Gary from OPA

Looks like downloads are working again. Many thanks for your quick response and service. Hopefully the rest of your week goes smoothly.

The worse was went I sent out postal letters from federal jail, I had to use USPS there was no other options. I found I had to write like 5 to 9 letters at once to force it get sorted and sent out, or it would just sit there for weeks, and then writing to Canada would take 3 months to arrive and writing to Dominican Republic would take 10 months, within the USA it was about 2 weeks once it got started.

Once Wayne Gretzky moved to LA Kings it was officially over for Canadian Hockey. Well at least we have curling still. The Yankees will never steal that from us Canucks.

That seems to occur with my other releases as well. Hopefully they fix it. You can find the files on my GitHub and on my Patreon pages. Just check no files download at all even in other threads here. Hopefully @Albert can fix this issue.

Canada post already sucks now they are thinking of doing mail only every 2 or 3 days. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/05/07/canada-post-exploring-cutting-daily-delivery/

Saturday Night Bingo by 9T9 Assembly Sig Here is another great sample of TMS9900 Assembly Source Code, this was originally a disk release program by Texas Instruments in Extended Basic in 1980, and has been converted to Assembly most likely around year 1989 by the 9T9 Assembly Sig and Cecil G. Chin and now I have released it with permission to my O.P.A. GitHub and here on AtariAge as usual, and is a good example on how to use RND numbers, the PRINT device, SPEECH and VDP Sprites in Assembly. Enjoy! -=(GaryOPA)=- ************************************************* * SAT-N-BINGO v1.00.80.TIXB by 9T9 Assembly Sig * * * * Saturday Night Bingo * * * * (c)1980 By TI & Cecil Chin & 9T9 Assembly SIG * * * * Released on: May 8st, 2024 by Gary Bowser * * Uploaded to: TI99.AtariAge.com via GaryOPA * * Mirrored to: gary99opa GitHub Repositories * * * * BINGO-S -> The Assemble Source Code File * * BINGO-MNE -> Saturday Night Bingo Assembly * * BINGO-SUB -> Commonly Used BLWP/BL Library * * BINGO-TXT -> Text Block after the DataArea * * * ************************************************* GITHub Release Link: https://github.com/gary99opa/sat-n-bingo SATNBINGO-Source-Files-Only.zip SATNBINGO.dsk SATNBINGO_1_00_80_TIXB_GaryOPA_05_08_2024.zip

Well James had good memory as well. Sadly, so do I. But the issue the others in this thread have its that it makes it harder for others to pick up the work once the person leaves. which i can understand, but that can also be solved with having very good docs on how to use the program, for example if its api and how to interface to it.

finally tried out the 80col versions, looks nice, but sadly i don't have a SAMS card, so i can only display files, any attempt at moving or copying data fails horribly. hopefully, my sams card will arrive soon. -- too bad it doesn't support other memory options or make use of the extra vdp ram (which i know isn't available on the f18a). also for some strange reason, all the dm2k programs, including the du2k and the cfhdx transfer program i got to remember NEVER to use the Q for QUIT feature, as it fucks up on exiting and a few times it took the Horizon ramdisk with it, if it was the last device i was using. -- this has been issue for a while now with these programs not sure why.

Personally, I wish Canada was treated better by both eBay and the USA sellers. There so many nice things which are not available all because both sides hate dealing with the Great White North.

Like I mentioned earlier stackoverflow is important to AI for their LLM training data.

Well that's your narrow view and opinion, but if you had work along side him like I did and see how he operate and was able to complete tasks that were needed, you would have different opinion.

It might apply to some or most but not all. I worked alongside James on many projects and he was one of the best not talentless at all. He understood the system and programming better than most and his lack of commenting was in no way because he was lousy or incompetent programmer.

It is kind common in many cases of using blwp routines to have a data statement right after which is used to pass the parameters to the routine from the main code. In this case the vdp screen address for the input line, the cpu version of what you want displayed and edited, then finally the length with if you want a starting offset useful for path entries. For example: ....... example BLWP @KB DATA 5x40,path,>0520 ...... path TEXT 'DSK3. ' So above would display path string on line 5 of the screen if 40 column mode and have the cursor blinking after the period . With a maximum input length of 32 characters. For allowing you to input a filename, etc. and if you want backspace to change the dsk3 part. And his routine handles all the various fctn keys for insert, delete, etc.

His real life job was designing, coding and programming the whole backend for MasterCard payment processing system, do he was a very talented programmer and if you are the only one on the team you really don't need comments. I normally add in the comments after I finished a section so it could be better understood by others but if you know the system inside and out and how it works they really not needed.

Seems spare keyboards keep going up in price. https://www.ebay.ca/itm/226127474251

The problem with compiling this code is that it uses the 32k expansion ram as storage for the array of prime numbers. You need to reserve that area so that it doesn't interfere with the compiled code. Looks like it needs 8k of storage.

If she can make money from bathwater. We should start bottling our soldering fumes from building retro hardware and sell it.

Remember the bathwater girl? She claims PayPal fined her 2,500 usd for each sale of her 35 dollar bathwater. She lost 90k in total she claims. https://fxtwitter.com/bunnydelphine/status/1787478788676207087 For some reason you can't embed this tweet so here it is. Or use the fx link above to view it.

In honor of #MSX the #MaySiXth event. I present to you the amazing #V9938 video display processor that was an upgrade to the original #TMS9918. In 1990, OPA released the "Tiny-TIM" which allowed you to swap out your old VDP and replace it with the newer #V9958 with 192k of RAM. The internal die shots of the VDP are from RCAVictorCo and maddoka on Twitter. Thanks!

My mentor that first helped me learn some assembly once I joined the local 9t9 users group was so good that he just read the hexcode, he was a human disassembler and compiler, he didn't need to use programs could just type the opcodes out directly and the code would work and give him a program image file and he could transcript the hex into assembly for you. He never used comments either when coding and also made use of the registers completely, rarely using outside data statements with @ in his coding. You can see example of one of his coding routines in some of my GitHub repos look for the blwp keyboard cursor routine it is sometimes labeled by James or Jim Ballantyne. Sadly near his natural life on earth before he upgrading to coding in the heavens he went blind but that didn't stop him from coding on his ti99 systems and running code even tho he could no longer see the screen. ************************************ Data Passed= Screen Address * Cursor routine by Jim Ballantyne * CPU Buffer Address ************************************ Byte Offset (left movement) KB DATA >8320,$+2 Byte Length MOV *R14+,R0 RETURN = R0 contains length MOV *R14+,R1 of input MOVB *R14+,R3 MOVB *R14+,R2 SRL R3,8 SRL R2,8 BLWP @VMBW A R1,R3 MOV R1,R4 A R1,R2 DEC R2 MOV R2,R5 S R0,R1 MOV R1,R6 CLR R7 KB1 CLR R9 KB2 MOV R3,R0 S R6,R0 LI R1,>1E1E MOVB *R3,R1 KB3 SWPB R1 BLWP @VSBW CLR R8 KB4 MOVB R8,@>8379 KB5 CB @>8379,@TC1 JL KB6 INC R7 INC R8 C R8,@TC2 JL KB4 JMP KB3 KB6 LIMI 2 LIMI 0 BLWP @KSCAN MOVB @>837C,R2 JNE KB7 MOVB @>8375,R2 JLT KB5 C R7,@TC3 JL KB5 MOV @TC3,R7 JMP KB8 KB7 CLR R7 KB8 MOVB *R3,R1 BLWP @VSBW LI R2,>A00 DEC R2 JGT $-2 MOVB @>8375,R2 JLT KB5 CI R2,>1000 JHE KB9 SRL R2,7 MOV @KFT(R2),R11 MOV R3,R2 RT KF7 MOV R4,R3 MOV R3,R0 S R6,R0 MOV R3,R2 KF2 LI R1,>2000 KF2A BLWP @VSBW INC R0 MOVB R1,*R2+ C R2,R5 JLE KF2A JMP KB1 KF3 C R2,R5 JHE KF2 MOVB @1(R2),R1 BLWP @VSBW INC R0 MOVB R1,*R2+ JMP KF3 KF4 SETO R9 JMP KB2 KFB AI R3,-39 KF8 DEC R3 C R3,R4 JHE KB1 JMP KF9A KFA AI R3,39 KF9 INC R3 C R3,R5 JLE KB1 KF9A MOV R2,R3 JMP KB1 KFE MOV R4,R3 JMP KB1 KB9 CI R2,>2000 JL KB5 MOVB R2,*R3 C R3,R5 JHE KBAA INC R3 ABS R9 JEQ KBA MOV R3,R1 MOV R5,R2 S R3,R2 INC R2 BLWP @VMBR DEC R1 INC R2 BLWP @VMBW JMP KB2 KBA MOVB R2,R1 BLWP @VSBW JMP KB1 KBAA MOVB R2,R1 BLWP @VSBW KFD CB *R5,@KF2+2 JNE KFDA DEC R5 C R5,R4 JHE KFD KFDA INC R5 S R4,R5 MOV R5,*R13 RTWP KBF CLR *R13 RTWP KFT DATA KB5,KB5,KF2,KF3,KF4,KB5,KB5,KF7 DATA KF8,KF9,KFA,KFB,KB5,KFD,KFE,KBF BIT0 DATA >8000 TC1 DATA >0600 TC2 DATA 3 TC3 DATA 10

The lack of memory or being able to self train or teach it is done on purpose. At first they allowed outside user input but sadly bad actors were quick to corrupt and brainwash the model with enough promoting and telling it things, the first AI chatbots were quickly turned into racist hating machines by users, so it was decided for security reasons outside information from users would not be used to improve the model even if it was factual correct information. Second issue in regard to generating programming code via AI is that old information like from books and magazines is not used to train the models, instead 90% of it's programming knowledge comes scrapped from sites like "stackoverflow" where answers to problems have been upvoted as correct. I once argued with a top programmer at large company that I would firewall stackoverflow from their Internet for a week and see how many of his amazing team of programmers would still be fixing problems and moving the project forward with solutions. I bet that zero productivity would be the result, but they were too scared to try my experiment as most likely that would had been the case. Finally, alot of AI reasoning for a certain set of code it gives is not from the logic of the code itself but from the comments or description that humans placed on that section of code saying this is what it does.