Sharp PC-1211/TRS-80 PC-1 program tapes from Radio Shack

[Dave Britten]

Don't know if anybody saw that lot of 19 program cassettes that was on ebay a week or two ago, but that was me that bought them.

The tapes arrived today, and I got my equipment set up to dump them with Pocket Tools (Radio Shack Computer Cassette Recorder connected to my 15-year-old desktop which actually has a suitable line-in jack). I've exported the Golf Scoring & Handicapping tape's programs to text listings with no trouble. I still need to scan the accompanying manual.

Question: Are the plain text listings the best option, or should I try to export these to binary/img files as well? Not sure what everybody prefers to use. I'm going to try to get audio recordings, program listings, and manual scans onto archive.org, not sure if I need to include anything else.

The Golf Scoring & Handicapping program listings are attached to this post. These are the 19 tapes I have to process, all with original manuals. Might take me a little while.

- Banners
- Business Finance (2 tapes)
- Business Statistics (2 tapes)
- Calendars
- Engineering Math II
- Engineering Math IV
- Games I
- Games II (2 tapes)
- Golf Scoring & Handicapping
- Math Drill
- Personal Finance (2 tapes)
- Real Estate (2 tapes)
- Surveying (2 tapes)


  Golf Scoring & Handicapping Program Listings.zip (Size: 2.37 KB / Downloads: 14)

[toml_12953]

(05-17-2021 05:39 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  binary/img files as well? Not sure what everybody prefers to use. I'm going to try to get audio recordings, program listings, and manual scans onto archive.org, not sure if I need to include anything else.

The Golf Scoring & Handicapping program listings are attached to this post. These are the 19 tapes I have to process, all with original manuals. Might take me a little while.

I can only speak for myself but since I don't own a PC-1, the source is more valuable to me. I can easily adapt most PC-1 programs for use with other machines that run BASIC. Since these programs are so small, though, why not include both source code and binaries in the ZIP file?

[Dave Britten]

Alright, here's Golf Scoring & Handicapping complete with manual, binaries, text listings, and WAV files:

https://archive.org/details/trs-80-pocke...ndicapping

There's one zip file with the programs and PDF manual, and another with the WAV files. I'm still arguing with archive.org on getting the item formatted properly, so it might be in flux for a bit.

[Dave Britten]

Got a few more converted and uploaded:

Banners (Requires a printer)

Business Finance

Games

Games II

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Dave,

Thanks for scanning and posting the files. I have started going over them and see that some of the listings have errors in them. I'm assuming that the tape may have been bad at some locations. For example, the program listings for most of the programs in the games II pack have funny characters in the listings.

I plan to try to load the programs and see which run and which still have problems.

Maybe there are other people here that have correct listings. With the program listing corrected, it is easy to use the pocket tools to recreate valid wav files.

But I really appreciate you taking the time to try reading the tapes. And really appreciate the PDF's of the manuals.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[Dave Britten]

(06-13-2021 10:36 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Dave,

Thanks for scanning and posting the files. I have started going over them and see that some of the listings have errors in them. I'm assuming that the tape may have been bad at some locations. For example, the program listings for most of the programs in the games II pack have funny characters in the listings.

I plan to try to load the programs and see which run and which still have problems.

Maybe there are other people here that have correct listings. With the program listing corrected, it is easy to use the pocket tools to recreate valid wav files.

But I really appreciate you taking the time to try reading the tapes. And really appreciate the PDF's of the manuals.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

Huh, interesting! I hadn't noticed any when giving them a quick once over, and Pocket Tools didn't report any errors. Could you point me to an example? (If it's the € that you're referring to, I believe that's what Pocket Tools uses to represent the special exponent 'E' symbol. Also, I think Π is pi. EDIT: Yes, I just loaded BANDIT into my PC-3 to confirm, and this is correct.)

Also, thanks for reminding me to get off my butt and finish scanning the manuals...

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Hi Dave,

In the text file ACEY, look at line 15:

15 Y=√Π: INPUT "ENTER RANDOM NUMBER? ";Y

As you can see, Y= some garbage.

If I load it into a the PC-1251 emulator, it appears as

Y= LPRINT ~ SGN CLS : INPUT "ENTER RANDOM NUMBER? ";Y

I'm using the Pokecom GO emulator on my Android Tablet. You directly load
text files of the basic source into the emulator.

One little quirk with the PC-1251 emulator - it doesn't like the leading spaces before the line numbers. The funny thing is that the PC-1261 and PC-1350 emulators load the text file fine with the leading spaces. I'll have to send a note to the developer about the quirk with leading spaces. I'm currently checking each of the basic listings in all three emulators - 1251, 1261, and 1350.

The programs that you have posted were originally for the PC-1 pocket computer, but when I checked the Radio Shack Catalogs, I see that they list each of those program packs for both the PC-1 and PC-3. The PC-3 is equal to the PC-1251 which I'm using. So if It works on the PC-1251, it should work on the Radio Shack PC-1 and PC-3.

I have just finished checking the programs in the Business Finance Pack and all of those programs (at least when loading the text files) work fine on the Pokecom GO PC-1251, 1261 and 1350. I went through the manual and did all the examples.

Next step is to test the TAP files with the Olivier's GO125x, GO126x and GO1360 emulators. I have no way to test the wav files, but I'm assuming if the source listings run, then the wav generated from them should also work.

My first pocket computer was the Sharp PC-1211 which was the equivalent to the PC-1. Playing around with this is bringing back fond memories. Running the Finance programs made me remember how great it was to have a pocket computer to do interest calculators back then - especially since there really weren't any easy access to financial calculators.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[Dave Britten]

What text editor are you using? The files are in UTF-8 format, and this is what I see for line 15 of ACEY, with either Notepad or Notepad++ on Windows 10:

Code:

   15 Y=√Π: INPUT "ENTER RANDOM NUMBER? ";Y

The text files are mainly intended for someone hand-entering the programs - the .bin/.tap/.wav files should be relatively immune from encoding issues, and the emulator should be able to load from one of those formats reliably.

The PC-3/PC-1251 appears to be almost entirely compatible with programs for the PC-1/PC-1211, and I usually use my PC-3 to run programs for the older model. It's faster, and I have a compatible printer. I haven't fully tested if all of the array indexing and data loading/saving commands are identical though.

Also, here's Business Statistics & Marketing:

https://archive.org/details/trs-80-pocke...-marketing

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Quote:What text editor are you using? The files are in UTF-8 format

I'm just using a text viewer from File Commander.

Okay, I see what's happening. I need to recreate the bas files using the

-u 2asc

Doing that gives:

15 Y=SQR PI : INPUT "ENTER RANDOM NUMBER? ";Y

Quote:The text files are mainly intended for someone hand-entering the programs - the .bin/.tap/.wav files should be relatively immune from encoding issues, and the emulator should be able to load from one of those formats reliably.

Actually, the text files are very useful for use with the Pokecom GO emulator for Android. It's a very nice emulator. But it loads/saves as straight text files. It appears to be text files in msdos - no UTF-8. It does not use wav or tap files. So it should just be a simple matter for me to re-create the bas files in ascii format.

I'll try some of the tap files today with Olivier's emulators.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[Hollerith]

To Dave Britten

I have the following Radio Shack programs

Aviation
Business Finance
Business Statistics
Civil Enginerring
Electrical Engineering
Engineering Math I
Engineering Math II
Engineering Math III
Engineering Math IV
Games
Personal Finance
Statistical Analysis
Surveying

I gave more details in this thread

https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-16477.html

I have scanned the manual to pdf and recorded the Electrical Engineering programs to wav and decoded to ascii. Let me know if you would like a copy.

[Dave Britten]

Awesome! Of your collection, these are the ones I don't have:

Aviation
Civil Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Engineering Math I
Engineering Math III
Statistical Analysis

I'm going to try to scan a couple more of mine this morning. They're pretty short manuals, so they don't take too long.

[Dave Britten]

Got a couple more hot off the scanner:

Calendars
https://archive.org/details/trs-80-pocke...-calendars

Engineering Math II
https://archive.org/details/trs-80-pocke...ng-math-ii

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Quote:Actually, the text files are very useful for use with the Pokecom GO emulator for Android. It's a very nice emulator. But it loads/saves as straight text files. It appears to be text files in msdos - no UTF-8. It does not use wav or tap files. So it should just be a simple matter for me to re-create the bas files in ascii format.

I have given up on the Pokecom GO emulator. At first I really liked the ideal of it using plain text files for program savings/loading. Unfortunately, I have now discovered that it does NOT save special basic character commands correctly.

For example, spelling out PI and SQR works, but using the actual symbols for them does not. Saving a program that includes the PI symbol and then reloading it results in a bad command being inserted instead of the PI symbol. Likewise with square root and other symbols.

It's a shame. I really like the ideal of creating a text file, loading it in the emulator, and then editing the text file and reloading, etc.

So I'm back to using Olivier's emulators which are also great and actually have more features than Pokecom GO.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[Eddie W. Shore]

Thank you for scanning and making this available for all of us! Much appreciated!

[Dave Britten]

I finally got off my lazy butt and finished scanning and packaging the rest of these.

Engineering Math IV (Triangle solver)

Surveying

Real Estate

Math Drill

Personal Finance

[robve]

Thank you for your efforts to make these available!

For traders, the "Value of Stocks" program may not work so well (N is the number of stocks):

70 "A":M=N*3+15: IF N>18 PRINT "TOO MANY STOCKS!": GOTO 18

For the rest of us, no problem!!

If I'm not mistaken, the PC-1 (SHARP PC-1211) has 1,920 bytes RAM with 1,424 bytes available.

- The program (ST bin file) takes 1,062 bytes.
- (3*18+15)*7 bytes storage for 18 stocks = 483 bytes. Each variable and array A() entry takes 7 bytes.
- They cleverly start at M=15 meaning that 12 of the internal vars O to Z are used (84 bytes) since array A(M) maps onto them.
- Total max memory usage: 1,062+483-84 = 1,462

Won't this overflow before hitting the error message?

- Rob

[Dave Britten]

My pleasure! I enjoy archiving old software to keep it from being lost to time. There's plenty of effort being done to preserve games and major non-game releases, but less for for obscure stuff like this.

I loaded the stocks program into my PC-1211 to check your math. The MEM command reports "362STEPS" free with the program loaded, meaning it does in fact occupy 1062 bytes (1424-362), matching the size of the .bin file.

On this model, however, variables occupy 8 bytes each, not 7. The MEM command reports "45MEMORIES" available after the program is loaded. Each stock occupies three variables, meaning 57 variables are needed to hold 19 stocks. With the program storing the stocks in fixed memories O-Z, and then the flexible memories at A(27) and beyond, this gives 12 + 45 available memories, or 57 total. So just enough room for 19 stocks. If you try to add another stock when N>18 (i.e. N=19), you get the "TOO MANY STOCKS!" error, since memory is already full. A nice example of using every last byte of memory.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

I’ve been looking at what it would take to modify the programs so that they would run on more Pocket Computers. At present, the programs will run without modifications on the Sharp PC-1211 (Trs-80 PC-1) and the Sharp PC-125x (TRS-80 PC-3) I think it would be nice if they could also be run on the Sharp PC-126x and PC-1350/1360 series.

I do not own any of these pocket computers, but do have the following emulators on the Android:

Pokecom GO (Supports PC-1251, 1261, & 1350)
go125x (Supports PC-1250, 1251, 1255, & 1258)
go126x (Supports PC-1260 & 1261)
go1360 (Supports PC-1360 with various memory modules)

I also have PockEmul, but have never figured out how to load and save programs.
(If anyone knows how to load/save to PockEmul, please provide an how-to).


My concept would be to have a single text file of the basic source for each program. By using batch files and the Pocket Tools, this txt file could then be converted into either TAP files to load into Olivier GO emulators or converted to a text file that could be loaded into the Pokecom GO emulator. They could also be converted to WAV files for loading into actual pocket computers.

I have been corresponding with the Pokecom GO developer on some items with reading/writing the PI, Square Root and Exp symbols. At present, he’s using “\PI” and “\SQR” to represent the symbols in a text file. The latest update handles this correctly. A future update should correct the Exp symbol – probably to “\E”. With the future update, text files should be loadable/saveable across his emulators.


There are several major differences with the Basic and its operation between the PC-1211/125x and the PC-126x/1350/1360. One major difference is that since the 1211/125x only have single character variable names, they could do implied multiplication.

For example”

If A=5 and B=6, then you could just do AB to do multiplication between them. No need for the “*”.


I quickly learned that it not as easy as just adding a “*” between variables whenever they appear together in the source code. I tried that with the “REAL1” of the Real Estate software package. When running the same program examples from the manual against the original source and the modified source (where I had added “*” to get rid on the implied multiplication), I ended up getting a slightly different answer between the two on one of the examples.


After much research, I discovered that the calculation order of priority was different depending on whether implied multiplication was involved.

From page 162 of the PC-1251 manual:

Operator Priority
Operators on the SHARP PC-1251 are evaluated with the following priorities from highest to lowest:
1. Parentheses
2. Variables and Pseudovariables.
3. Exponentiation (^) when preceded by a multiplication which omits the operator.
4. Multiplication which omits the operator.
5. Functions
6. Exponentiation (^)
7. Unary minus, negative sign (-)
8. Multiplication and Division (*,/)
9. Addition and subtraction (+,-)
10. Relational Operators (<,<=,=,<>,>=,>)
11. Logical operators (AND, OR)

The fourth item refers to usage such as 2A or 5C(2) in which a multiplication is implied, but not shown.

The third item refers to the combination of this with exponentiation, such as 3A^3 or 5D^1.5. In these combined cases the exponentiation will be done first and the multiplication second.


When looking at the above, I see that Item 3 & 4 can really affect the order of calculation which might not be obvious when looking at a line of basic.


I ran into this on Line 240 of Basic program Real1:

240 N=LN (FR/PG+1)/LN (1+R)

If the above line is executed with
F=1, R=2, P=3, G=4

You get N= 1.403139956E-01


Now, if you blindly just expand the multiplication (which is what I had done), you get
240 N=LN (F*R/P*G+1)/LN(1+R)
Now N = 1.182658339 which doesn’t match the results of the original equation.

In the first instance, FR is Divided by PG = 2/12 = 1.66666667E-01

In the second, F*R is divided by P and then multiplied by G
F*R/P = 0.5 * G = 2


So original equation should be expanded to
N = LN (F*R/(P*G) +1)/LN(1+R)
whose results will now match the original equation.



One problem down. I wonder what I’ll run into next in trying to create a universal Basic listing that will run on several pocket computers.

I would appreciate any comments and suggestions. Plus let me know if there are other things I should be aware of.


73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[Valentin Albillo]

(08-08-2021 09:43 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  I wonder what I’ll run into next in trying to create a universal Basic listing that will run on several pocket computers.

I would appreciate any comments and suggestions. Plus let me know if there are other things I should be aware of.

This document might be useful.

A major problem is that the BASIC version of the SHARP PC-1211 only admits one array variable, single-dimension A(), which doesn't require dimensioning, and further its first 26 elements are overlapped with scalar variables A to Z, so that A(1) is the same as A and A(26) is the same as Z, and the same goes for the string versions, A$(), A$, Z$, which also overlap the numeric variables.

This often requires applying some sort of offset to array elements so that they don't collide with scalar variables. For instance, A(I+26) would ensure non-collision with A-Z for I=1,2,3,... Also, dealing with 2-dimensional arrays requires yet another offset to access rows and columns as elements of the 1-dimensional array A().

On the other hand, the PC-1350 BASIC version does allow 1- or 2-dimensional numeric arrays, with indexes from 0 to 255, and there's no overlap with scalar variables due to the fact that you can have more than one array, say A(10,10), H(30), etc. and can have many more distinct names because names aren't limited to a single character.

You can also have 1-dimensional string arrays and even specify the maximum number of characters for their elements, say DIM S$(30)*50 would allocate 31 string elements of up to 50 characters each, unlike the fixed 7-chars elements of the PC-1211's A$() array. Finally, you must explicitly dimension arrays using the DIM statement.

As you can see, this is vastly different from what the PC-1211 allows, so converting a PC-1211 program to run on a PC-1350, say, can be cumbersome and error prone if dealing with arrays, but likely possible. The reverse conversion from PC-1350 to PC-1211 might be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

Regards.
V.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Hi Valentin,

Quote:This document might be useful.

A major problem is that the BASIC version of the SHARP PC-1211 only admits one array variable, single-dimension A(), which doesn't require dimensioning, and further its first 26 elements are overlapped with scalar variables A to Z, so that A(1) is the same as A and A(26) is the same as Z, and the same goes for the string versions, A$(), A$, Z$, which also overlap the numeric variables.

Thanks for the document. Lots of useful information.

You're right about the PC-1211 arrays. I'll have to watch for that.

Quote:As you can see, this is vastly different from what the PC-1211 allows, so converting a PC-1211 program to run on a PC-1350, say, can be cumbersome and error prone if dealing with arrays, but likely possible. The reverse conversion from PC-1350 to PC-1211 might be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

Fortunately, all the programs that Dave was nice enough to scan in were for the PC-1211/125x series. At present I am only trying to create basic files that could be run on the 1211/125x/126x and 1350/1360. All of these PC's allow for Variables in the form of A( ). It would be much more difficult to convert the programs to PC-1500/PC-1600 and many of the other PC's if the program made a lot of use of the single array.

But I plan to keep an eye out for complications that may occur with the single arrays.

Thanks for the PDF and comments. I knew if anyone knew of other problems I might have, it would be you.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ