Thread: Basic
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Old 10-15-2007, 06:20 AM
Grant Stockly Grant Stockly is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Geoff Harrison View Post
I tried a maximum of 9600 and was losing characters due to the lack of handshaking. I'm going to order another Molex connector and pins and make a proper cable, but that's probably about a week away. I think you have mentioned before that Tera Term allows inter-character delays, so that should be another way to slow down the transmission to allow the Altair to keep up at 9600. However, the only configuration I have tested with my 2SIO card is 4800,8,n,1, no handshaking.
I forgot about that! I've used that to "type" in basic programs to the Altair. You WILL need a delay for line EVEN with 300bps!

There are two kinds of delays in terra term. Character and Line. Hyperterminal has the same thing. It is kind of annoying that these delays are not available for telnet connections, but that doesn't matter for us.

Click the "Setup" menu and select "Serial Port". Look for the "Transmit delay" frame at the bottom.

I think at 9600bps I used 5-20ms for character and 200-300ms per line.

There are ways to optimize speed based on the echo from the Altair, and I will try to perfect those methods later and release a special Altair basic transfer program. The Altair tokenizes basic lines after a LF. Not all basic lines take the same amount of time, and it seems as memory gets filled up it takes longer (what??? ). Any way...I myself would prefer to bootstrap basic at 9600bps with a delay than run at 4800bps all the time.
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