Robcfg: Added categories

2015-04-21T11:34:30Z

Added categories

Robcfg: /* Software */ Added Copycat and Diskup

2015-04-20T17:51:41Z

‎Software: Added Copycat and Diskup

Robcfg: Added Peter Mooney's memories of softsystems

2013-11-02T20:21:49Z

Added Peter Mooney's memories of softsystems

Alastair at 22:36, 1 April 2009

2009-04-01T22:36:38Z

Alastair: moved SOFTSYSTEMS to Softsystems: Capitalisation change.

2009-04-01T22:29:03Z

moved SOFTSYSTEMS to Softsystems: Capitalisation change.

Admin: Created page with 'ZAPPER'

2009-03-18T15:31:17Z

Created page with 'ZAPPER'

New page

ZAPPER

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:34, 21 April 2015
Line 56:		Line 56:
	* [[Discup]]		* [[Discup]]
	* [[Zapper]]		* [[Zapper]]
		+
		+	[[Category:Documentation]] [[Category:History]] [[Category:Software]] [[Category:Company]] [[Category:Software_publishers]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:51, 20 April 2015
Line 53:		Line 53:

	== Software ==		== Software ==
		+	* [[Copycat]]
		+	* [[Discup]]
	* [[Zapper]]		* [[Zapper]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:21, 2 November 2013
Line 1:		Line 1:
−	[[Zapper]]	+	Softsystems is the name used by the Northwest TRS80 user group to publish utilities for the Dragon.
		+
		+	Peter Mooney, one of the leading members of the group, told us the story behind Softsystems:
		+
		+	I was an early purchaser of the Dragon 32. I added the DragonDos
		+	cartridge knocked up some disk drives and a friend cloned the cartridge for his
		+	own disk system. We added extra memory, built the Maplin interface and RS232
		+	boards and linked them to TRS80 Model 1s and IBM PCs.
		+
		+	Having members with CoCos to hand and several friendly Tandy RadioShack
		+	managers in the group we had access to technical stuff, magazines and
		+	occasional software and hardware goodies.
		+
		+	With a wide range of club member's machines to support and a monthly club
		+	magazine to produce we faced a challenge accepting submissions in a wide
		+	variety of formats - hand written, tape and disk - both text and program code,
		+	and produced on different machines. One of my early efforts was to read files
		+	from the Model 1 and IBM disks and CoCo disks and tapes which taught us a lot
		+	about Disk formats, directory structures and FATs. On the Model 1 there was an
		+	invaluable piece of software called SuperUtility. A number of our Dragon disk
		+	and memory reading utilities were modelled on this and bundled into Zapper.
		+
		+	Translating tokenised Basic between machines or transposing CoCo and Dragon ROM
		+	jump table addresses was another job. Another frustration was the location of
		+	the DragonDOS jump table at &h0600 which prevented some tape based MC games
		+	from running. It was a simple task to write a utility that could be appended to
		+	a tape based game and move the code up and down away from the 0600 page.
		+
		+	But with a 64k machine (whether an upgraded Dragon32 or a true Dragon64) there
		+	didn't seem to be any reason why the Dos jump table couldn't be moved to the
		+	top of memory so that graphics page location were identical on 32 and 64
		+	machines. My friend Alan Butler wrote it and we called it DiskUp. Come to that,
		+	with the Dragon ROMs copied into RAM we could try to get the Tandy ROM images
		+	running (substituting alternative vectors where necessary, parallel printer
		+	code, alternative keyboard decode, etc.). We had quite a job but managed to get
		+	it to fit in the available space and called it TROM.
		+
		+	Alan had SuperdosE on his machine which had some nice features - so we hacked
		+	Dragon Dos to match and called it HighDos. I seem to remember cloning a Cumana
		+	DOS too - or was that on a BBC?
		+
		+	These utilities were all free to Group members but I don't know that anyone
		+	other than us actually used them. We weren't IT developers - just enthusiasts,
		+	and most of the time there were just 3 of us hacking Dragons but we offered our
		+	code under the name SoftSystems. We all had full time jobs to do (well I was a
		+	teacher at the time so I suppose I had a little more time) and we had other
		+	common interests like sailing. I'm not even sure whether I still have all the
		+	code any more and I know that Alan sold his Dragon soon after he got an AtariST
		+	so I will have to review my disks when I set up the Dragon again. I know I had
		+	piles of listing paper somewhere with my dissassembly and annotation of the
		+	various alternate ROMs but I couldn't find it last week. I think lots of stuff
		+	got binned when I moved from Manchester to N Wales where I am now.
		+
		+	== Software ==
		+	* [[Zapper]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:36, 1 April 2009
Line 1:		Line 1:
−	~~ZAPPER~~	+	[[Zapper]]