80-Bus News

was going on, and being a self confessed novice at machine code he admitted he didn’t have a clue, and as far as he could see the program didn’t work. What he had done was attach LEDs to the Sinclair I/O connector, which he believed to be some sort of I/O port, and was trying to switch the LEDs by machine code instructions which he took to be the machine code equivalent of POKEs to a given address. As this was his first attempt at machine code programming (I considered it a bit ambitious for a first attempt) he was somewhat disappointed when nothing particular happened.

Anyway, as I have about as much experience with the ZX81 as I have at piloting a 747 (a real one that is, no I can’t land the natty Sinclair Spectrum Flight Simulation program either, and that’s supposed to be a light plane although a couple of experienced pilots who have tried it assure me it’s more like a 747), this was all Dutch to me [Ed. – apologies to our readers in Holland!]. It seemed to me somewhat unlikely that the ZX81 I/O connector was controlled by some sort of latched I/O device, and I guess it is nothing more than a partially decoded address/​data bus. However, he assured me that he could flash the LEDs in sequence by poking a 2-4-8-.. sequence to a particular address in BASIC, so why could he not do the same thing in machine code. It was then that a glimmer dawned. The ZX81 in it’s text display mode under its own BASIC is about as fast as a superannuated snail, so if anything was happening to the LEDs it was probably the speed (or rather the lack of) at which the program ran which allowed anything to be visible. I suggested that he take his BASIC program and introduce a FOR – NEXT delay loop to see if the rate of flashing the LEDs was reduced, and he went away to try it. A day or so later we came across each other again, and he confirmed that the FOR – NEXT delay did indeed slow down the LEDs, so how to do this in machine code.

I explained that the BASIC FOR – NEXT loop simply made the processor waste time by counting, and so it is the same in machine code. The only difference is that whereas the BASIC loop may only be counting a hundred or so for a delay of about a minute (see what I mean, brother is the ZX81 slow), at the machine code level, the few hundreds have to be considered as a few millions instead. All he wanted now was a machine code equivalent to the BASIC FOR – NEXT delay loop. So I gave him the very simple counting loop shown in program 2 (adjacent). Now I know it’s simple, but there are many around who still haven’t mastered (or even tried) the machine code end of the business, so I offer it here for all those who have been searching for a delay loop of between about a half second to about two minutes. (That includes the guy who wrote the time delay routine in the PLUTO colour card demo program, it’s awfully complicated to. do such a simple little thing.) I have since heard that the chap now has his LEDs flashing away in machine code and because of this modest success is now only too keen to progress to other things.

A Nascom 1 ‘feature’.

That story has very little to do with Nascom is but is at least the sort of level applicable to an unexpanded Nascom 1. The second story very definitely concerns the Nascom 1 and one of its shortcomings. Some months ago the shop supplied a Mr. Rudd Thornton of Largs with a Gemini GM812 IVC and a SYS7 to run it on his CP/M system. Well from that order it was easy to predict the system the gentleman has, a Nascom 2 with a Henelec/​Gemini G805. Imagine our dismay when he phoned to say it didn’t work because he has a Nascom 1. The problem was easily pinned down to the ambiguous I/O decoding of the Nascom 1 (a design fault or feature depending upon which way you look at it). Mr. Thornton has the G805 plugged into the PIO on the Nascom, and as soon as the IVC was plugged in the whole lot predictably stopped working. None of the easy alternatives were at first sight agreeable. Telling Mr. Thornton to scrap the idea and accept a refund was out as I can’t stand the tears and reproachful looks from the boss when I ask him for a refund cheque. Similarly, it wouldn’t be fair to ask Mr. Thornton to cough up another £60 odd quid to fit a Nascom I/O card which would