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There were several places where I corrected it with a comment, but yes, i was spelling it out in my mind phonetically...my research area is automatic speech recognition so I spend too much time with phonetic dictionaries.

Oh, that's a cool project. You should share your old code, if you still have it. There's a pretty big ZX81 community, and I'm sure some people would pick that project up and run with it.

@@8BitRetroJournal I'm afraid that only copies are on cassettes and even ignoring that i have only bleak idea were they should be, it is possible that they are unreadable after 30 years without rewind ☹

@@AK-vx4dy If you find them, contact me and I'll try and recover the info for you. Have had success with that.

[shrug] At least the alphabetic characters were in a contiguous block, unlike in EBCDIC (typically found on IBM mainframe and minicomputer) where you saw the alphabet being broken up into blocks with some control characters interspersed (which may not seem to make sense until you look at the code values in hexadecimal, and notice the pattern -- the character coding is based around binary-coded decimal and that the control codes occupy parts where the nibbles were outside the 0-9 range).

Right, you need video card. Was that included in the original's selling price?

@@8BitRetroJournal If you bought an IBM PC computer, you always got one of the available video cards, so it was included in the price of the machine. Disk controller + floppy drives were 'technically' optional, but very few people would buy that machine to just use it with cassettes.

@@8BitRetroJournal the basic IBM PC came with 16K of RAM and no floppy disks. It did however have a vastly better keyboard and, because the CPU wasn’t used to generate video, ran much faster.

@@stevetodd7383 Yup, and the CPU was also slightly better, though in the greater scheme of things that's not saying too much. If you follow my channel, I'll have a video in a couple of weeks were I unbox a US ZX81 and it has a mod on the side of a 15-pin connector that presumably connected to an external keyboard. Also, as a kid I built my own keyboard out of switches -- I think I mounted them on a piece of cardboard and wired them by hand and took a magazine ad of the ZX81 and cut out the keycaps, pasted them on the keys and added clear nail polish to protect them...you can watch a video of it that I did on August 6, 2021.

@@8BitRetroJournal I had a MK14 (the machine that Sinclair came up with BEFORE the ZX80, which had an awful hex keypad (spring steel domes under a plastic membrane). Likewise I bodged it to use a desktop calculator keyboard with legends on Typex.

Well, I wasn't talking about form here, but function. There were a ton of keyboards out there you could buy for pretty inexpensive. In fact, if you watch one of my videos (April 7, 2021) I made my own. The whole point here is that this stripped down machine had similar power, it just lacked all the stuff the PC had but then again, only cost $99.

@@8BitRetroJournal I do recall seeing an article in a magazine (I don't recall which one) that outlined how one could modify a TI-99 keyboard to use with the Sinclair ZX-81. The keyboard was relatively easy to obtain since Radio Shack had carried them for a while. The modification involved cutting some traces on the board and adding some bodge wires to reconfigure the keyboard matrix (the matrix was quite similar).

​​@@8BitRetroJournalWell, why don't you do a comparison and demo with one of those magical keyboards then? Your demo is like showing off Windows 95's GUI capabilities, but having no mouse connected, and having to navigate with keyboard shortcuts, then starting to act annoyed like a little child when somebody mentions it.

@@der.Schtefan I'm not quite catching your interpretation of my comment as "then starting to act annoyed." I pointed out there were several keyboards out there but that I wasn't trying to intimate that the ZX81 was comparable to an IBM PC, just that, as toy-like as it seemed, it had some things in common with the IBM PC where it could run MS-DOS (or similar) but was just extremely trimmed down and therefore less expensive. Also, there were people that did expand the machine after having invested in it with keyboard, disk drives, etc...

I wrote the shell and I integrated a coupe of programs that I recently had recovered off of some tapes that weren't mine (see my November 9th video on the process I used for that tape recovery). The shooter game was one of them and it was just the right feel to have me include it. (i.e. it could just as well be an MS-DOS game).

​@@8BitRetroJournalso, you didn't play a game you typed in? Not even once? Just copied it into your program without knowing if it even works, or playable?

@@nneeerrrd Oh no, I ran it to see what it looked like, but I didn't try to play it so I really didn't understand how it worked -- I mean I got that you shot at things, but did you shoot an any or only the latest, etc... stuff like that.

​@@8BitRetroJournalwell, than you played it, despite for a brief moment. Hence, in this video you made a false claim. And a pretty puzzling one, too

@@nneeerrrd again, I didn't play it. After first recovering it from tape, I hit RUN and saw it create the screen and kind of watched without hitting any keys., and didn't really pay close attention as I was just wondering if I recoverd it fully or if it would crash Then, when I actually played it during the video, I wasn't quite sure 100% how it worked but it was pretty easy to figure out. So I had run it previously but not played it, i.e. like watching someone play chess versus playing chess yourself.

I did look for an MS-DOS version for a Z80 so thank you for pointing me in that direction. I'll have to take a look at it. Happy Holidays to you as well!

MSX is almost a completely different computer architecture from the Sinclair family of micros, despite using the same basic CPU instruction set.

@@craigtheduck Right, but it's still Z80 so that's a nice start. The difference is how it integrates into a system (that 20% of 80/20 that the biggest hurdle).

I'm still at Windows 10. I kind of follow the "skip ever--other-one model" so I've only run 98, XP, 7, and 10, skipping 95, ME, Vista, 8 and 11.

The RAM Disk OS is pretty interesting but you need hardware to run it on a real machine. But year, writing that simple command interpreter was fun. I could see a company trying to sell you PCs making this little program in the 80s for all sorts of platforms and giving it away free to get you to upgrade...I guess the distribution back then would have been the problem since there was no word wide web.

I asked a friend who's a bit more knowledgeable on DOS stuff: "You can't do what he's trying to do. DOS PCs support a monochrome display adapter plus any other color adapter. It sounds like he's trying to use two VGA adapters at the same time, which is not supported by any BIOS. It is technically possible with two PCI cards, but he must do all of the programming himself."

@8BitRetroJournal With Windows and with Linux we can use the primary and the secondary monitor with one graphic card. In Windows device manager we can find the linear address of the primary and the secondary linear framebuffer both addresses in the 4th gigabyte. In DOS Using 16 bit function 4f01 with a mode number from the mode table(from function 4f00) number + 4000 hex of VBE 2 or VBE 3 bios for mode specific info we can get the address of the primary linear framebuffer, if the mode support the linear frame buffer. The linear address of the linear frame buffer can vary from card to card, but all modes of a card use the same linear address. I think Ralph Browns routine for two PCI cards is not made for the linear frame buffer of VBE 2/VBE 3 mode numbers.

Oh yes, that and TopView are on my radar for future videos.In fact TopView was next but with MS-DOS 4.00 source being released it got me looking at that first.

Is that a question? FreeDOS was released about a two decades later (yes, first alpha version came out in 1994 but first stable release was 2006). Not sure when MS-DOS 4.00 was in Alpha (it had copyright into the early 80s), but it was released in 1986. I usually avoid more modern operating system stuff and focus on 80s.

The Sinclair QL could do this really well. It had a very stable preemptive multitasking microkernel in 1984. It, unlike the Amiga, had memory protection built-in so the OS was safer from being corrupted.

I do recall that feature of Concurrent DOS. I think Retro Tech Chris did a video on that feature for #DOScember a few years ago. But yes, I did like Concurrent DOS better. I'm a big fan, in fact of Gary Kildall. Wish he'd have the success that Bill Gates did, but Gary was more of a creator (I think he was a professor) than a business man.

And all versions after XP are exponentially worse memory hogs..

But... XP is quite much more demanding comparing to 2k

I think it's a Dell keyboard.

I'll have to try them...I didn't know they existed.

I think it looks more like a crappy ripoff bootleg version of DR ConcurrentDOS

@@vardekpetrovic9716 Well, I did look at Concurrent DOS last year and its windowing system was much more intuitive. I think this looks more like Microsoft trying to figure it out for themselves as they looked at DR's version.

Oh cool, someone that actually saw it back in the day. Yes, it doesn't behave like it's preemptive, though it may be implemented that way (it splits a number in half of a BASIC print statement which is a big hint) but perhaps completely halts the swapped out jobs (maybe it couldn't deal with screen updates properly). The Amiga actually does the same thing when you play with job priorities I've done a few videos on the Amiga's multitasking OS. The last one looked at an improvement where it gave Unix like "nice" control over jobs (May 11th of this year).

Yeah. DOS 4 wasn't great. As you mentioned, DOS 5 was a lot better. As for the first Amiga, that was released in 1985 and demonstrated in 1984. I'm surprised this video mentions issues with the Amiga Exec (from the Amiga video in the same series). I thought people had already established that the 'tests' done in that video were irrelevant and that it's best to not try to override taskpri for best results. I.e. AmigaOS knows what its doing and is best left to it's own devices (no pun intended).

Why did piggybacking not work?

@@8BitRetroJournal Well, piggy can always be tricky. I would go for another try "one-skip one" and then "skip one-one" and see what happens. It is really hard to have all chips fried, some of them are definitely good. Hope this helps!

I wish Sinclair had created that next QL with the wafer drive. That red and black looked amazing. I just watched this recent interview with David Karlin who noted that he felt that they were so close to competing with the likes of Apple and could have had that type of success, but missed it by making a few wrong decisions. I'll post the link in a follow up reply in case the RUclips gods decide to remove the comment 🙂

ruclips.net/video/kRSr8CYGseA/видео.html

Ok, just watched it (I remember actually watching it a few years ago). No fair, your presentation is so much better with music and displaying your nice collection 🙂

No, I have a dedicated PC with Windows 7 since it's a great OS for retro stuff.

@@8BitRetroJournal nice idea.

Not sure if RUclips will accept the link, but I'll post it in the second reply. If not, check out page 4 of the qlforum topics "QSTAR 1"

qlforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=4809&start=30

But 90% of the video is QLs full-screen capture

Not quite sure what you are specifically speaking of regarding the "indoctrinated pronunciation" part, but I have a video on why I choose that pronunciation and it's all about nostalgia -- the whole reason for having these retro channels. It's like me complaining you put a u in color. It's how you grew up with it. If, the first time I used a ZX81 it was referred to as a ZED X 81, then I'd be in the wrong...but if for my entire youth of having that as a computer, all I knew about was that it was called a ZEE X 81 (yes, I had a NTSC version from Sinclair Research mail-order from Nashuah, NH and they didn't bother including an audio tape on proper UK pronunciation) and not until, perhaps 2019, was it brought to my attention you folks in the UK pronounce it ZED X, then for pure nostalgic reasons I continue to call it what I did as a child. Think of it as being asked to remove all the u's from shared words on any US RUclips channel when commenting...that would be completely silly and I would say "to each their own" and not have it bother me.

Thanksgiving in the US is kind of a X-mas dry run. Almost the same food and family gathering, but without the gifts. So, in some ways it's more fun since there is no pressure to get gifts. But you still have to avoid awkward conversations, especially this year with regard of our terrible election outcome.

@@8BitRetroJournal It's to do with correct pronunciation of the items brand name from it's point of origin. It originated in UK and was called ZX81. ZED. Your simplified version of English really shouldn't be an excuse to mispronounce the objects name. That would be the same if your name is eg Kevin but I called you Bob because in my country K E V I N is pronounced Bob. Thanks for the Thanksgiving update, I guess that was too dry a joke. No offence intended and I hope you had a good one.

@@JimWood28 Bob would definitely be a bad pronunciation of Kevin. How do you pronounce the US made Z80?

@@8BitRetroJournal The Zilog Z80 is same in the same fashion, how do you pronounce that?

Sorry for not being clear on that. When you connect the MICE ROM that comes with a mouse attached, the cursor keys will no longer move the mouse pointer. Everything still works, but, unlike ICE which uses the cursor keys (similar to an IBM trackpad) to move the mouse pointer, with MICE, only the mouse moves the pointer and the cursor keys do not.

@@8BitRetroJournal Right, thanks for clarifying that.

It's not too hard. The only thing that risks infection is browsing and email. I use gmail in my browser and I browse safely (i.e. only go to sites I know). I use a virtual machine for unsafe browsing.

@@8BitRetroJournal Can you use the current versions of, say, Firefox on an older OS? I'm primarily concerned with keeping my online banking and online purchases secure. By the way, my favorite OS was Windows Vista. Aside from the early driver issues (of which I had none) it was an awesome OS. Thanks. Regards.