welcome
to cat5 tv's community coffee break
uh i'm bp nine uh and uh
to my well on my screen anyway i see
peter up in the top left so give us away
peter good to see you thank you very
much and doug give me a wave as well
that's doug and i don't see sobu and i
don't see
um uh robbie so i don't know if they're
gonna make it this time around but
i hope you all have got your coffee or
something to drink anyway something that
is not going to mess with your with your
digestive system
all right so here's what i've been
playing with
um so firstly
a note for you uh peter about um
about docker versus virtual machine
so it turns out that docker allows you
to docker will
only stay active as long as there is a
process
to run inside of docker so that works
great
if you if you've got a process that
that runs uh all the time but
for what i'm trying to do all i'm trying
to do is run a script
and since all i'm trying to do is run a
script docker won't stay alive
for that you'd have to set up like a web
server or something to
to um keep the docker image alive
that's not really what i wanted to do so
your suggestion
peter about using a vm was a very good
one and i'm in fact
installing a vm even as we speak so
if my if my video skips or if my audio
skips or anything like that it's
probably because of that but i've got
plenty of memory plenty of cpu on this
machine so
it's not even straight it's not even
breaking a sweat from what i can tell so
i'm not too worried about that so yep
that's the that's the trick um
definitely
i gave it two gig
yeah i don't need i know but i don't
need anything like
that kind of memory for the process that
i'm trying to run so
it was perfectly fine to give it two gig
and uh and and i don't foresee any
problem with it
i installed a minimum gui
interface don't really need to but i did
anyway
um i could do the whole thing with um
uh with um text
but i i decided to do gooey just because
i like gui
so that's what i that's what i ended up
doing so
uh it will be it will be a virtual
machine i'm going to keep messing with
it this afternoon and i'm just
chugging away at it so uh i literally
did that today for for some reason i
could not find
the um virtual machine uh
uh uh uh install files in the repository
uh and then i looked up some um i looked
it up on the interwebs
and uh discovered yeah it really is in
the
it really isn't the repository i just
couldn't see it so
that's all right it's all good so that's
i'm installing it now it's an older
version of ubuntu so
it will have the cvs to get
um uh utility that i'm that i'm actually
looking for and that's
there only for that i'm not i'm not
putting it there for any other reason
except to
to have that uh have that there
so that's the that's the news with that
um i forget what else um i was gonna
catch catch you up on but here's
a bit of a fun thing that i've been
i don't know if you can we can't read it
it doesn't matter
but i don't i don't suppose you remember
the model 100
that i've been um that i've been messing
with
do you remember this unit right oh this
is the trs
that's the trs-80 model 100 yes sir
that's exactly what it is
now one of the things that you can do
with this
if you um if you install a um
a uh a handy dandy
bit of um hardware
let me see if i can show that to you
real quick
you install this handy dandy bit of
hardware
and what you have is
cpm you can now run cpm on this laptop
which works really really great except
that
the laptop has a lcd screen
of 40 characters by eight lines
cpm works with that but it's not
wonderful it's not the best option
so what i ended up doing was
um i could i could run it on the lcd
that would be no problem whatsoever i
could absolutely do that
but what i ended up doing and it's not
plugged up right now and i may do that
in just a minute but the idea is you
plug in a serial connection
on here to the serial connection on
this the db9
and then you power this thing up
with a usb wall wart
basically and this
is a vt 100 screen
uh driver or well not an emulator
because it's hardware isn't it
so what happens is
19 200 board
you can't pick anymore no
probably but 192 is quite fast enough
for me thanks very much
even if i i mean even if i push it
faster than that
the processor that the pic processor on
here
just won't drive the screen any faster
oh yeah
yeah yeah the pick is only running at
i don't know um eight megahertz no it
can't be eight megahertz
that i forget what the crystal is that's
driving that's that's
timing what's the number on the pig
oh it's uh oh i don't remember you're
gonna make me go look for it now aren't
you
[Music]
i could probably find it um but it um
i didn't build i didn't build this kit i
didn't design this kit
the kit came from a fella in australia
you're welcome
and then it was tweaked by a another
gentleman
in um
who took the original design and then
tweaked it a little bit
to put the rs232 port on it so that it
would be much more easy to connect the
model 100
to that but um what it means is
you i don't know if you remember way
back in uh
oh it was back in april or may or
something when we first started these
coffee breaks
i showed off the uh the capra
um you remember the k-pro cpm machine i
powered it up and it had
the little sd card um reader in it that
was that was how it was um
that was how it was selecting all the
disk images all that fun stuff
well um this model 100
that that i showed you a little while
ago
does all that in the um
or does does everything the capro can do
and
has a harder has a larger disk drive as
a result
this those two little devices that i
showed you that were plugged into the
back of the machine
in the option wrong with the machine
allow for a four
megabyte um not a hard drive
a four megabyte floppy disk um
cpm as delivered can handle up to an
eight megabyte hard floppy disk
um and then my capro
has provision on the motherboard
for a winchester disk drive interface
that interface um
would allow me to obviously connect up a
one of those old-timey winchester hard
drives
that you have to be extra ordinarily
careful with you could not
just you know bump it around like you
can hard disks of today
because if you did that you basically
trashed it it was done
yeah um and as i recall
i think that all you could do with those
hard disks was partition it
so it didn't matter how big it was
you could only do 8 megabytes
per partition on the hard drive now
eight megabytes is a huge amount of hard
disk space
cpm
of a hard disk yeah no no
both sides or
eight meg in total so if you used
yeah if you use both sides that would be
four megabytes per side um
the floppy disks that came on the on the
k pro
were three ah not three now five and a
quarter inch floppy disks
um that by the time i by the time i dug
them back up to try to recover them
most of them had started growing
fungus on the actual surface of the
of the drawer of the desk so i was able
to recover
probably half of the of the discs that i
actually had
that did include turbo pascal peter so
you may remember i mean i know you love
pascal
and you use lazarus in your case on on
windows
well back in the day the solution was
uh back in the day the solution was
turbo pascal
on cpm yeah did you really
yeah yeah so so this unit
this this um uh model 100
that i've that i left a cover on
this model 100 has an 8085
in it or more specifically an 80c85
which is a uh which is a successor
to the 8080. the 8080
is what cpm was originally written for
but what i did not know was that
well i knew that my capro had a z80 in
it
but what i thought was that the there
was the 8080
then the 8085 and then the z80 followed
after that but that's not the case
the 8080 is was the
initial cpu then the 8086
correction the 8085
was based off the 8080
and added something like 10
instructions to the 8080.
then as it turned what turned out to
have happened is
the z80 came along that was also based
on the 808.5
they implemented a different set of 10
instructions
so if you have some software for the 8
for the z80
it will not run on the 808.5
if you have software for the 808.5 it
will not run on the z800s
yep i know it i know it i used to have
them in australia
yeah yeah i'm probably dead yet uh
did the 8080 was the one the first pcs
use the 8080 the
the 386 jobs or something before 286
or something so i think yeah i think
that's that right
well i think it goes 8080
8085 8086 and then
286 38648 i think
i think 886's as well got their pc
computers won the first ones
yeah i'd have to i'd have to look into
that i really didn't follow
that i'm not sure but that's a memory
for about a long time ago yeah
yeah i did not follow that genealogy
through but
i believe that it's 80 8080
8085 8086
and then 286 3864a you remember the 286
i think it was had the numeric
coprocessor
that you have to have if you wanted to
do any kind of math because the
286 or the 386 was not capable of doing
that math
[Laughter]
that seems weird because a co-pr
microprocessor does math anyways
it does fixed point or should i say
integer math
the coprocessor was meant for floating
point math
okay and you couldn't you back then
if you wanted floating point uh math
you had to do you had to get a
i think that was true only for the 286
or the 386 i
i don't remember so um
we'll see a long time ago
yeah it was it was a while ago there's
no doubt about that
that that much is true well shall we see
but you guys can talk while i try and uh
um so peter you go first since you were
go ahead doug i caught a bit of a blast
from the past the other day
oh yeah atari's coming out with a new
videos
console
interesting the atari vcs video console
system i think
interesting but it can it can do 4k
isn't it funny now how um all the
the console manufacturers are all of a
sudden copywriting
all of the games that you used to be
able to download the roms for now you
can't because they're all copyrighted
yeah um and they're doing that because
they're realizing there is a market now
in the games retro games yeah yes so
they're not letting you
um they're not letting you uh um
download those games anymore which
really unfortunate but that's the way it
works
that is sad so what did you do did you
did you set it up and did you get you
one doug
no no it's i wonder they want 300
something 399 for it or something like
well that's about their console customer
they're right up there with
uh the ps5 and
being released along uh alongside the
ps5
the same time as the ps5 so is it really
going to be competing with atari
atari is a name we haven't heard from in
a long time they've been making
things for a while uh but they they're
not run by the trammell brothers anymore
it's
completely different uh ownership
who is the tremble brothers they bought
atari i'm so sorry i don't
i don't know the history of atari well
i'm not real familiar with it myself but
i believe they bought atari and
they were the ones that kind of killed
oh nice
and then somebody bought it from them
and they've slowly been trying to bring
it back
but they started out making i think they
were designing games or something
um they were doing something to stay in
the business
and um now they've come out with a new
video console so
nice you think you'll get one
no
well i'm not a big gamer anyways i had a
ps3 a few years ago but
not only at that price but the thing is
i've discovered that
um i suck at those high dexterity games
that's
i just don't i just don't play them well
so you know i do my best but uh but i
can't i just can't
keep up with the with all the keystrokes
all and the
the paddle movements and all that stuff
but some of those guys are easier than
others
some of the older ones like from the
atari 8-bit moon patrol
and yeah that was a pretty simple game
for me my speed is text games
like adventure
which by the way i have running on this
cpm box you want to see it
what is it adventure the original text
adventure
ah you want to see it
well sure if i had it it should take
long let's see
let's see if i can't i'll try not to to
completely uh mess it up here let's see
what happens
okay so now it's on me
if i if i mess this up i'm sorry i'm
gonna see what i i'm gonna see what i
can do
so here we go so first thing i'm going
to do is this
and then this and this
and this okay
so now what i'm going to do here if i
don't completely mess this up
is i'm going to switch cameras if i can
do that
now peter you're not allowed to make any
noise here because i don't want you to
mess up my camera view here
so i'm gonna see if i can't
make this thing's camera here it goes
come on switch the camera dang it
it's not it's not working i don't think
it's switching oh wait a minute or was
oh there is okay
let me turn this off so you all can see
it better
ah peter you went you made some noise
peter
there you go can you see it okay
so if it'll if it'll run
boy it's taking its time
cpm look at that lightning speed
okay and so now i'm running
now i'm running um
yes i wish to quit thank you very much
at which point it will insult me and
tell me that i'm a rank amateur
what is the name of that that's just the
adventure where did you get that
here we go uh well i actually have it on
my
actually copied it from my capro oh
so so there we go i can just do um
so now we have uh now we're in word star
and anyway so that's word star running
like you know
just like it should so there you go
that is
that's cpm running on a um
on a on i thought i told it to quit quit
anyway so that is cpm running on
a uh come on switch dang it
i hope that i hope that oh one
right so hopefully that'll switch come
on
switch thank you there we go i'm back
i hope you all can still see me because
i'm still switched to the
yeah let me kill this okay good
i just gotta shut down cpm here
good right that boys and girls
is cpm running on
a uh running on a uh
model 100. it's something i would never
have expected to see running on a model
100
because the model 100 this little
beastie right here
is a uh it had 32k
of ram a 32k of rom
so the only way that it could work would
be to um
would be to replace the ram and the rom
with uh with another
with with other memory in this case
that's what those little
um option roms do they they replace the
uh
the ram and the rom um and the
the onboard memory is not used at all
but the native memory that's on that
unit is not used at all
so yeah that's good fun um
in word star in particular one of the
things it likes to do
is because of the way it formats words
it put it sets the high bit
on the on the last character of every
word that's its signal to
justify that you know do incremental
spacing between each word so
that you get a um not not a ragged line
ending but
i guess a straight line ending is what
it's called
but that high bit on the last character
of each word is what it used
to signal yes this is what i have to
this is what i have to do
so one of the problems is
that you know you try and display
a text file that was built with with
word star
and it's it's full of what looks like
control characters because it has the
high bit set on the last character of
each word
so i wrote a simple simple c program
that literally reads one character one
character at a time
off the input file and then if it finds
the high bit set
resets it and then writes that new
character out
why don't you hand you what do you have
without
yes that's exactly what i did okay yeah
exactly what i did yeah yeah and so what
you get
the output of that program it's
literally
like a dozen lines of c it literally
is that simple and it treats it you
treat it like a pipe
so you take you you take the input file
you you
pipe it into this program and it acts
like a filter or a pipe
and then it writes the output to stand
it out so
and then you can just save that to a
regular a regular file if you like
so that works like a charm what comes
out the other end is just plain old text
so i doesn't matter if now it is
possible
to uh to make word
use what's called non-document mode and
i won't put those in but i keep
forgetting to do that
so i use that i use that little pipe
real real simple
so peter what have you been up to
i
you just did a whole bunch of work on
that tower i did yes
i don't think the guy who did the world
and did a good job in the top fella
was wrecked so long and i'm not getting
and i am not getting any help
uh somebody will come and help me uh
sold the wealthy now
well what happened do you know what
happened
on 20 meters where the vs
something fantastic
took it down and then i took it down and
the other mighty crunch
and the top fellow how did you
what do you mean you took it down
like that you lie down like that you
know you painted it
so i guess the uh i guess that
whatever's going on at the top of the
tower it was not meant to
to take that side load that happens when
you when you
when you're freezing
before about when we did the stuff we
did the other day
the other time and uh and
uh one of my friends is a
mechanical engineer i went to university
with him uh he goes to the same church
and uh we're talking to him today and
he's dead because it's the way it's
welded
and the thing is guards almost
if they caught himself of course the
fracture on the tail
because we can't get anybody to do it
nobody will do it around here
are you any good at welding no i can't
work
right that's about that's about the same
as my soldering
i'm uh i'm pretty crappy at soldiers
what did you what did you do to annoy
them peter it's because i am an outsider
because i come from england
i see okay i'm a blowing
uh how long have you been
yeah but how long have you been living
in ireland 30 years
wow you don't really count as an
outsider anymore although
i've been in the states uh 20 some years
and i guess
i guess i could still be considered an
outsider because i don't have
an american accent do i found the accent
like me and one of my relations also
comes from england
uh when i manage relations uh uh
auntie rose uh they lived across the
race and she's been here longer than i
have and she said that you should never
be accepted
uh liberty and aimed
and i i i don't have to have people
though i'm quite nice to them all really
and uh
and uh i gave them some help the other
time and uh you know you get no thanks
at all so
interesting i'm sorry to hear that peter
peter don't you climb that tower
don't you climb that tower you hear me
yeah but you said you can bring that you
said you could bring the tower down and
work on it that way so
okay
so you still have to you still have to
get up a little bit it doesn't come down
all the way to the ground right
yeah yeah yeah i've got a voice
vertical that i've been using but uh not
very good as you know
uh you need the beam obviously you don't
realize that
i can tell
what's the tower for ham radio yeah yeah
yep
funny i i i
i'm so i'm sorry peter i'm sorry to do
this to you but we're uh
believe it or not we're 30 minutes we've
done our
we're up to our 30 minutes
got any closing comments real quick doug
anything you'd like to add before i
close it now that i can think of no all
right so
how about we continue this story next
week peter
i appreciate it thank you again for uh
for
uh jumping in and and hanging out with
me for the for the last 30 minutes it's
hard to believe it's flown so quickly
uh yeah i heard you tell um i heard you
tell doug earlier
yeah yeah i don't think our clocks get
moved back until the first weekend in
november
so it's another week or so to go yet
yeah remind me because okay
yeah yeah good job sometimes yeah
no worries thank you
all right then have a great end uh rest
of uh sunday it's probably nearly the
end of the day for you peter but uh for
you doug
have a great end of the uh you know
afternoon
and thank you catch up thank you and
i'll catch up with everybody
take care bye bye