commands. I've used TED from the PC magazine utilities and it works OK for small stuff.I'd love to have a keyboard buffer/bug fix cart. There are a few games that I've tried that run perfectly on the PCjr with enhanced Tandy graphics and everything, but choke when you press certain key combinations. Windows 3.0 has problems with the keyboard as well, where it won't let you type a backslash (which is awful when trying to type the path to a file in, although I did discover that some things will allow a forward slash as a directory separator).James wrote:A bit of bad news
My PCjr has the PC Enterprises Combo V2 cartridge. Among its features is a keyboard buffer and some Keyboard bug fixes. If I remove the cartridge I get the same results as you did on both QuickBasic and QBasic. Sorry.
I recently spoke to the the people that used to own PC Enterprises (his son actually). He was nice enough to look to see if they had any PCjr parts left. Sadly no. I didn't ask him about licensing but I wonder if we could get the OK to make a run of Combo V3 cartridges, either physically or built in the jrIDE.
VB DOS was painfully slow and I don't know if it would work without the Combo Cartridge. I uninstalled it almost immediately.jharre wrote:VB/DOS? Wow, I haven't spun that up for ages. There is a full copy buried out in the garage somewhere, but I think the install floppies are 3.5" and may be high density.
I've done that and it works well as long as you don't try to get TOO PCjr-specific in your coding (ie. simple 16-color graphics and 3-voice sound work, but don't try to bang on the hardware directly or use the vertical retrace interrupt or change palette index entries, etc.). The only "gotcha" is that the default keyboard map has combinations on it that will clash with your IDE (for example, CTRL-F9 will immediately exit DOSBox). The solution is a custom keyboard map that pretty much disables all custom mappings.James wrote: I wonder If any of these compilers are fully functional under DOSBox. DOSBox has good but limited compatibility with DOS but since the compilation process is internal to the compiler, e.g. not using DOSBox's unsupported print functions, it should be useful as a development platform but not testing platform.
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The big symptom was the character was being entered on both the make and break
of the keystroke. Ha, bet I caught you with terminology there! The "make" of
a keystroke is simply the key being pressed down, the "break" is when the key
is released. The hardware treats these as two different events, telling the
computer a different thing for the make and break of the same key (the
difference is that the make scan code's high bit is low, while the break's is
high). This to me meant that the break keystroke was losing its high bit
before it got processed by the INT 9H routine, which translates scan codes
into characters. That was also why the shift keys got stuck in the QB3
editor; the computer never saw the break of the shift key, so it assumed you
were always holding it down.
)