Micro_Cornucopia_07_Aug82.pdf

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August 1982

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The C Reviews

Small-C ........................ ' .......................... 5

Small-C+ ................................................ 6

Q/C ..................................................... 7

CBO ..................................................... B

Supersoft C .............................................. 9

BDS C .................................................. 10

Is Your Big Board in a State of Flux ........................... 17

Adding 6K of RAM ......................................... 17

Viewing 50 Hz ............................................. 19

REGULAR FEATURES

Letters ....................... 2

FORTHwords ............... 12

Technical Tips ............... 17

Want ads .................... 21

On Your Own ............... 21

NEW PRICES EFfECTIVE ON THE 1ST DAY OF THE COVER MONTH OF THIS MAGAZINE_

"THE BIG BOARD"

OEM - INDUSTRIAL - BUSINESS - SCIENTIFIC

INGLE BOARD COM'PUTER KIT!

Z-80 CPU!

64K RAM!

•

r.w

(')

::II

(')

-I

(')

THE BIG BOARD PROJECT: Three years in the works, and maybe too good to be true. A tribute to hard headed,

no compromise, high performance, American engineering! The Big Board gives you all the most needed

computing features on one board at a very reasonable cost. The Big Board was designed from scratch to run the

latest version of CP/M·. Just imagine all the off-the-shelf software that can be run on the Big Board without any

modifications needed! Take a Big Board, add a couple of 8 inch disc drives. power supply, an enclosure, C.R.T.,

and you have a total Business System for about

1/3

the cost you might expect to pay.

(64K KIT

BASIC I/O)

SIZE: 8'h x

13'1.

IN.

SAME AS AN 8 IN. DRIVE.

REQUIRES: +5V

3 AMPS

+ - 12V

.5 AMPS.

::II

FULLY SOCKETED!

FEATURES: (Remember, all this on one board!)

64K RAM

80 CHARACTER VIDEO

With a crisp, flicker-free display that looks extremely sharp even on small

monitors. Hardware scroll and full cursor control. Composite video or spill video

and sync. Character set is supplied on a 2716 style ROM, making customized

fonts easy. Sync pulses can be any desired length or polarity. Video may be

inverted or true. 5

7 Matrix - Upper

Lower Case

Uses Industry standard 4116 RAM'S. All 64K Is available to the user, our VIDEO

and EPROM sections do not make holes in system RAM. Also, very special care

was taken In the RAM array PC layout to eliminate potential noise and glitches.

;

::II

Z-80 CPU

Running at 2.5 MHZ. Handles all 4116 RAM refresh and supports Mode 2

INTERUPTS. Fully buffered and runs 8080 software.

::II

(')

FLOPPY DISC CONTROLLER

Uses WD1771 controller chip with a TTL Data Separator for enhanced

reliability. IBM 3740 compatible. Supports up to four 8 inch disc drives. Direclly

compatible with standard Shugart drives such as the SA800 or SA801. Drives can

be configured for remote AC off-on. Runs CP/M· 2.2.

•

SERIAL I/O (OPTIONAL)

Full 2 channels using the Z80 SIO and the SMC 8116 Baud Rate Generator. FULL

RS232! For synchronous or asynchronous communication. In synchronous

mode, the clocks can be transmitted or received by a modem. Both channels can

be set up for either data-communication or data-terminals. Supports mode 21nl.

Price for all parts and connectors: $49

TWO PORT PARALLEL

1/0

(OPTIONAL)

Uses Z-80 PIO. Full 16 bits, fully buffered, bl-dlrectional. User selectable hand

shake polarity. Set of all parts and connectors for parallel I/O: $19.95

BASIC

1/0

Consists of a separate parallel port (Z80 PIO) for use with an ASCII encoded

keyboard for Inpul. Output would be on the 80 x 24 Video Display.

REAL TIME CLOCK (OPTIONAL)

Uses Z-80 CTC. Can be configured as a Counter on Real Time Clock. Set of all

parts: $9.95

BLANK PC BOARD - $149

The blank Big Board PC Board comes complete with full documentation

(including schematics), the character ROM, the PFM 3.3 MONITOR ROM,

and a diskette with the source of our BIOS, BOOT, and PFM 3.3 MON ITOR.

PFM 3.3

2K SYSTEM MONITOR

CP/M* 2.2 FOR BIG BOARD

The popular CP/M· D.O.S. to run on Big Board Is

available for $159.00.

PRICE CUT!

The real power of the Big Board lies in lis PFM 3.3 on board monitor. PFM commands Include: Dump Memory, Boot CP/M", Copy, Examine, Fill Memory, Test Memory, Go To,

Read and Write I/O Ports, Disc Read (Drive, Track, Sector), and Search. PFM occupies one of the four 2716 EPROM locations provided.

Z-80 is a Trademark of Zilog.

Digital Research Computers

(OF TEXAS)

P.O. BOX 401565 • GARLAND, TEXAS 75040 • (214) 271-3538

*TRADEMARK OF DIGITAL RESEARCH.

TERMS: Shipments will be made approximately 3 to 6 weeks after we

receive your order, VISA, MC, cash accepted. We will accept COD's (for the

Big Board only) with a $75 deposit. Balance UPS COD. Add $4.00 shipping.

USA AND CANADA ONLY

NOT ASSOCIATED WITH DIGITAL RESEARCH OF CALIFORNIA, THE ORIGINATORS OF CPM SOFTWARE

**1 TO 4 PIECE DOMESTIC USA PRICE.

MICRO CORNUCOPIA

11740 N.W. West Road

Portland, Oregon 97229

503-645-3253

IICRD CDRNVCD.II

August 1982

The Single Board Systems Journal

No.7

Editor

Publisher

David

Thompson

Technical Editor

Ruth Fredine-Burt

Graphic Design

Sandra Thompson

Typography

Patti Morris

Martin White

Irish Setter

Staff Assistant

Anna Berry

Cover Illustration

Gerald Torrey

Happy

Birthday

We're One

I was rummaging through my stack of

Micro C's this morning looking for issue

#3 when it hit me, I had a stack of six

magazines to search through. Six maga-

zines, and of course issue #3 was on the

bottom. That kind of problem I can live

with.

The Single Board Systems Journal

You may have noticed that the mast-

head has changed a bit. As the computer

world and you, our audience change,

Micro C is changing. We are going to

continue providing the world's best sup-

port for the Big Board and Big Board II

(the new Ferguson board) but we are al-

so planning to stay on top of the latest in

other single board systems plus, of

course, systems languages. (We'll let the

other magazines support the 5-100, the

55-50, the minis, and other crumbs.)

We're going to do our best to support

you. You are building and modifying the

Big Board, the Xerox 820, and similar

systems and you are deeply involved in

some very interesting projects, all the

way from writing new data base man-

agement systems to designing satellite

packet switching networks. And most of

you are doing this at home.

You are engineers, software de-

signers, and heavy weight hobbyists.

Most of you are using your system both

as a way to continue your education in

the computer field and as the basis for

that hoped-for business of your own.

The rest of you are already consulting, or

manufacturing and marketing some-

thing for the computer market.

Nearly all of you are proficient in two

or more languages. Many of you are us-

ing Cobol, Fortran, Algol, assembly lan-

guage, or even Basic on your jobs. But

you are also very interested and profi-

cient in one or more of the more modern

structured languages. Of these lan-

guages, Pascal is by far the most popular

with FORTH and C a distant 2nd and

3rd. FORTH and C interest appears to be

quite regionalized. FORTH interest is

strongest in California while there ap-

pear to be pockets of experienced C' ers

all along the West Coast and in the Bell

Labs area.

The information flow within the

whole Micro C group is tremendous.

Ideas are going through here at a rate I

wouldn't have imagined a year ago. The

number of pages in each issue of Micro C

is limited mostly by the cost of produc-

tion, mailing, and help.

Can YouC?

This is the issue a lot of you have been

waiting for. The feature this month is the

review of some of the more popular C

packages. I had hoped to begin working

on the reviews in March but I'm glad I

didn't. All but two of the packages

(Small C and Small C +) are either new or

have been substantially updated in the

last couple of months.

Of course, change is the norm in the

software business but C has seen more

than its share of change lately. I'm glad

to see it the changes because C is finally

achieving a price/performance ratio that

puts many other languages to shame.

(Pascal also has a new package that will

shake things up in that arena. See below

for more information.)

Drive with Caution

Issue #8 will feature information on

disks and disk drives, but I feel that the

following can't wait. Think twice (or

three times) before using Maxell disks.

turns out that Maxell achieves its

long data life by putting a hard, slightly

abrasive surface on its disks. This surface

not only protects the disk but it keeps the

heads clean by polishing them. So, not

only do your heads wear out quickly (af-

ter a year of intermittent use), but the

abrasive residue left on them substan-

tially reduces the life of other brands of

(continued on page 20)

MICRO CORNUCOPIA is the sin-

gle board systems journal support-

ing systems programming lan-

guages and single board systems-

including the Big Board, the Big

Board II, and the Xerox 820.

MICRO CORNUCOPIA is pub-

lished six times a year by Micro Cor-

nucopia of Oregon, 11740 N.W.

West Rd., Portland, Oregon 97229.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES:

1 yr.(6 issues)

1 yr.(Canada

Mexico)

1 yr.(other foreign)

$16.00

$20.00

$26.00

All subscription orders payable in

U.S. funds on a U.s. bank, please.

ADVERTISING RATES: Available

on request.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Please

send old label and new address.

SOFTWARE, HARDWARE, AND

BOOK VENDORS: We would very

much like to review your CP/M

compatible products for Micro C.

Please send material to the Review

Editor, Micro Cornucopia.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Please

sound off.

CP/M is a trademark of Digital Research, Inc.

LITTIRS

Dear Editor,

Here are a few patches for people who

have our double density controller.

Big Board owners who have more than

two drives should modify the CBIOS

slightly so they can access drives C and

D. First run DDSYSGEN and select a

source drive. Hit your system reset so

you can use the PFM monitor to change

1B04 from 02 to 04. Then G100, and use

function 2 to place modified CP/M back

onto the same disk. Now reset the sys-

tem again and reboot CP/M.

Some drives can't get the head loaded

and stable in 25ms. When this happens

and you try to write to the disk you can

cause some definite problems. You can

increase the time the Big Board waits be-

fore writing by increasing R44 (sche-

matic #4). An increase from lOOK to

about 130K increases the delay to about

33ms which should be sufficient.

Xerox did not include this one shot

(U106) delay on the 820 and it has been

creating problems, especially when

users add double density.

You can reduce head banging on Shu-

gart 801's by moving the B jumper to X.

This way the heads remain loaded 15 for

revolutions of the disk after the last ac-

cess.

John McFarland

Software Publishers

2500 E Randol Mill Rd., Suite 125

Arlington, TX 76011

Dear Editor,

Just a short note to express my appre-

ciation for the fine job you're doing with

Micro

Without it I would still be floun-

dering around trying to get the ole BB up

and running.

Mark Stieglitz's SCBIOS (user disk

#2) is the best thing you guys have sup-

plied yet.

works like a dream! I have

connected a u82A printer to the PIO port

(SCBIOS provides the parallel print

driver) as follows:

u82A

Signal

OSTB

chops the first character off some words. I

haven't contacted them because they appear

to be working in an understaffed/overworked

mode

fixes don't get accomplished very

quickly.

.tl'~P1NK

Wire

Color

u82A

BBJ5

~Iv.~

BLK

t.t/e,"I,~

{) \lbBRN

RED

~(,\.fP'd)RG

1...

u"",,,YLW

t..t"c-)1'BRN

't\~

BLU

r-'ecf

VIa

BUSY

Q:.e.'"

GRY

SIG

GNo·t?<1~7trK

ODD

Signal

AROY

STB

GNO

CHASSIs~.)~"'GR

ff,16

000

Jumper BB J3 pins 1-2, 13-14, 15-16.

Mark C. Worley

1831 W Pioneer Apt 203

Irving, TX 75061

Dear Editor,

I though I'd drop you a note to let you

know why I've reduced JRT Pascal from

$295.00 to $29.95.

You see, the exploding number (over

500,000) of CP/M compatible systems

makes it feasible to market in high vol-

ume. In fact, to further encourage the

spread of JRT Pascal, I've partially lifted

the copyright so you can pass it on to

your friends as long as you don't resell

it.

JRT Pascal is a most advanced imple-

mentation of a very elegant language

and I think it deserves to be one of the

most widely used CP/M languages.

James R Tyson

189123rd Ave

San Francisco, CA 94122

Dear Editor,

enjoyed reading your critique of

VEDIT, especially since I just received

version 1.34. Unfortunately three bugs

showed up.

First, the test wouldn't format. Sec-

ond, I couldn't get the text to print via

the 'print text' command. And third, the

word wrap line size wouldn't configure

correctly.

I called Rick Fourtson at CompuView

and he mentioned that several Big board

users are having difficulty with VEDIT.

Rick said he would contact you for some

possible leads on solving these problems

and if necessary, VEDIT will be cus-

tomized for the Big Board.

By the way, the third bug results when

the customization assumes you've en-

tered a HEX value for line length (not

documented) while the command mode

assumes you are entering a decimal

number.

Rick Kobbe

8909 Corbin Drive

Everett, WA 98204

Dear Editor,

I bought a bare Big Board early in 1981

and over a period of about 6 months, ac-

cumulated enough parts to bring it up.

I'm using it with a Keytronics word proc-

essor keyboard and a converted TV set.

One of the problems I had with the

board was extreme instability in the

video crystal oscillator. The fix was easy.

I put a 100 pf capacitor between

13 and ground.

Be very careful with the 4 MHz mod in

issue #2 page 4. The asymmetrical clock

does not satisfy Z80 specs and I had a lot

of problems trying to get it to run

wiped out the directory on a disk).

My next project for the Big Board is to

interface a graphics display to the paral-

lel port, probably similar to the Micro-

graph display described in Byte. Then I

could emulate a Tektronix 4010 graphics

terminal. I would be very interested if

other Big board owners have ideas on

the subject.

Ken Stephenson

Physics Division

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne, IL 60439

Editor's note:

I haven't heard from CompuView

I don't

know what the status is of the bug fixes. I

haven't had any problem using the print

command and my format command works

fairly well. Its problem is that it occasionally

Dear Editor,

Sometimes it is nice to have a software

selectable alternate character set for the

Big Board. I noticed that half of the char-

acter generator is filled with FF's for

blanking the screen during retrace. I de-

cided to use the chip select pin on the

2716 instead. I've modified my board so I

can select different character sets such as

US, Swedish, German etc.

Mods: Cut the trace between U60 pin 8

and U73 pin 19. Connect U73 pin 19 to a

spare PIO pin. Cut the trace between

U25 pin 3 and U25 pin 4. Connect U25

pin 12 to U 60 pin 9. Connect U25 pin 13

to U25 pin 3. Connect U25 pin 11 to U25

pin 4. Now reburn the character genera-

tor so that you have one set in each half

of the EPROM. (See issue #6 page 8 for

more information on designing your

own character set.)

Thomas Hameenaho

Djaknegatan 7

S-754 23 Uppsala

Sweden

(continued on page 11)

Micro Cornucopia, Number 7, August 1982

ANNOUNCING

THE BIG BOARD ADD--ON

••••

FEATURES

••••

Program 2708, 2716, 2732, and 2764 type EPROHS. With four programming

sockets you can program lots of memory at once. Programs EPROMS sequentially

or in parallel for small production runs.

Second bank (64K) of memory will allow fast screen swaps, larger EPROM

program storage, etc. Memory is fully-static 6116 CMOS type RAMS which will

allow RAM/EPROM intermixing. Battery back-up for CMOS RAM.

More goodies. Sixteen channels of both 8-bit A/D and D/A conversion.

Connect any of the FCC approved modems by NOVATION directly into the board.

Plus, there's an S-100 connector which will allow you to connect an S-100

card directly or interface with an S-100 motherboard.

And speaking of

features, voice output with the on-board VOTRAX phoneme generator chip.

All this plus: four serial channels, four parallel ports, everything

socketed, and it runs at 4 MHz. (In fact, with all this, you may just forget

about the Big Board altogether!)

This is the board you

the serious builder and

board, full kit, partial

same dimensions as the

Available 3/20/82.

have been waiting for. This board is intended for

the novice alike.

It will be available in bare

kits, and assembled and tested. The board has the

BIG BOARD so it piggy-backs into the same space.

Bare board ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• $ 99.00

Complete package

CALL

...........................................

All Prices Plus Postage

••••

OTHER BIG BOARD ACCESSORIES

••••

Big Board power supply kit (BB

2 DRIVES

+ ) ••••••••••••••

85.00

Big Board power supply A&T ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 135.00

C.ITOH 8510 9xN matrix, graphics, 5 char sets printer (ser.) 645.00

C.ITOH 8510 same as above but par. interface •••••••••••••••• 595.00

4Mhz mod that WORKS •••• $1.50

BIG BOARD PARTS.............

CALL

E.C.R.L.,INC.

P.O. BOX 387

CANBY, OREGON 97013-0387

503-266-4982 *24 DRS* or 503-656-3382

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