Monday, October 27, 2008
PEEKing and POKEing
My fiancee gave me one of these, and I've been playing with it a little. At first it was dead, and it wasn't the batteries; luckily, I was able to wake it up by reseating what I presume to be the RAM card.
It's older than me, and at first I thought a bit about the engineering: how come older technology, which is supposed to be bigger and clunkier, can be engineered into a form factor smaller than what we're fumbling around with these days? Quickly enough I remembered that today's handhelds have a much bigger screen, wireless radios, cameras, rechargeable batteries, and whatnot. This little PC-3 has a 1x24 character cell display and what may or may not be a serial port. If I'm lucky, the CPU has about the same power as the Intel 4004 (though twice the bits).
It has a BASIC interpreter, and it saves code as an unbroken series of commands. You can save multiple programs, though each program must have unique line numbers. It's interesting to get into the head of '80's tech-savvy financial workers - hack together some spaghetti code to speed up your calculations. You can map your own functions to the bottom keys on the keyboard, and the thing came with two overlays so you can keep track of what's what.
It has a port on the side to hook it into a printer and tape drive, so you can save your programs. Too bad I don't have one, if I try to write anything complex it'll be gone when I have to change the batteries. If it's a serial port it should be possible to hack together an interface for it, though that's somewhat outside of my abilities right now. On the other hand it'd be marginally easier than building a serial interface for the Nintendo DS.
I did however manage to write a little program using the information here. Makes a little man march across the screen, with very poor redraws. Proves that I can use it for more than just calculations, though. One of these days I'll have a full-blown text adventure engine running on it :D ¶ 2:23 AM
My fiancee gave me one of these, and I've been playing with it a little. At first it was dead, and it wasn't the batteries; luckily, I was able to wake it up by reseating what I presume to be the RAM card.
It's older than me, and at first I thought a bit about the engineering: how come older technology, which is supposed to be bigger and clunkier, can be engineered into a form factor smaller than what we're fumbling around with these days? Quickly enough I remembered that today's handhelds have a much bigger screen, wireless radios, cameras, rechargeable batteries, and whatnot. This little PC-3 has a 1x24 character cell display and what may or may not be a serial port. If I'm lucky, the CPU has about the same power as the Intel 4004 (though twice the bits).
It has a BASIC interpreter, and it saves code as an unbroken series of commands. You can save multiple programs, though each program must have unique line numbers. It's interesting to get into the head of '80's tech-savvy financial workers - hack together some spaghetti code to speed up your calculations. You can map your own functions to the bottom keys on the keyboard, and the thing came with two overlays so you can keep track of what's what.
It has a port on the side to hook it into a printer and tape drive, so you can save your programs. Too bad I don't have one, if I try to write anything complex it'll be gone when I have to change the batteries. If it's a serial port it should be possible to hack together an interface for it, though that's somewhat outside of my abilities right now. On the other hand it'd be marginally easier than building a serial interface for the Nintendo DS.
I did however manage to write a little program using the information here. Makes a little man march across the screen, with very poor redraws. Proves that I can use it for more than just calculations, though. One of these days I'll have a full-blown text adventure engine running on it :D ¶ 2:23 AM
