(PC-1211) Engineering format

[robve]

(05-11-2022 02:14 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Oh yes, I think I've seen that before. Very nice little hack. Haven't tried it on my 1360 to see if it'll work yet. Of course, I have approximately a gallon of 8 KB RAM cards, so I can just swap between a handful of those easily enough too.

Yep, RAM cards work well too.

The MultiPC machine program won't work on the PC-1360 without updating it to call the appropriate ROM routines. It uses a few ROM routine calls. In that respect the PC-1360 is slightly more complex to program in assembly since the routines reside in ROM banks. Switching banks isn't as easy as on the PC-E500 CPU that has a 20 bit address space.

I could perhaps write a new machine program to allow multiple BASIC programs to be used in a different way than MultiPC. This machine program I have in mind simply moves one of the earlier MERGEd BASIC programs on top that you select with a CALL, so it can be edited. Kind of like a Rolodex of BASIC programs from which you can pick one to work on. It is also possible to create a new (MERGEd) BASIC program on top to start writing a new BASIC program, without having to MERGE from cassette or serial. This should always work, because MERGE already supports multiple BASIC programs "stacked" (i.e. not really merging the BASIC lines as other BASIC dialects typically do). The BASIC program on top of the "stack" can be edited. I suspect that this machine program I have in mind will be small and won't need much ROM routine support, if any. Only the addresses of the BASIC start, BASIC end and the last MERGE address are needed, which all Sharp PC have in RAM (and on RAM cards) and those are well documented.

- Rob