80-Bus News

Comments And Praise

I did not write to complain but to add my voice to the many people who have praised your efforts over the last two or three years. The magazine has been interesting in so many ways, often when the articles have been on subjects outside my own particular interests. The useful point is that as my ideas have matured and the hardware built up – so ideas and articles that were not of interest before now become relevant.

The only comment that I can make about future issues is that I would like to see more descriptions of system software capabilities written either by the originator or by experienced users. as I live some way from any dealer, knowing what one would get by buying a particlar software package is somewhat vague. The articles on CP/M have been useful but could go further. Don’t laugh, but I would like to run Cobol. Is CIS-COBOL at #400 the only option? Adverts in Byte indicate it is available for CP/M at $29! I would have liked to have seen comparative reviews of PolyDos vs. NasDos before I bought my FDC. And so on. Thanks again for a great magazine that gets the words worn off by reading again and again.

Yours truly, Nigel Chetwood, Twekesbury, Glos

Mis-quoted

My congratulations on yet another splendid issue of the 80-BUS News. Lawrence (alias Mr D G Richards) has rather quoted anything I may have said to him (whilst tired and emotional) out of context – honest! I don’t really think you are the Mafia .....

Yours truly, C Blackmore, Taunton

Nas-Graphpac

I have been catching up on my reading and came across the free dump of Graphpac in one of last year’s issues. I have typed it in, and find it works perfectly on my Nascom 3 under NAS­SYS 3 and NasDos, with ROM Basic. The only minor difficulty is in plotting or drawing circles in the pen-flip mode – presumably because some points on the circumference are plotted twice and hence flip twice (i.e. don’t change). I find a ratio of 375 is right for my screen, and 400 or 415 to get a round circle in a screen dump to my MX80FT 2. Thanks for the magazine and the free software.

Yours truly, C R Case, Rugby

Utility Disk

I recently bought a copy of ‘Henry’s Incredible CP/M Utilities Disk” for use on my ageing Nascom/​Gemini system running CP/M Version 1.4. As the documentation tells you (when you have worked out how to decipher the DQC files – hint, TYPE file UTILITY.HLP), not all the goodies will run under CP/M 1.4. Worse, some of the most useful programs which were version independent, refused to perform, or had irritating quirks.

Fortunately, some very minor patches soon cured these problems. Here they are (addresses assume programs are loaded at 100H):–

HELP.COM For the NAS­COM display, change the byte at address 02A3H from 17H to 0DH. This changes the page length to the correct value. Use DISKPEN or similar to reduce line length in the HLP files to 47 or less characters.

UNERA11.COM The program needs the track number at 03FAH to be changed from 02 to 03. I also changed the skew table (all of it – hence the repetition after 18 values) commencing at 03DFH to the values on the G805 Disk System. These