Patches to Microsoft Basic K-1008-2L MTU

Added to the MTU pages:Patches to Microsoft Basic K-1008-2L sources and binaries, ready to run!

Micro Technology Unlimited MTU pages enhanced

Dave Plummer (Dave’s Garage) received lots of documents on the MTU products with his KIM-1 in a cage system and scanned them for us.

Dave Williams (devilishdesign, vintagetech) has a MT-130, a standalone 6502 system sold by MTU with MTU cards and also scanned documents and imaged floppies.

On the internet I also found a stash of MTU products documents for the PET computer, like PET versions of the K-1008, a KIM-1 bus adapter and more.

All this made me add pages to my website, devoted to MTU. Special attention to the genius behind MTU, Hal Chamberlin. Several of his articles about music and microprocessors and a clean scan of his book Musical Applications of Microprocessors .

One of the documents is the “K-1008-2L Patches to Microsoft BASIC”. Software source of the integration of the text and graphic routines into Microsoft Basic. I already did a simple integration of the K-1008 as terminal into Basic with the Graphics Software package SDTXT and VMSUP, so I have already a lot of the code. So this source wil be typed in also!

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New KIM-1 info and more

Added again some KIM-1 information!

MDT 650 photos (John Feagan)

Scans from the Commodore International Historical Society (Dave McMurtrie):
KIM-1 Schematic Poster alternative scan (Dave McMurtrie)
Johnson Computers and McShane brochures
MOS Newsletters and brochures
Microsoft Basic for KIM-1 alternative scan
KIM-1 ROMs source listing scan
KIM-1 DATA1-K assembler manual (incomplete)

MTU K-1008 Visable Memory

All about the MTU K-1008 Visible Memory: documents, programs, images, videos and replica, you find it here.
The MTU K-1008 is an 8K memory and video display board. Part of the MTU family of card cages and RAM/ROM boards, around 1978 for KIM-1, SYM-1, AIM 65. Later also for Commodore PET systems.

I have some K-1008 information on paper as Fall Catalog and K-1008 User manuals of MTU, the listings in the Graphics software Package and hires photos of the board.

Triggered by Dave Plummer, who owns a K-1008 and made some demo programs I added this spring the K-1008 as peripheral to the KIM-1 Simulator.
A basic working version, with memory settings as the original. A 6502 program in the simulator could fill the video display.
Dave made nice youtube videos about his KIM-1 system with MTU cards in a card cage, see Dave’s Garage.

Then Eduardo Casino, of KIM-1 Replica fame, started to design a replica, including an expansion bus. He motivated me to enhance the Simulator.

Eduardo also OCR’ed and typed in the Graphics Software Package programs for the MTU K-1008. I played with the sources and coupled the text display programs to Microsoft KB9 Basic.

He made a quick and dirty binary image to show on the K-1008 video display. I took his idea and added a facility to the Simulator to load any image to the K-1008.
This requires the use of GIMP, the image handling program, to create intermediate black and white 320×200 files as ‘C header files’.
These C header file can be imported in the Simulator and shown on the display. A command line utility LoadK1008 converts these C header files to a binary image in K-1008 format.

All this required a page with all the K-1008 information: documents, programs, images, videos and replica, you find it here.

Update 10 september: Eduardo Casino has made available his work on the Graphics Software Package: OCR’ed manual, listings, sources, binaries made with 64tass assembler.

KIM-1 Simulator 1.3.0 -> 1.3.4

KIM-1 Simulator 1.3.x adds the improvements from the 1.2.x branch to the V1.1.8 branch.

NEw improvements also: bundled with the also recently updated Convert 8 bit Hex formats program and the SST switch now turns on the built-in debugger!
1.3.1 Adds refresh of K-1008 memory with File/tapeload and debugger refresh.
1.3.2 Load C header image files into K-1008 video display, and command line utility to convert C header file to K-1008 binary
1.3.3 Adds a more realistic aspect ratio variant of the K-1008 display besides the simpler and therefore faster ones.
V 1.3.4 August 31 Read text file to console improved, improved K-1008 settings

Have fun with this release and as always: keep me posted of wishes and bugs.

You may ask, but this will never be more than a simulation and not a real KIM-1 emulator, many First Book of KIM programs that manipulate the LED displays will not work in this simulator architecture. TTY programs work well. Use the debugger!

Convert8bit hex V2.4

The Convert 8bit hex formats utility has reached version 2.4.

Bugs fixed:
– one off papertape save fixed
– KIM tape format more robust
New save format: Define Byte. assembler formatted .byte $XY, prefix text user defined.

The last book of KIM

On his blog Nils has posted for download ‘The last book of KIM’:

Ich habe in letzter Zeit Energie in dieses kleine (auf Deutsch geschriebene) Heftchen gelegt.

Es ist allen Enthusiasten gewidmet, denen, die es werden wollen, und denjenigen, die es waren. Es soll einen in der Computerhistorie bislang unterrepräsentierten Mikrocomputer ins rechte Licht rücken und seine Rolle bei der Entwicklung hin zum modernen Heimcomputer beschreiben.

Viel Spass

Webdoktor

Funkschau 1979 KIM-1 AIM 65 6502 articles

Funkschau 1979 KIM-1, AIM 5 and 6502 articles. German, scanned by Matthias, SBC at VzEkC e. V. forum

Original KIM-1 ROMs reproduced

I have two sets of KIM-1 ROMs. One set is the original KIM-1 dump by Dwight Elvey, in which the filler bytes (unused locations in the ROM) are filled with $00.
Alas the dumps by Dwight have a couple of bit errors and the NMI vector is wrong.

The other set is the result of assembling the source in which the assembler used $FF for the filler bytes. It makes sense to use $FF, since EPROMs can be programmed byte for byte ‘1’ later to ‘0’s.
Functionally the filler byte is irrelevant, so I present here the ROMs with filler byte 00 (corrected Dwight original KIM-1 dumps) and filler byte FF (assembly result).

6530-002 $1C00-$1FFF, filler bytes $FF 6530-002 ROM
6530-003 $1800-$1BFF, filler bytes $FF 6530-003 ROM

6530-002 $1C00-$1FFF, filler bytes $FF 6530-002 ROM
6530-003 $1800-$1BFF, filler bytes $FF 6530-003 ROM

Small update to KB-9 V1.2 and KB-6 V1.2

Small update to KB-9 V1.2 and KB-6 V1.2: the NULL command is back, to ensure binary compatible tokenized saved Basic programs.
Now the USR location is the same in KB-9 V1.1 and V1.2, 2040 and 2041 (see Nils’ blog KIM-1 Basic and the use of assembler subroutines – netzherpes).

In KB-6 V1.2 it is 8254, 8255.

If you downloaded these , please do it again