Editors note: We covered some of this new BBS in our last issue. I encourage those of you who like to program and are interested to contact Dave and get involved with this. You can contact David at: 2590 North Jordan Drive, Tucson, AZ 85745-1132. Phone for voice at 602-884-7667 and by modem at 602-882-0388. FWD
This is a report on the current status of SOL BBS, the 2068-based bulletin board system that has been growing in Tucson, AZ since the end of 1995.
It has achieved all of its preliminary design objectives, which were to maximize the capabilities of the Timex-Sinclair 2068 as a platform for Data Communications.
We feature trouble-free time-tagging of the time-on, current time, elapsed time, message entry time, and – well, you get the picture! !
Thanks go to BOTH Jack Dohany AND Larry Kenny for the successful mods. We are carrying software for an autonomous version too, in case the 2068 by not having a Dallas Smartwatch chip wherein times are simply absent.
The major hangup has been the unsatisfactory performance of Larry’s modem in the case of FULL DUPLEXity. Messages kept being received clearly, but were not echoed back hardly at all. So the first thing we finally had to do was GIVE UP ON MESSAGING AT FULL DUPLEX.
Understandably, this created a lot of problems with PRINTing of double-characters, as we frantically searched for and destroyed the many PRINT #7 instructions to the callers’ screens.
But, just as understandably, this put the onus on the user, to VIEW his or her message prior to SAVEing it to the message base.
Well, this was a perfect place to install our WELL-TESTED line editor. Of course we had continually to keep throwing out unneeded capabilities as we scrounged around for FREE RAM!!
This invited another consultation with Larry Kenny. As a result we THREW OUT keyboard scanning with INKEY$ #7 along with FULL DUPLEX. Now, SOL BBS RELIABLY reads a line of message from the modem channel #7, using INPUT #7!!!!
However, READing the modem with INPUT #7 is of limited help when READing ASCII files into the message base. The best way, the proper way, to RECEIVE ASCII files is in TERM MODE, but we still lose 2 characters out of each 64-character line.
So the best way to transfer files with Maxcom is in 128-byte blocks with Xmodem Checksum protocol.
By the way, Paul Holmgren‘s implementation of ISTUG’s BBS software uses precisely this last method of reading from the modem a line of the user’s message. INPUT #7 uses rapid Z80 CODE to read the whole line and store it in the message base before returning to BASIC. So it is pretty fast. Larry says that the ultimate way of reading the modem would be entirely in Z80 assembly language. But we will leave that to someone else.
In conclusion, we can say that the SOL BBS software is almost a complete implementation of data communications on the TS2068.