Thread: Basic
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Old 10-14-2007, 07:04 PM
Geoff Harrison Geoff Harrison is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phe View Post
Anyone know how to load Basic?
Paul,

I just finished loading basic into my 4k Altair with a 2SIO board using an XP machine as the terminal. I'll post a longer explanation of what works and what doesn't and why later today or tomorrow, but in the mean time, here's what should work.
  • Get a copy of Tera Term. You'll be sending a pure binary file to the Altair and Hyperterm can't do that. I downloaded Tera Term from here.
  • Get a copy of the 4k Basic3.2 tape image from Rich Cini's Altair emulator. For convenience I have put a copy of it here.
  • Make sure you can communicate with the Altair 2SIO card. I think you said in an earlier 88-2SIO thread that you got that working, so you should be good to go. NOTE: due to cable limitations I am using only RD, TD, & GND, so I am not using handshaking and the fastest I can send data to the Altair without dropping bytes is 4800. If you have a full cable, it should run faster, but I am unable to test that until I fix my cable.
  • Set up Tera Term to use 4800, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit.
  • Toggle the following bootloader into the Altair. This comes from the Altair Extended Basic manual and is set up specifically for 4k Basic3.2
    Code:
    000:  076 003 323 020 076 025 323 020 041 256 017 061 032 000 333 020
    020:  017 320 333 021 275 310 055 167 300 351 013 000 000 000 000 000
    Check it carefully. If it doesn't correctly load Basic it will probably trash itself and you'll have to enter it again.
  • Set address switches A11 and A10 on, all others off. Hit reset, hit run.
  • On Tera Term, go to File->SendFile, select the Binary checkbox, navigate to the 4kbas32m.tap file you downloaded above, hit Open. Tera Term will display a status box showing the number of bytes sent.
  • When the file finishes transferring, if all went well you'll see something like "Memory Siz@@" on the main Tera Term screen. Before you type anything else, go to Setup->SerialPort and change the word length from 8 to 7. Then you can hit enter and answer the rest of the Basic startup dialog questions. You should finally end up with something like
    Code:
    973 BYTES FREE
    
    BASIC VERSION 3.2
    [4K VERSION]
Good luck. Let me know if you have any problems or questions.

Geoff.

Last edited by Geoff Harrison; 10-16-2007 at 08:54 PM.
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