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From: agodwin@acorn.co.uk (Adrian Godwin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Anyone out there with a PORFOLIO?
Message-ID: <6760@acorn.co.uk>
Date: 30 Apr 91 12:43:55 GMT
References: <2816894f: 2914comp.sys.handhelds@hpcvbbs.UUCP> <41818@cup.portal.com> <1991Apr29.205630.4696@ira.uka.de>
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Lines: 30

In article <1991Apr29.205630.4696@ira.uka.de> dmose@bright.math.uoregon.edu writes:
>
>I just bought myself a Portfolio this past week.  Nice little toy.
>Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do much with it, as my serial
>interface seems to be dead.  I do plan on writing some assembler
>programs _on_ and _for_ the Portfolio (don't have a PC at all).

Shortly after the Portfolio came out, I spent a few hours with a group of friends
trying to program it - the owner didn't have a serial interface, or any other
way of connecting it to another machine.

We wrote a hex loader (ASCII-hex digits in stdin, binary out to a file)
using the text editor to write a .com file ... had to choose opcodes carefully 
because the text editor wouldn't accept all 256 byte values. An entrant for an
obfuscated-assembler contest ?

Then the owner went home and typed in all of MSDOS debug, as hex bytes into
a file. He had to do it in chunks, because there wasn't enough file space for
the binary file and the whole ascii-ised input file at the same time.
When it was all typed in, he ran it ... and it crashed, losing all the files.
So he typed it in again (patient man, this :-)) .... it responded with
"Wrong DOS version" !

A few weeks later, he bought the serial lead.

-adrian

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Adrian Godwin                                        (agodwin@acorn.co.uk)