INMC News |
Autumn 1979 · Issue 4 |
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Unless you haven’t been reading these marvellous bits of prose we have been writing over the last months, you can’t have failed to notice that we have mentioned NAS-SYS 1 on occasion. NAS-SYS is of course the new monitor for Nascom 2. Now the Nascom 2 is almost with us (at the time of writing), and as Nascom have agreed (at least in principle) to release NAS-SYS on an unsuspecting public, we thought we ought to let you know what you are in for.
NAS-SYS is an entirely new monitor, and is not compatible with software written to run under the earlier Nasbug ‘T’ series monitors. However, NAS-SYS is compatible with Nascom 1 hardware.
So having plugged in our brand new NAS-SYS, and not having bothered to read the words that come with it (on the basis of “If everything else fails, try reading the instructions”), what do we find?
Well, the screen blanks as usual, but displays “NAS-SYS 1” on the top left of the screen with a cursor (which blinks on and off) at the start of the line below. There is no > sign as a prompt. The screen “scrolls” from the top downwards; when the cursor reaches the bottom line the display starts to scroll up. “
NAS-SYS shows it’s parentage as being “from B-BUG out of Nasbug T4”, as many of the commands have identical or closely similar functions with many detail improvements; the following are identical or similar to Nasbug:
| A xxxx yyyy | Arithmetic – in Hex |
| B xxxx | Breakpoint at x |
| C xxxx yyyy zzzz | Copy from x to y for z bytes |
| E xxxx | Execute at x |
| G xxxx yyyy zzzz | Generate a self-loading tape |
| I xxxx yyyy zzzz | Intelligent copy |
| K xx | Keyboard options select |
| L | Load (Nasbug tape or paper tape) |
| M xxxx | Memory examine/modify at x |
| N | Normal I/O resumed |
| O xx yy | Output y to port x |
| Q xx | Query (input from a port x) |
| R | Read a tape |
| S xxxx | Single step from x |
| T xxxx yyyy zzzz | Tabulate from x to y in increments of z |
| W xxxx yyyy | Write a tape from x to y-1 |
| X xx | External serial mode select |
The new commands are:
| H | Half duplex terminal mode |
| J | Jump to #FFFA – cold start BASIC |
| U | User specified I/O options select |
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