SC/MP National Industrial Basic Language (NIBL) Retro

[Phil_G]

Wow, thats an impressive array of MK14s Martin
its nice to have a big display for general use and a Texet-type one for show, then you have both ease of use and S of C realism
I must have dropped lucky, I bought that exact calc but only paid £3 for it- the slide switch was faulty!
My Philloupat PCB has common-or-garden 2N3904s for the display, its what I had to hand - upside down wrt the silkscreen but no caps & no ghosting.
I wonder, are Budgetronics sending out the kit with the latest firmware? ie with 'Message' pre-loaded?
Cheers
Phil
PS there was an entry by 'ceptimus' in the VCF 2023 challenge, but it was in Commodore BASIC. not you? (I expected yours might be Forth )

[Martin]

I don't know what the calculator might actually sell for - you see some very speculative asking prices on eBay sometimes. I suppose some people are rich and foolish enough to just pay the inflated asking prices. I've had it since it was new and it was my first calculator, so although I'd almost forgotten about it, I'm a bit reluctant to tear it to bits now - it's about the same age as a real MK14 !

As far as I know, the Budgetronics kit didn't ship with your scrolly message firmware. Certainly no mention of it in the manual, and I followed that, keying in an add-two-numbers example, and then the duck hunt example, which would have overwritten the scrolly code anyway. Then I built the other two, for which I had to flash some fresh PICs, and at that time I reflashed the Budgetronics one too, so now it's too late to find out.

Yes it was my VC3 C64 entry. I've been playing around with 6502 and 65816 processors lately. The 65816 is quite an interesting beast! I'd intended writing some code in BASIC V2, and then doing the same algorithm in 6502 assembler, but I never got around to the assembler part. My BASIC one was 104 bytes, I think, so over twice as large as the smallest C64 BASIC entry!

I've not done much with FORTH lately. I was thinking about transferring the FORTH I wrote for the MSP430, to the 65816. I really ought to document and share my MSP430 FORTH. It's faster and more standards compliant than the popular Mecrisp one, but no one is using it.

[Phil_G]

As far as I know, the Budgetronics kit didn't ship with your scrolly message firmware.

Its not so much the message program itself Martin, but if its Karens original software then the SC/MP DAE instruction doesnt work properly
and theres a problem with the SC/MP reset clearing P1 & P2, this broke programs that assume P1-->display and P2-->ram.
These bugs cause problems with some examples from the Science of Cambridge manual such as Reaction Timer, Moonlander, etc.
I'd (humbly) suggest the update as it fixes all these problems

Theres a huge amount of Forthery going on in the Minimalist Computing group, they would love to see your compiler:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/minimalistcomputing

See you there?
Phil