80-Bus News

One aspect of this, as I have said before (at the Brighton conference), is that the contents of this rag are written entirely by readers, and as such it is the keenest readers who contribute, and they fairly naturally seem to be the ones who have added varying quantities of expansion. I have to date endeavoured to keep the general (e.g. non-disk) content as high as possible, and shall continue to do so, as long as the relevant material keeps arriving.

Another viewpoint is to draw a parallel with other hobbies/​professions. Many people buy car magazines, for example, NOT for the information on driving techniques, achieving economy etc. (i.e. how to use what they have), but for details of all the accessories that they may one day add, and for the reviews of the Ferraris, Lambourghinis etc. that they recognise they have little chance of ever owning or even driving.

With the Nascom, Gemini or Nascom/​Gemini hybrid that everyone(?) reading this owns, or has access to, there is the in-built flexibility to expand it from the very basic (sic) model upto an extremely powerful and comprehensive system. This magazine will continue to inform the reader, as well as we can, what is available to achieve this expansion, and we will try to present objective evaluations of how well this is executed. At the same time we will continue to present information on how to make the most of the system that you currently own, regardless of its state of expansion.

That is, provided the material is sent to us.]

PEN MODIFICATION BUG

The journal of the CP/M Users Group (UK) Vol. 1 No. 6, May 1982 describes a number of bug fixes to some of the standard Digital Research CP/M utilities (e.g. MOVCPM, ASM, PIP, SUBMIT) and useful changes to BIOS and BDOS. (N.B. The patches to MOVCPM.COM need to be applied to addresses 100H higher up.)

While trying out some of these ideas I decided to check the change I wrote up in the 80-BUS News Vol. 1 Iss. 2, April – June 1982 headed PEN – 1 on pages 5 and 6. Unfortunately I found a mistake. The byte at address 296A should be patched from 18 to E2. It just goes to show there is many a slip between proving a mod. and writing it up for 80-BUS News.

Has anyone thought of a mod. to the Nascom 2 board which would enable the EPROM bootstrap loader to be ghosted out and thereby allowing the whole 64K RAM to be used for CP/M 2.2 with an IVC?

S. Willmott, West Drayton.

CLUB IN HANTS?

My. lonely Nascom 2 has waited for three years for a club to spring up within the ALTON/​CAMBERLEY area but thus far I haven’t even seen any clubs formed for other (Gulp) machines.

I would like to hear from anybody in this neck of the woods who would like to exchange this or learn that! My current interests would be to link up Nascomers over the Welybone using the LetserP protocol or something like it; well this is the age of ET isn’t it?

And now a puzzle:
Following power up, my RAM board memory contains random data which is correctly refreshed. I can write zeros into the memory but not one’s. Anybody who has