While waiting for the arrival of parts for the dTALK project I am going to upload and archive some of the programs from the past. Most of these programs saw the light of day but how much light is questionable.

sdump.zip

SDUMP.ZIP contains SDUMP11.ACC and SDUMP11.M65

SDUMP11.ACC – is an accessory program that will print the screen display to a printer capable of printing graphics. Its origin is from the “The 49 Second Screen Dump” in Compute!'s Second Book of Atari.

To use, put SDUMP11.ACC on your Diamond boot disk. Diamond only allows a limited amount of memory for accessories so you may need to rename other accessory programs to deactivate them.

Now when you boot diamond SDUMP 1.1 will appear under “Desk” in the drop down menu. Just click on SDUMP1.1 and it will send the screen to your printer. There was not enough room for error checking so be sure the printer is on and ready to go.

This is a scan of a desktop printout make on a Star NX-1000 printer and 850 interface.

SDUMP 1.1 fixes an annoying bug that was in the first version.. When the a computer sent the byte $92 to the printer, the printer thought it was the end of buffer and stopped printing the rest of the line. To keep this from happening, when ever a byte = $9B, a $9A is sent to the printer. If you examine the next scan of a print out you will notice there is a missing pixel in the file icon, just above the A. If you notice that a bit is missing, this may be the reason.

An accessory will be available to use any time the drop down menu is active and on the screen. People have reported using it to print out the desktop and to make screen dumps in Diamond Write. The accessory can also be utilized with the VIEW-8 program (used to view Graphic 8 pictures saved in 62 sector format). The following scan is an interface for the memocom robot created with the Graphics Master program having been loaded by VIEW-8.

At this time, I will make no claims that SDUMP will work with BASIC programs. For the moment, it seems that the ways of the Diamond accessories have been lost to the dark side of my memory. There maybe problems when SDUMP and the BASIC link program use the same memory in Page 6. I won't know(or care) until there is a BASIC program that uses drop down menu.

I now have the parts for the dTalk project.