Getting ready & excited for VCF West this weekend! Who's Going to Mountain View, CA??? 🙋🏼♂️
#VCFWest #VCFW #VCF #VCFed #VCFederation #Tandy #Tandy600 #WiModem #BBSing #VintageComputing #RetroComputers #RetroGaming #WallOfRetro #NerdsOfVintage #HappyNerding #TheVintNerd
in other #8088 things I ordered (what I hope are) the correct battery connectors and will soon have all the parts to rebuild the #Tandy600 battery pack.
Also a lot of stuff that was on my desk is now in a box, hopefully making room for the #Tandy1000 to live there!
Tandy 600 is single side double density fat12 360k 3.5" floppy.
my backup copy was previously amiga format, so anything that doesn't believe the fat descriptor block and looks at side 1 is going to get very very confused.
It's a very good test case. 😀 Any code/hardware/firmware that tries to be smarter than the floppy disk, fails.
More #PocketChip goodness!
Hooked up the USB floppy drive and it worked for msdos 1.44M and 720K disks!
It mounted the Tandy 600 disk but it wasn't right and I wouldn't try to write to it.
CHIP kernel doesn't have Mac hfs compiled in so no mac hd disks.
This means however that data file compatibility is a lost cause. 😭
I mean I've read complaints that modern MS data files are just raw memory dumps but I doubt they include the full stack... 😉
The HHOS work may be where that habit started!
That is, in fact, why the ROM apps have such huge minimum data file sizes. The in memory data file is the process's data segment: stack, variables, and the data set! Hence the 64k limit of data files...
Any user keypress may be a kill or a task-switch, and it is the process's job to make sure the RAM filesystem is sane before going away.
One neat part is that, when you load a file into an app, that app is in *exactly* the state you left it in! Unless it was confused...
A less msdos-focussed 8086 assembler would be a good starting point. There's lots of possibilities there!
anyway, long term thoughts. even if i had the time, #Tandy600 dev work is behind "build a new battery pack" and "throw money at a maker to build me some RAM expansions".
Also HHOS (yes thats what MS called the OS - "HandHeld Operating System") really is the descendant of the #Model100 OS... The files in RAM have that same incredibly fragile edited-in-place thing going on.
Ive been reading the programming docs for the #Tandy600 , and, keeping in mind that I've done 8080 and x86 (32bit) assembly but not 8086 assembly...
I think we've got enough info to actually write programs for the 600. It would be a lot easier if the "microsoft works utility disk" actually existed anywhere, a debugger is always nice. But it sounds to me like the mysterious "execvt" just undoes whatever magic masm 4 insists on doing to build .exe files.
alright i got 2/3 the parts needed to build the #tandy600 a new battery pack: 1 pair of nimh D cells and wires ending in a usable (not right but usable) connector.
another pack of D cells and it'll be solder time!
#tandy600 internals!
This thing may have seen more use than i thought... One of the screws was missing, and one was badly stripped...
This really convinces me that the reason vanilla msdos machines can't read the #tandy600 disks is table-based BIOS routines that simply didn't have an entry for 1sdd 80 track disks. By the time msdos officially supported 3.5" disks that brief window of single sided drives was already over.
as for going to the #tandy600 it requires trickery to read a plain text file that i haven't attempted yet. If i have any data files from ms works they'd be buried in the oldest deepest backup archives, very possibly in xtgold archives.... ouch!
So now I have a reasonable sized data file from the #tandy600 what can i do with it?
So far, not much! 😢 neither kword or libreoffice had a clue. (old raspian libreoffice may be missing converters it complained about file errors). as expected.
i had hopes for RISC OS Writer+ as it claims to support lots of ms files but not this one!
I should have a copy of a later ms works (91 era)... but i don't actually have a dos box running right now...
today's experiment: reading #tandy600 disk from #coco #os9 on my #coco3
The command pcdos reads/writes msdos disks from NitrOS9 or patched OS9LII.
pcdos -dir /d2
got a valid directory listing off the t600 disk.
pcdos -get /d2 rant01.wrd rant01.wrd
read the file off the t600 disk and saved it to a file.
But pcdos -get /d2 basic.!55 basic.!55
fails! Why? "!" is a reserved character in shell and there's no escaping! oops! 😂
#tandy600 no longer can even pretend to run off battery... But the RAM battery still works!
At some point I'll take it apart and see what i need to build a new battery pack.
#tandy600 ended up sitting unpowered for 4 days while work exploded on me.
main battery didn't have enough juice for it to turn on, but it didn't loose its battery-backed RAM, so that's a win.
Finished building the first spreadsheet from work in multiplan. I'm getting used to the ui quirks. -- once you figure it out, it's not that bad.
