Laser 2001 & Salora Manager - official thread

[carlsson]

Ok, then I understand. I suppose if I look up the ROM location of the graphics, I could simply PEEK from BASIC to find out if there are definitions or just blank.

[carlsson]

Well, this ugly little program was all that I needed:

Code: Select all

5 GR:COLOR=15,1:X=8:Y=0:R=0
10 FOR A=63488 TO 63999:B=PEEK(A):FOR I=7 TO 0 STEP -1
20 C=B/2:IF C<>INT(C) THEN PLOT X+I,Y+R
30 B=INT(C):NEXT
40 R=R+1:IF R=0 THEN R=0:X=X+9
50 IF X>240 THEN X=8:Y=Y+9
60 NEXT

The COLOR= statement is required after going into graphics mode, otherwise it will plot 8x1 wide fields instead of individual pixels.

This is what it plots on screen:

rom-font-2001.jpg

As you see from the listing, I made sure to separate each character with an extra pixel to be sure, that is why the CreatiVision logo looks particularly broken apart but of course it isn't stored in that way in the ROM. You also notice that Laser 2001 BASIC lacks bitwise AND/OR which is why I had to resort with division and INT, could perhaps have been improved a bit but it did the job.

It probably means the BIOS ROM routine to display the font was modified in the Laser 2001 to not display the logo, but it still is there. It also means that homebrew that reads the characters from ROM but uses an own routine to display the logo and year, will be able to display it on both types of machines... does not the Rameses also omit the logo on power on? Then there is the philosophical question of which way is the right one to do it...

[@username@]

The BIOS routine uses the characters at ROM location $F871. These are set to spaces ($C0) in the non-logo ROM. Perhaps the same in the Laser 2001?
In the CV they are $DD $DE $DF $E0 $FB $FC $FD $FE.

[carlsson]

I might check the actual routine to display the logo tonight, if it is zero'ed out. At least the graphic definitions themselves are there, as shown by my program which dumped the ROM content from $F800 to $F9FF.

[MADrigal]

Well I think the guys at VTech simply embedded the "most recent cv BIOS" into the Laser 2001.

And by those times, the most recent one was that of Rameses/Funvision, in which the logo was blanked.

Obviously it was easier to blank 8 bytes (the logo chars) instead of 64 bytes (the charset bytes)

[@username@]

Does the Laser/Salora have a centronics output?

[Scouter3d]

Hi @username@,

Yes, the Salora Manager / Laser 2001 has a centronics Printer port...

Greetings TOM:0)

[Mobsie]

Today i opened my Salora Manager, and it really strange. Tom write me about that, but i want to see myself. I closed, i cannot help here.

[Scouter3d]

Today i wrote a little Mandelbrot program for the Salora Manager,

The Graphics starts to get "pretty" and nearly at the finish the Salora produces an "Overflow" Error... Any ideas?

TOM:0

mandelbrot_2.jpg

mandelbrot.jpg

[carlsson]

Not sure. I ran your program in C64 Basic and instead of PLOT, I printed the numbers to file to see if anything strange happens. The X values range from 1 to 122, the Y values range from 50 to 150. Since you get overflow, it sounds like a math error. If I get the time, I can check tomorrow evening, and see what the values are when it fails. Perhaps some superfluous parenthesis will help?