Fantastic, I'm really glad you found the video! Excellent work with the Gold and all your products, and thanks for sharing the extra undocumented commands. Since I'm new to the 6303 instruction set it's a lot slower for me to decipher it than 6502. Those other easter eggs sound fantastic, if you've got hints you're willing to share, let me know :)

@@8_Bit I remember the HD6303 was great in that it had a lot of I/O and integrated timers and the ability to address a large external memory space. So it had a ton of ROM code space (for the day). Was an expensive part, IIRC, so we didn't use it in the lower cost products

I feel like I've gained some sort of closure I didn't know I wanted.

@@thebush6077 Celery, this kind of stuff is still used. I support 2400 and 4800 baud dial-up modems on RS-232 for sprinkler systems. There's a whole slew of computer equipment that has not , nor will ever be, updated.

Wow, you’re THE guy...you wrote the program Fontmaster II. I love that program! Granted, I haven’t used it in many years, but back when my C64 was my primary computer for word processing and such, I loved the variety of fonts and the ability to make new ones. I also love the variety of text effects and formatting that it can do. With no manual and no internet back then, I had to try all the key combinations to find out what the controls were, and wrote my own manual for it. Excellent program and very well done!

There's passive-aggressive and then there's "Robin reluctantly reads a mechanical translation of French."

What is the effect of the word "bien" in the sentence? Does it correspond to any English word or does it just add nuance?

@@FadkinsDiet bien = beaucoup in this context. plus = more, bien plus = much more. So a more accurate translation would be 'love is much stronger than we are' .

I agree it's an awkward translation, but it's apparently the chosen English translation of the song title. Here's the song: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Zs6oYMlhlrOVo2Q.html

Probably because the stressed syllables can be made to almost match up that way. Is--est, fort--far, etc

Wait...that's a channel?

@@peterlamont647 8-bit guy carried a huge gun to subway lmao

Ah, tractor feeds! And binders of 20-inch wide printouts, hung on mobile racks! Uh-oh, I'm dating myself!

I'll have to experiment more. I'm pretty sure at one point I did try sending form feeds, and in another version I made an infinite loop that kept printing text to the printer and left it for several minutes, with no success. I just looked, and I show that program at 7:48 though I had commented the GOTO at line 100 out again.

@@8_Bit I happen to have a similar printer. I can confirm that it does not print raw text until you send FormFeed code (HEX: 0C) to it. I never tried feeding it a bunch of text for auto-pagination - that may be configurable in printer's settings (the LCD menus). If the printer displays an error after a few minutes of input - this is a good indication that it may have run out of memory without recieving a FF. To test this try printing from DOS (not command window, actual DOS). Or install some generic dumb lineprinter driver - does not have to be HP and then print from command windows (echo Hello>LPT1 etc) The interface converter may also send centronics port signals that confuse the printer or it may not expect the printer to constantly be "ready" or something like that. A lot could have gone wrong and it's not very easy to diagnose. A logic analyzer could help. It is possible that the device needs a specific combination of DIP switches to work with newer printers - although it seems unlikely, more likely it won't ever work with those.

I may be remember incorrectly but I seem to recall my Okimate not automatically ending a print with Form Feed/Carriage Return. This was 25 or so years ago so I could be remembering wrong.

Yep. I have the same regret. Now I buy computer tech I used to own from eBay for the nostalgia!

I used to have a crapton of Commodore stuff which I donated to the local children's museum, and was dismayed to learn that it just went into storage instead of being used in their computing exhibit. Later I rebuilt my collection when it was cheap (like $20 for a C64 from a thrift shop) and then ended up long-term lending it to a friend who wanted to teach his kid how to program... and then it just ended up in *his* storage unit, and I ended up losing touch with him.

Wish I had kept my Plus/4. At least I still have my VIC-20 and it still works.

Sometimes, late at night, I will remember that time I tossed away this or that computer or part. It will make me physically cringe with sadness and regret. Other times I have bought back the same item I tossed away from eBay.

@@christopher88719 I get this watching a lot of these videos where they say how much they just paid for this vintage part etc and I think "I had 2 of those but binned them" 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

Hahaha! I've been watching Robin's vids now for a couple of weeks straight. I think my wife is getting annoyed. She recently asked if I was still watching the "instructional hand videos"! :rofl:

Do you still have your A2000 from college??

@@guru332 Long gone sadly!! Parents sold that at a garage sale and that was after I stored it at their house for many years... I was pretty sad when I found out. Luckily I've replaced pretty much everything I ever had and more! You still have your 3000 and CD32?

@@adriansdigitalbasement Yep. Still have my CD32 and A3000. I've also picked up a C128D and a few other commodore computers along the way. I fired up my A3000 last year and found an old pic of all of us from college! I sent a copy to Scott.

@@adriansdigitalbasement I lost all of my 8bit stuff to the destruction of my home 10yrs ago. Now I cannot afford to replace it thanks to being disabled. I owned C64s, 128s (no D models) a dozen or so 1541,1571,and 81 drives (mixed), An Amiga 2000, Atari 800XL along with a 1050 drive (my second computer I ever owned - my first was a Timex/Sinclair 1000)... and a crapton of original boxed software for the C64 (my favorites were the gold box set of D&D titles from SSI of which I had all of them), and an assortment of original boxed Atari software as well. I also had a couple of monitors, and ALOT of original magazines from the period (Compute!, Compute's Gazette, ANTIC, etc). I damn near cry every time I think about what I lost. I am not even going to go into the Vinyl I lost.

I threw out a wall of Mac SEs and SE30s, baskets loaded with AT and XT cards, piles of 386 and 486 machines, mountains of Commodore stuff, Mac clones, the works when I was in my teens. Everything was pristine and working.Total investment was maybe 200 bucks at the time. These days the decimal point would move to the right at least once. Whoops.

It's been around since the early 1990's, at least when I learned it off a BBS or read it in a magazine.

I thought the same thing.

I remember those days. I turned in a report printed on rolled fax paper with a thermal printer, each page cut to a different length, and written on Speedscript when I didn’t know anything about formatting or line wrap. I got marked down because it looked like total shit!

@@00Skyfox lack of true descending characters on the CBM 1526 drove one of my teachers crazy.

@@timmooney7528 Funny how teachers would focus on insignificant things like that rather than the information content of the report being turned in.

What other one video has hardware, software, easter eggs, two kinds of old computers and old print cart tips? =)

Ditto loved it loved it loved it keep it up keep it up keep it up.

They're worth a fortune now! I've been looking for one to show on the channel for a year now, but they're way too expensive.

Challenge accepted! --- Robin

Ugh, the missed opportunity!

I tried doing that once, but in text mode my printer interface put too big a gap between the lines. I bet the super graphix gold could do it with the right dip switch setting though.

I recall using a program from Compute!'s Gazette to make "true decenders" so the g, q, etc. did not look so odd on the MPS801.

@ungratefulmetalpansy this! I sometimes have to write how to or small manual and this is a task as big as doing the device described. Even having today's tools available

Yes, it's a very nice board layout! I'm going to try to find a GeoCable to further test this laser printer, they seem hard to find though.

Yes. It looks like 'Joshua' password recognized by WOPR backdoor login kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p5dkgreKu7Gxh5c.html

Makes me want to watch war games again. Its such a nerdy movie and i love it.

Speaking of dot matrix sound and dot matrix printers. I used to play a game I can't remember if it was on my own PC or friends!? But this is the back-in-the-day would not home PCS have sound cards back in the day. Nowadays seems like everything is on the motherboard! But on that game the printer was used in several different ways. For some time things it would ask you to have your printer active it would do this anytime before kind of redundant if you would just have the printer runny I'd say. For example when you were doing certain things you would get printouts of various things in the game. You could even have it print out your password 4 levels as well. But there were all sorts of functions in the game that would actually use it almost like a terminal in-game. The other thing is going back to sound. Of course it could use PC speaker but something very clever that it did it use the printer to produce music it was not exactly in tune and everything but it was pretty interesting that was able to do this just in a game. I cannot recall for the life of me what this was called or even how it played out it's just so foggy in my mind but just remember it using a printer for a lot of things. Why understand it was pretty obscure and very few people knew about it. I won't fight was novelty it forces something that was being spirit with but who knows! Of course this was nowhere near the quality of those videos are on KZfaq where a printer is used to produce music since that was done specifically to do things like this and evening as in tweaking to get things just right to produce musical tones so of course that was just hammering out quite literally on the printhead to produce music in the game I could have sworn that it it didn't even sound almost like speech in a couple places but I could be mistaken

I completely understand :( I've got a list of things that I got rid of and regret, and once in a while I re-find that stuff on eBay when I can afford it.

Nice user image AKA user image checks out.

@@aaronbrandenburg2441 Floppies rock!

The current capability would depend entirely on the power supply in the printer. It probably already has a 5V output for the printer logic. It could supply an additional 100mA or more easily.

@@simontay4851 There needs to be a standard so the printer manufacturer knows how much current the printer has at least to provide and the interface manufacturer knows how much current may be taken without damaging the printer.It is a very low current, I often had struggled keeping the current within the specified limit. A simple 7805 voltage regulator is 1A. If the printer needs 800mA for itself and someone draws more than 200mA out of the port, the electronics inside the printer will brown-out! Current limiters as common today (USB) were not possible in the 1980s - at least not economic!

I've got a couple other brands that I haven't tried yet. One's called a Hotshot, can't remember the other.

mps801 from memory printed at 50cps, tractor feed paper only, and uni-directonal printing - (it actually used a clock spring to return the head to rest postion.)

Oh how I loved GEOS. And F-15 Strike Eagle.

That bi-directional printing was a neat optimization that printer manufacturers started making; much faster printing with no extra hardware needed (as long as the firmware improvements could fit in the allotted ROM and RAM).

I had a printer which did this although it tended to cause *slight* differences in alignment depending on whether it printed forwards or backwards, meaning that a vertical line would look very bumpy. It was fine for rough drafts or if you're not doing graphics or boxes.

They weren't so accurate when doing that, though, so you wouldn't use it for something that needed to look really snazzy. Fine for rough drafts, however. I'm pretty sure my Epson LX-400 printer was bi-directional too.

Jesse Carlton Practically all dot matrix (and inkjet and daisy-wheel) printers in the PC era have supported bidirectional printing, with the quality caveats others already mentioned. It’s bizarre that your company didn’t have their report print job set up to use it, since I assume that wasn’t a quality-critical application!

I believe the DX7 also uses this CPU.

​@@TaleTN Yes, and there is also a 6805 which is used to scan the keyboard and read the analog controls through an external DAC. The later DX7-II and the TX802 used a 63B09 which is a 6809 with higher clock speed and special instructions.

It's the official (awkward) translation for the song, apparently: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Zs6oYMlhlrOVo2Q.html

@@8_Bit Must be a French person who translated it to English.

Interesting! I've heard of some software supporting user-port printing but I thought most expected the IEC/serial ports to be used. But I really didn't have a lot of experience with printing on the C64 as it was the very last peripheral I got for it.

@@8_Bit I am positive that whatever printers we had worked with Pocket Writer, and I'm pretty sure the dot-matrix one worked with GEOS as well, so that's worth looking at if you're interested in either learning more or proving that I'm completely misremembering how the family computer was set up around 35 years ago. :) No idea what model the printers were, unfortunately.