Monday, February 2, 2015

Card reader interface working, reading in decks

Busy day today at work plus I seem to have wrenched my back while fighting with the accursed shed, which his slowing me down. Still, I had success on a couple of fronts.

NEW KEYPUNCH INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT

I settled on a means of displaying the card columns just under the horizontal scroll bar, implemented the code and will be doing a bit more testing before considering it complete. There are some changes to make to allow the IBM 1130 simulator format cards to display the non-ASCII glyphs for the cent sign and logical not character. A few other conversion changes to make, but essentially this is just tweaking

READ TAPE OF 1130/1800 SOURCE CODE

The tape arrived this evening, in good shape. I will load it on a friend's tape drive and see what we have on the reel.


QUICK BUILD OF BRIAN'S CARD READER INTERFACE

I found one other wiring error, corrected it, and got the whole process working flawlessly. A friend wanted the source code for the ECAP program for the 1130, a circuit analysis/simulation application. I had the cards, four and a half boxes (each box holds 2,000 cards) worth, and processed them through the interface.

Video of cards being read


REPAIR OF VECTREX GAME CONSOLES FOR DGM

I completed one of the two console repairs and it is ready to return to the Digital Game Museum. The other one has some problem causing strange scrambled video output. Once I diagnose what component is causing the problem, I should be able to correct it.

2 comments:

  1. Cent and not are in ASCII ISO8859-1, A2 and AC.

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  2. Depends on how the file is encoded and stored - on my Windows PC it becomes a UTF-8 encoded Unicode file, but that makes a difference in how it is read and managed, compared to reading each character as a single unsigned binary byte and evaluating the characters with the high bit set as ISO-8859-1 values.

    The whole world of code pages, encodings and the like is a messy one. Unicode adopts the ISO8859-1 characters and basic ASCII as the beginning of its range of characters. Thus these two are 00A2 and 00AC in unicode, same value as A2 and AC.

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