The monthly news magazine of the Tampa Bay Kaypro User's
Group and the DataCOM Super Systems(tm)
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News and reviews of programs, hardware, and peripherals for users
of microcomputers with CP/M, MP/M, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, or TurboDOS
operating systems.
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-==( DISCLAIMER )==-
Articles and reviews of microcomputers, hardware, software, and
other peripherals reflect currently advertised prices as released
by the distributors and are included here for YOUR INFORMATION
ONLY. The TBKUG/DataCOM Super Systems(tm) is NOT being paid
to advertise these products and we cannot be held
accountable for the actual retail price and/or performance
of said products.
(PRESTO! is a multi-function software supercharger by Eric Meyer)
vendor: Spectre Technologies, Inc.
22458 Ventura Blvd., Ste. E
Woodland Hills, CA 91364
price: $42.95 (US dollars) postpaid
From among several Sidekick-style programs for CP/M machines
that have appeared recently, I chose Presto because it was
reasonably priced, required no hardware modifications, and came
from an established firm that had already given us Rembrandt. The
program is available for all Kaypros and Osbornes; I'm running it
on an '84 Kaypro 2X with graphics but no clock.
Presto is four utilities: a notepad, a calculator, a
timekeeper, and a screen dumper. Overlays for each of these
functions reside on disk whence they are called up by a core
program that sits in high memory regardless of what other
software is being run. Say you are editing a document in
Wordstar. You hit ^\, a bell sounds, and in about three seconds a
window appears on the screen with the Presto menu. Another
keystroke calls up the utility you want, again inside a window
with a menu (optional for the notepad). Striking ESC twice
cancels back through the main menu to Wordstar and the screen is
refreshed, all within four seconds.
In CP/M 2.2 the console command processor is rewritten by
Presto, and there are some visible changes. DIR now lists files
in five columns instead of four. The user number appears at the
system prompt unless it is 0. TYPE strips the high bit from files
as it displays them, so that Wordstar document files will not
appear to contain Kaypro graphics or other strange characters.
Users of ZCPR do not have to give up their CCP for Presto's,
if they have the source code. The manual gives the necessary
instructions.
With 63K or less at their disposal, CP/M users must be
conscious of headroom, and the first question they are likely to
ask about a resident utility program is: how much memory does it
take? The promotional material for Presto encouragingly promises
that it will cost only "a few K," but the fact is that the
version for newer Kaypros occupies a whopping 11008 bytes of RAM.
Thus the transient program area on my machine is reduced to 46K
when Presto is loaded. If I want to add Xtrakey, even allowing
for the minimum of keystring space I'm left with only 42K. That
allows enough room to work with files of moderate length (300
lines or so) in Turbo Pascal or MBASIC - but it precludes
Wordstar from running at all.
As for disk space, on 1984+ Kaypros the minimum requirement
is 24K for the core program plus any one function. If you want
all four functions you need 44K, allowing for the 2K holding file
created by the notepad. The maximum requirement for the old
single-sided Kaypros is 36K. None of the files have to be on
your working drive: you can keep them all on drive B while
running Turbo Pascal on drive A, for example.
What Presto Does
First, the NOTEPAD function, which as the manual says is the
heart of Presto. One of my reasons for wanting the program was
that I found it a nuisance to load Wordstar for any little
writing job like putting a short note on a disk. (Yes, I know I
can do it with PIP, if I'm willing to forgo editing.) The notepad
does this and a lot more. It is a complete interface between
screen display, program, disk, and printer, and handles just
about any kind of exchange.
At all times Presto keeps a single page of 11 lines in disk
memory and this appears whenever the notepad is called up. The
whole page can be sent to a permanent file or the printer, or
individual lines can be sent to the screen at the last cursor
position (where they are fed into any program you are running).
Pages can be saved individually, or appended one to the other. As
well as exporting, you can import text from the screen or from a
disk file of any length. A key feature is the ability to scan a
file without importing it wholesale into the program you're
running. Once a file is opened you can scroll forward manually,
either line-by-line or in notepad pages, or have Presto search
for a text string.
Editing on the pad is done with a small set of Wordstar
commands for simple cursor moves, character deletion, insert
toggling, and insertion and deletion of lines. Other commands
will home the cursor, erase the notepad, or undo what has been
done since the last file operation.
The notepad does have its limitations. You cannot scroll
backwards, and there is no word wrap. Imported lines longer than
80 characters are truncated. Wordstar documents come in as non-
document files with no print codes; and I've had a problem with
occasional lines dropping out between pages when scrolling with
^C. At the system level Presto is not suitable for editing files
of more than its 11 lines, since even changing a date on a letter
would require a number of appended saves.
The CALCULATOR provides many features invaluable for the
programmer, including the logical functions (AND, OR, ones
complement, etc.) and operations in octal, binary, and
hexadecimal (worth the price of the program as far as I'm
concerned), as well as easy conversions from one base to another,
and conversions of ASCII characters to their numerical
equivalents and back again. It does not do roots or
trigonometrical functions. The operation is straight-forward, and
results can be written to the notepad or directly into the
program you're working on. Up to seven values can retained in the
calculator's memory for as long as Presto is loaded.
The TIMEPAD provides a calendar of any month in this century
and, on machines with clocks (various makes are supported), a
display of the current time, a timer, and an alarm that will not
only ring a bell but also print a message to the screen. The date
and time can be written to the underlying software or the
notepad. The calendar too can be written to the notepad, and
from there into a document; but I encountered some problems here.
When the calendar was transferred to the notepad, the cursor
would keep on printing blanks and finally the page would blank
out and some gibberish would appear on the pad. By experiment I
found that the only way around this, unaccountably, was to enter
the date on the notepad with the WN command from the timepad menu
before using the WC command.
Finally, the SCREEN DUMP function will send the entire
screen (i.e. what underlies the Presto window) to the printer or
a disk file, or create a graphics file for use with REMBRANDT.
Presto is a powerful program, well-presented and easy to
use. Programmers and technical writers are likely to find the
calculator function a godsend. The notepad is a convenient way of
saving or printing lines from the screen, creating hasty notes,
and finding needed information in other files. It is an
especially useful tool for programming in MBASIC.
Still, the hefty chunk of memory Presto requires must be
weighed against its many useful features. If you're in the habit
of using a key-definition program, you may find yourself
reluctant to part with it for the sake of being able to use
Presto with Wordstar. (This may or may not be necessary,
depending on your machine and key-definition program, and the
length of your keystrings.) But if you find you have to live
without Presto in word processing, you can at least use your
keystrings to emulate some of its notepad features - for which
see Dick Ezzard's article "Shades of Wordstar," available on
bulletin boards as SHADES.DOC.
-={ Review: Adaptec ACB-2070A IBM HDD Controller }=-
(c) 1986 by Steven Sanders
The Adaptec ACB-2070A Winchester disk controller is the highest
performance unit available today for IBM PC-XTs and clones. It
is also one of the best kept "secrets" in the business. I have
never seen this controller advertised anywhere and believe me,
before I bought my clone I checked every ad in The Computer
Shopper. The ACB-2070A is fully IBM hardware compatible with
PC-XT controllers and plugs directly into the chassis without
modification. It can handle two 5-1/4" or 3-1/2" ST506-type
Winchester disk drives and has its own DOS drivers for ease of
installation. The 2070A will handle drives with up to 16 heads
and 1024 cylinders and even supports wedge servo drives like the
Sysquest and Microscience International. Plus features like
power-on diagnostic and self-diagnostic testing to insure the
controller is functioning properly.
The ACB-2070A when used with RLL capable drives such as Seagate
ST-238, Tandon TM755, Vertex V150, Microscience HH-725,
Miniscribe 3425, Lapine, or Titan will yield approximately 50%
more formatted disk capacity. Yes, I said 50% more formatted
disk capacity! The ACB-2070A uses RLL (run length limited)
encoding with a 3:1 interleave factor which turns a 20mb drive
into a 30mb+ formatted drive. It performs this magic by using a
25 sectors-per-track density versus the 17 sectors-per-track used
by standard IBM controllers.
The ACB-2070A features a primary formatting utility resident in
ROM which is easily called up by using the DOS utility DEBUG.
There is no software diskette supplied with the drive as anyone
with DEBUG.COM (which comes with DOS) has access to the
formatting routines. The format program is self-prompting and
allows you to enter the locations marked bad (if any) from the
factory and any other bad spots will be mapped and locked out
during the format process.
You may also partition a single drive into many equal logical
units. The units can be up to 32mb each (a DOS restriction)
having a maximum of eight units for one or two physical drives.
If you do some quick arithmetic you will find that the DOS
restriction of 32mb is no longer valid, the 2070A will handle up
to 256mb of online storage.
MFM (modified frequency modulation) Encoding:
- 4 megabit per second (4.0 MHz) transfer rate on ST506/412
- 100 nanosecond data window (+/- 50ns from center)
2,7 RLL (run length limited) Encoding:
- 7.5 Megabit per second (7.5 MHz) transfer rate on ST506/412
- 66.6 nanosecond data window (+/- 33.3ns from center)
Not all ST506/412 interface Winchester drives meet these
requirements. Based on testing done by Adaptec engineers many
drives that use the thin film-plated and sputtered media meet
these requirements. Most drives using oxide media do NOT. An
example of an oxide media drive is the popular Seagate ST225
which can be used only with the MFM encoding.
As always, you the reader benefit from my prior experience
(and expense), I have just found the Adaptec controller bundled
with a Microscience 20mb hard disk drive for only $499.00 !!!
Contact: Worldwide Access, 6311-L Desoto Ave., Woodland Hills,
CA. 91367 1-800-826-3736, 10-day trial period.
-={ WHATSNEW in Public Domain }=-
All files mentioned here are readily available for download on
any of the DataCOM Super Systems' remote nodes.
[PC/MS-DOS Files]
LSWP103.LBR contains the latest DOS library-sweep utility which
allows you to manipulate .LBR type files. LSWEEP is an extract-
only utility, you can extract and optionally unsqueeze any or all
internal member files to the default drive or any other valid
drive. LSWEEP displays the library directory in circular fashion
like CWEEP or PCSWEEP, you simply move to the desired filename
and then enter the appropriate command letter.
PCSWP21.LBR is the newest DOS file-sweep maintenance program and
now features a built-in LSWEEP mode. PCSWEEP can squeeze and un-
squeeze files using the standard HUFFMAN encoding scheme
supported by most SQ utilities. PCSWEEP can also now extract and
extract/usq library file members with the addition of the "="
command. It operates the same way as LSWEEP using a circular
directory and is very easy to use. PCSWEEP supports DOS
directories and you can easily log into another dir or sub-dir
once it has been invoked. PCSWEEP should now run on any IBM-PC
or clone machine, earlier version were very IBM BIOS specific and
usually bombed on clones.
COMMANDO.LBR is also from the authors of PCSWEEP and is very
similar to a very enhanced 1DIR type program. COMMANDO allows
full manipulation of files on any drive or directory with simple
function key entries. You are shown a full-screen display with
many different windows showing disk space remaining, memory, date
and time, and sorted file listings. A file pointer can be moved
over any listed file to perform the desired function and
executable programs can be run by pressing the appropriate
function key. All of PCSWEEP's features are included plus you
get a really nice full color interactive screen display. This is
a super nice program, buy a legal copy from the authors!
QMDM20E.LBR is probably the best freeware modem program for IBM-
PC or true clones. Full support of all XMODEM and YMODEM
protocols except 1k packet which will (hopefully) be supported in
future versions (if everyone asks John nicely!) The 2.0E version
now also supports SCRipt files for auto logons and automatic file
transfers. The library has a multitude of pre-done .SCR(ipt)
files for logging into most major telecom services like CIS,
Source, FIDOs, BBSs, MCI-MAIL, and others. Other features
include an auto-dialing phone
directory that can also change the
communications parameters (baud, data bits, stop bits) on the
fly. On screen pop-up windows for all operations which are
easily configured to whatever colors suit your monitor best plus
you can also move them to another part of the screen if desired.
If you're not going to buy a commercial program such as MEX-PC,
then I would highly recommend QMODEM as a shareware alternative.
SEARCH.LBR is similar to the GLOBAL utility and allows you to
access any file in any directory once SEARCH has been defined.
SEARCH will replace the DOS PATH command and allow access to ALL
files, not just .COM, .EXE, or .BAT files - but ALL files.
SEARCH also works properly under DOS 3.x which is where GLOBAL
fails. SEARCH can be disabled or enabled with simple commands.
DISMOD.LBR contains a disk utility program similar to CP/M's DU
and allows full modification of data in any DOS file. DISMOD
uses full-screen editing to display the data record, the + and -
keys move you forward and backward through the file. Editing can
be done in either the HEX or ASCII display areas and does not
become permanent until you issue the "S"ave command. This is a
very useful addition to anyone's bag of DOS tricks and is much
easier to use then DEBUG for most ASCII search-and-replace
applications.
DSM206.LBR is the latest version of DOSAMATIC. This is a multi-
purpose DOS operating shell that initially comes up looking like
PC-BOSS or 1DIR but also allows psuedo multi-tasking of several
programs like MULTI-CH. You can switch back and forth between
different segments of memory running different programs. It's
main purpose is to manipulate files from a menu-driven
environment plus have all the usual DOS commands like TYPE,
CHDIR, CHKDIR, ERA, and REN available on the function keys. This
is the last version of this program to be put into the shareware
community. Version 3.00 is sent to users who purchase the $39
registered (and enhanced) version, and is well worth the $$$.
PROCOM23.LBR PROCOMM is another full-featured modem program with
many of the same commands as used by QMODEM. PROCOMM was written
in 'C' and is available as one large .EXE file unlike QMODEM
which is written in Turbo Pascal and consists of many external
overlays. PROCOMM features many different "exploding" pop-up
windows to set parameters, transfer files, dial numbers, and is
very easy to use. Once connected with a host system, the PgDn
key will initiate a file download sequence with full support of
XMODEM, YMODEM, Telelink, and Kermit protocols.
GAMES, GAMES, GAMES ... In the DOS-FUN file section we have an
excellent assortment of the latest color graphic games like
PACMAN, FLIGHTMARE, QUBERT, TIC-TAC-TOE, CHESS, MONOPOLY,
SPACEWAR, PINBALL, STRIKER, DIGGER, and many other to keep your
interest for hours. For kids of all ages!
[CP/M 2.2 Files]
KP-DB22.LBR is the latest (and probably last) version of my
Kaypro-specific multiple-file mailing list database & name,
address, and phone roladex program. During first-time
installation of DB you will now be prompted whether or not your
Kaypro has an Advent TurboROM installed. If you answer YES, then
the codes used to generate the status line on video Kaypros will
be handled differently to accomodate the altered BIOS used with
the TurboROM. I have added the "U" option to switch to any valid
CP/M user number 0 through 15 during program execution. Added
support for both the Kaypro 2/4 and Kaypro 10 Legacy clock boards
as each uses different PIO port addresses. And I added a
"W"ildcard string search option which will attempt to match a
string you input to a string anywhere in the name, address, or
city fields. This is handy when you can't remember someone's
name but you do remember what city they live in. All known bugs
have been removed and version 2.2 is fully compatible with .DAT
files created by version 2.1 and 2.0.
DZ-FEB86.LBR This is the newest update to the absolutely
incredible DAZLSTAR disassembler utility. DZ will disassemble
any CP/M file and gives you an on screen display almost exactly
like Wordstar. Help menus on top (in inverse if supported), then
two windows below with HEX, ASCII, and opcodes. You can change
the size of the display windows for HEX or code or do away with
one or the other altogether. Can dump the disassembled code into
a diskfile and build a symbol table, and much, much more. This
new version features an install program with many of the most
popular terminals pre-defined for a simple "pick the menu letter"
installation. This is not just for hackers!
BD02.LBR is a long-overdue update to the essential FINDBAD
utility for locating bad sectors on disks and locking them out.
BD goes FINDBAD one better by also showing which filename(s) were
affected by a locked out sector. BD will work on any floppy or
hard disk drive being used under CP/M 2.x.
FINREP22.LBR Eric Gans' Find & Replace utility that is much
faster then the ^QA of Wordstar and offers many more options such
as: wildcards in the search string, wildcard filenames, can have
hex and control codes in the replace string, and even works on
object (.COM) files as well as text files. All of it's command
parameters can be fed in by a SUBmit file to fully automate the
process if desired.
WINDEX21.LBR Indexes Wordstar document files with lengths up to
9,999 pages and with up to 254 key words. Many improvements
above and beyond the ability of MicroPro's STARINDEX program.
This is just another example of Eric Gans' fine CP/M utilities.
B29V301.LBR is a NEWSWEEP look-alike/work-alike disk maintenance
utility that now even has LSWEEP features added. You can copy,
print, delete, and rename files either in single or multiple
modes. B29 now also has the ability to extract, view, or print
library file members much the same as LSWEEP. The only known bug
with version 3.01 is with the "N" command for changing a file's
user number assignment. It does not seem to work right on hard
disk drives but is OK for floppy-only systems like K4'84s.
CHG11.LBR CHG is a small utility that allows you to change a
file's user number assignment or unerase a file. This is a great
utility for hard disk owners as you can move a file from one user
area to another of the same drive without the need or delay of a
physical copy. You can also specify a filename and a user number
to restore a previously erased file.
COMP-DIR.LBR CDIR is another handy utility for hard disk or
floppy-based system owners, it will compare the directories of
two disks and show duplicate filenames. The standard version is
set to compare diskette A to diskette B and the Kaypro 10 version
will let you compare any drive user area of the hard drive to the
user 0 area of the floppy drive. Great way to find out what you
have already backed off the hard drive to the floppy drive.
CRUNCHLZ.LBR Here's a new kind of CP/M file squeezer utility
that compresses files smaller then can be obtained by HUFFMAN-
encoded files. CRUNCH uses a different kind of alogrythm to gain
a superior compression ratio. This is the scheme being used in
the DOS archive program ARC51.EXE and is now available for CP/M
users as two very small (2k each) utilities.
TYPELZ.LBR This is the first of the new utilities for use with
CRunched files. TYPELZ can display any ASCII CP/M file whether
it be normal uncompressed form or compressed either with SQueeze
or CRunch. TYPELZ will display the file in paginated form,
pausing after 24 lines. You can advance a single line by
pressing the spacebar or an entire page by hitting RETURN.
EGUTIL50.LBR I have already mentioned the FINREP and WINDEX
utilities by Eric Gans, EGUTIL50.LBR is a collection of all of
his latest CP/M utilities. There are many Kaypro 10 (hard disk)
specific utilities in this library plus a wrath of others usable
by anyone running CP/M 2.2 or ZCPR3.
CSWEEP.LBR CSWEEP is a command-mode version of NSWEEP, it does
not have an interactive mode but rather is operated strictly from
the commandline. CSWEEP fully accepts wildcards and can move
files from one user area to another, much easier to use then PIP.
SSTAT19.LBR Replacement for the standard STAT command plus it
has a circular directory display that easily allows you to set
and reset file attribute bits. Inverse video display for
terminals that support it like the newer Kaypro models.
DDRAW-20.LBR The much awaited release of Dan Griffith's graphic
editor for video Kaypros - the complete source code in Turbo
Pascal is now available. Lots of super routines in the source
code that can be used by Turbo hackers to enhance other programs
using graphic screen routines.
-={ Until Next Month ... }=-
That's about it for another month. Looking at the number of new
CP/M programs available I'm reminded of the phrase, "Rumours of
my death are greatly exagerrated."
