Here I am starting Vol. 3 #2 and I have seen only the advance copies of Vol. 2 #4 and Vol. 3 # 1. But that is the way with publication. You have to work far in advance to keep up.
I have found yet another DOS (Disk Operating System) for the T/S 2068. It is not a new one but one that was called to my attention while Frank Davis and I were discussing the T/S 2068 and the DOS available for it. I mentioned the Ramex and he mentioned that it was the Ramex Millenia K which was from U. K. and that it was also usable on the Oliger system. So I found out more details. This all happened at a meeting of ISTUG. More about that in a separate article. I was also discussing having an AERCO 2068 disk interface but I don’t want to have yet another set of drives and also I don’t have room to have another computer setup all the time. Besides, a software only DOS was interesting.
I have a T/S 2068 with the Russell Spectrum Rom installed but I think that there is something wrong with it. I can not get it to operate correctly (or what I think is correctly). And without another computer set up the same way that is working correctly I don’t really know. It seems to work with a pure Larken disk interface but when I try to use an Oliger with a Larken dock board seems to be when I have the trouble. I am planning to install a Spectrum EPROM on the Larken dock board and see if that is a better way of going.
A thought just crossed my mind, “How do we stay with our T/S computers when the last one bites the trail?” And it came to me that since there are programs to emulate the ZX81 and the Spectrum and I believe the QL for the MSDOS computers that is the way we will have to go to to stay with the software and possibly some of the hardware that we currently use. I would like to hear from anyone that has successfully used a MSDOS computer to emulate any of the above and the luck in converting the original T/S programs to run on the Emulators. I am especially interested in which MSDOS computers will run the software.
I saw an article on using computers to preserve family history. Of course it is a program or suite of programs to do that offered by colleges or a software developer. Howver, with our trusty T/S computers and a little ingenuity it is possible to do it without their software package and get it printed out far cheaper. See Preserving Family History.
About the Larken Ramdisk and battery life. I put a pair of alkaline AAA batteries in my orginal Larken Ramdisk in May 1989 and the voltage of the batteries is still 2.9 volts or 1.45 volts each. Of course that Ramdisk has only 128K of memory. My working Ramdisk with 256K of memory probably will have a faster battery drain. I did write to Radio Shack but the reply was not very helpfull since they could not tell me how long the batteries would take to drop to 1.1 each or a total of 2.2. The static ram chips require at least 2.0 volts to maintain memory.
I was sent a disk with some files on it for the Larken disk interface. But there was a problem. The disk was 3.5 and all I have are 5.25. No problem except that when I took it to the ISTUG meeting I found that Paul’s 3.5 disk drive would not read the directory. But Frank’s 3.5 would but the other drive was a 80 track and the copy program was on a 40 track disk. So I LOADed the copy program and unplugged the disk interface and plugged in Frank’s, and then copied the disk. Sort of round the rosy sort of deal but I got it done. The drives I take to the meeting are two 1/2 height 40 track drives.
I use D. U. S. by Kristian Boisvert and use copyII.B1 to do the copying. It FORMATs the disk as it copies and it also starts with track 0 so whatever is the title of the orginal disk is copied. It also copies 5 tracks at a time so there is less disk drive operation. But it will only work with the Larken disk interface. In copying a set of disks for the CATUG library I did discover that occasionally it does not actually copy a disk. Nor does it report BAD DISK! However, since I always check for a correct SAVE after I have finished I discovered that I had a problem. Two disks out of about 60 actually refused to accept a copy using D. U. S. copyII program. And the disk had been FORMATted with the Larken so there is something strange going on.
After using the Oliger disk interface there is one feature of Oliger that I like. And that is it reports how many bytes is saved in each file on the disk when you do a CAT. Of course the Larken does report how many blocks of text are in each file but the Oliger does let you know just exactly how many bytes are in the blocks of the files. It is really nice when working with a wordprocessor since you can look with MSCRIPT to see how big the file is and chack to see if that is what is SAVEd. Of course for a reason that I don’t have the answer to the text SAVEd to disk is always 1 byte more than the size of the file given by MSCRIPT.
I had a call out for a full height double sided double density Tandon TM 100-2A disk drive(s) and I got a response on April 1st but nothing materialized. Then this last week (first week of June) I got a call from Bob Swoger and a fellow there thought he could find me some drives that he thought might be Tandon drives. So I asked for 3. He also was wanting a full height 80 track drive which I will exchange with him. Then a few days later I got a call from the first person and he is going to send me some Tandon drives. Since all drives are used off of IBM computers during upgrading they could be clunkers. So if I get two working drives out of the 6 I will be not badly off in price since full height drives are almost non existent. It pays to have a stock pile of some parts in case of failure. I will either have 6 untested drives or none.
And I got a call from a person that I was working with by letters and telephone when I was in Iowa (I moved here in 1990) on problems with the ZX81 and he dropped out of sight. Since he has changed work places and moved so he wanted the address of SMUG so he could go to meetings. He is in electronics and is trying to get back to tinkering with the ZX81.
I have finally decided to set up a schedule of publication for ZXir QLive Alive! With publication set for January, April, July and October I decided that I should have a cut off date for material submitted. Camera ready ads (ready to be copied in the newsletter) can be accepted up to the day before I mail the material to Bob Swoger to be printed. That day will be the 15th of the month preceeding publication. That will give Bob a chance to get it printed and delivered to Abed Kahale for mailing in time to meet the schedule. This month is a little late since it is already June 17th. Other material can be submitted anytime but if it is too close to mailing time it may be held over till the next issue. 0/0.
Don Lambert
Timex/Sinclair NorthAmerican
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