my 5.25" stash is pretty large right now.  So I don't see a need.  The half-height drives in the "1" aren't nearly as bad as the full height ones from the 4/83.

I did upgrade my version of Super Star Trek to include the additional screen attributes that the 1 supports (since they didn't downgrade the video chip).  Mainly the reverse screen and the blink modes.

Tandy 1500HD - Complete failure

tl;dr

If you are interested in working with or restoring vintage computers, avoid the Tandy 1500HD.  You will only be wasting your time and money.

The full story:

I picked up a Tandy 1500HD from Goodwill recently.  It came with 2 power supplies, an extra battery (probably dead too), original diskettes, and original documentation.

Once it arrived, I triaged it.  The display wouldn't light up, but it would flicker.  No beeps from the machine as it tried to boot.  The hard drive would spin.

I took it apart to see what was going on.  No leaking capacitors.  Good sign.  The clock battery looked good (i.e. not leaking but probably dead).  The Tandy 1500HD kept it's config in flash, so the battery was only there to keep the real time clock going when powered off.

I wish I had done more research on this before I paid for it.  The drives (both floppy and hard) are completely proprietary and not replaceable - and you can't even update them to flash drives like many old computers today.  The interfaces are completely non-standard.

The floppy drive belt was almost goo.  It loosened over time and just came off.  I attempted to replace it, but no go.  I figured that maybe I could get at least something working on it.  I also found out that the system won't even POST unless the hard drive is hooked up.

The display problem was simple.  The cable inside the display came off.  The old foam simply had broken down over time, allowing the cable to be pulled from the connector enough to not make a good connection.  That, at least, was a simple fix.

The bottom line is that to get this back to working condition, I'd need to replace the hard drive and the floppy drive.  Either with old stock or refurbished parts, or with modern replacements.  Unfortunately, neither exist.

Trying to find technical documentation on this computer was not fruitful either.  The usual places simply had nothing on them.  No repair guide.  Just PDFs of the documentation that came with the computer and some jumper settings (which, BTW, were incorrect).

So I wasted my money on this.  Hopefully you'll read this and not waste yours too.

S-BASIC vs. Turbo Pascal

My next experiment was to take some of those S-BASIC programs and convert them to Turbo Pascal.

It wasn't a surprise that the conversion was pretty easy.  Much easier than M-BASIC to S-BASIC.  S-BASIC has more in common with Pascal than MBASIC.

 

Overall, Turbo Pascal is much better than S-BASIC.

Turbo Pascal has an IDE.  With S-BASIC, I needed to use an external editor.  The one that I had was TE, but that's actually a relatively new program.   But I probably could have used Wordstar - to keep the Turbo Pascal comparison apples-to-apples.

Turbo Pascal can compile to memory.  This greatly increases the speed of which it tells you where your errors are and makes it able for you to test your program quicker.

With S-BASIC, it's save, exit the editor, run the compiler, go back into the editor - and remember the line that had the problem.

As far as creating an actual .COM file, Turbo Pascal might have a slight speed advantage, but not enough to really notice.

 

So the reason for S-BASIC star not rising is proven.  Turbo Pascal is so much better.

Please don't take this as meaning that S-BASIC is bad.  On the contrary, it's really good, and if Turbo Pascal hadn't come out, it probably would have gotten much more traction.

S-BASIC - Bunco game

 So we start with a simple Bunco game written in BASIC.

10 PRINT "BUNCO"
20 S=0:W=INT(RND(1)*200)+300
30 FOR R=1 TO 6
40 PRINT "ROLLING..."
50 FOR Q=1 TO W: X=RND(1): NEXT Q
60 D1=INT(RND(1)*6)+1:D2=INT(RND(1)*6)+1:D3=INT(RND(1)*6)+1
70 PRINT "ROUND:";R;"Rolls:";D1;D2;D3
80 IF (D1=D2) AND (D2=D3) THEN 150
90 IF D1=R THEN S=S+1
100 IF D2=R THEN S=S+1
110 IF D3=R THEN S=S+1
120 PRINT "SCORE ";S
125 INPUT "PRESS ENTER";A$
130 NEXT R
140 PRINT "FINAL SCORE=";S: END
150 IF D1=R THEN PRINT "BUNCO!": S=S+21: GOTO 120
160 PRINT "MINI BUNCO": S=S+5: GOTO 120

The original for this was probably written for my Pocket Computer 2.

The S-BASIC version looks like this:

var s,w,r,q,x,d1,d2,d3=integer
var a=char

PRINT "BUNCO"
S=0
W=INT(RND(1)*200)+300
FOR R=1 TO 6
    PRINT "ROLLING..."
    FOR Q=1 TO W
        X=RND(1)
    NEXT Q
    
    D1=INT(RND(1)*6)+1
    D2=INT(RND(1)*6)+1
    D3=INT(RND(1)*6)+1
    PRINT "ROUND:";R;" Rolls:";D1;D2;D3
    IF (D1=D2) AND (D2=D3) THEN BEGIN
        IF D1=R THEN begin
            PRINT "BUNCO!"
            S=S+21
            end
        else begin
            PRINT "MINI BUNCO"
            S=S+5
            end
        end
    else begin
        IF D1=R THEN S=S+1
        IF D2=R THEN S=S+1
        IF D3=R THEN S=S+1
    end
    
    PRINT "SCORE ";S
    INPUT "PRESS ENTER";A
NEXT R

PRINT "FINAL SCORE=";S

Now, it certainly is much easier to read and much of the original code is there, but there was a significant amount of change to make this work under S-BASIC.

One gotcha was the 

60 D1=INT(RND(1)*6)+1:D2=INT(RND(1)*6)+1:D3=INT(RND(1)*6)+1

The S-BASIC compiler did not flag that as an error, but the assignments to D2 and D3 were simply ignored.

But lines 150 and 160

150 IF D1=R THEN PRINT "BUNCO!": S=S+21: GOTO 120
160 PRINT "MINI BUNCO": S=S+5: GOTO 120

Did get a compiler error because they came after the PRINT.

Lines 150 and 160 also have a second gotcha: The way to those lines is a GOTO within the FOR loop.  Again, the S-BASIC compiler flagged no problem, but the FOR loop simply exited after the first iteration.