I wish to thank Abed Kahale for building up my LarKen RAMDISK board. It works just fine although I have only a few programs on it. I have found only one program that will not work on RAMDISK, nor will it work on a regular disk unless it is LOADed from the original menu program. That is COPY12.B1 that is on TTSUC’s disk #1. I thought that with it on RAMDISK I would be able to get it into operation without having to find it in the LarKen disk file box. I suspect that it is because of a PRINT #4 in the menu that it will not work. But not being a programmer I am lost with anything that is not directly straight programming. Throw in a PRINT #4 and some VAL and I am lost.
I received LogiCall V5.1 from Abed Kahale on my RAMDISK. But there is a problem. While it works on the RAMDISK and the disks that I have generated it on it will not create itself onto another disk as an AUTOSTART program. I can SAVE LogiCall but not generate AUTOSTART. I press A for AUTOSTART and get ERROR C nonsense in BASIC, 430:1. Somewhere, somehow, it has gotten corrupted. My RAMDISK does not have a write protect switch so it could have been overwritten somehow. What I will have to do is use an earlier version of LogiCall to SAVE to disk and then SAVE just the LogiCall V5.1 portion to get the latest version on disk.
I just now tried to get a working LogiCall, that is, one that will self SAVE, by working with V4.9 and then trying to SAVE just the LogiCall V5.1 and while the program works I still cannot use that to SAVE to disk the self LOADing properties since it halts after I press the A key. So the problem is not in the AUTOSTART, maybe, but could be in V5.1. Since the only thing that I use and neither Bob or Abed don’t is the LarKen/Oliger marriage that could be the problem. Will version V5.0 work? And I don’t have version V5.0. Sorry about that Bob but I can’t use the latest version if it will not work. [Don fell victim to a copy of LogiCall modified for Abed’s personal use with Dohany’s EPROM! LogiCall has only been released as version V5.0! See editor’s report. Ed.]
In reply to “FROM THE EDITORS DESK” comments in the last issue about the problem of me supplying Editor Bob with DOUBLE SIDED disks when he has only SINGLE SIDED drives – that was an error on my part. I assumed that since he had been sent a double sided disk drive that he had installed it. [I was? By whom? Ed.] BUT! Bob has informed me that is not the case. I will only send Bob SINGLE SIDED disks NOW THAT I KNOW THIS. And since Bob uses SSDD disks and his drives require head stepping rate not faster than 30 ms and he wants LogiCall on every disk I will set up my master disk with that on it and will then copy the disk using D.U.S. copy program “COPYII.B1”.
For those that have a LarKen TS2068 disk interface and have never used COPYII.B1 it is a program that copies and FORMATs the disk at the same time. If you use COPYII.B1 to copy from a SSDD disk the result is still a SSDD disk, and if you copy a DSDD disk to a DSQD drive you end up with just the same data on the QD disk and the same number of tracks. In other words, you will be using only half the disk. The last half of the disk can’t be accessed since the directory only contains the last track that was on the DSDD disk.
In reference to Bob’s comment about not using LogiCall to access another drive to get an AUTOSTART to work on a drive other that drive 0, at that time, spring of 1989, I was new to disk drives and also I did not know about the existence LogiCall or Bob! It was later in the year at SMUGFest in Milwaukee that I first got LogiCall and that first version required you to type in the file name to LOAD a program.
I agree with Bob that what I need is a “quickie card”. I did create one for a nice person so that there would be no problem of using the TTSUC disk MSDOS to MSCRIPT and I also sent a program to convert MSCRIPT to TASWORD II. The entire “quickie card” ended up being a page and a half of text. I included what to do as well as what to expect on the screen. Bob, how about a couple of “quickie cards” for me and or other readers? I believe that others could benefit. so please publish it here, the ones I need are on MaxCom and LOADER V.
Don Lambert, Chairman
TIMEX/Sinclair NorthAmerican
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