Re: PCW8256 Unerase

SuperVinx <supervinx@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
: My father-in-law gave me a PCW8256 in excellent shape, but with only a 3"
: drive, and no expansions.
: I need to unerase the content of a floppy (also a disk editor is suitable
: ...)
: Since the only programs he had were Locoscript and the customized CP/M (with
: Mallard Basic), how can perform this task ?

This trick (published in PCW Plus) may work:

PIP M:=PIP.COM
PIP M:PIP2.COM=M:PIP.COM
ERASE M:PIP2.COM
BASIC
POKE 64432,229
SYSTEM

You'll now be at an F9A> prompt. Insert the disc with the deleted file.
If you do a DIR, you should see the name of the file.

M:PIP2 M:[G0]=filename
USER 0

And then the recovered file should be on drive M:. To do more than one
file, repeat the whole thing except the first PIP. Once you have all the
files on M:, copy the whole lot back to floppy.
Since this is rather tedious, if you can get files onto the PCW then an
unerase utility like U3.COM may make things quicker.

: What is the Mallard syntax to execute machine code ?

variable%= address-of-code
CALL variable%

or

DEF USR0 = address-of-code
PRINT USR0(value)

(You can define 10 functions like this, USR0 to USR9. On entry, HL will
point to the parameter and A will be its type: 2 for integer, 3 for
string, 4 for float, 8 for double. For types 2, 4 and 8 the memory at HL
will hold the approprate numeric value; to change the return value, just
overwrite the bytes. For type 3, the word at HL points to a 3-byte string
descriptor:
DB length
DW address

and to return a different string, I presume you point it at your own
string descriptor instead). CALL also has a parameter-passing convention
but this post is not wide enough to contain it.

--
John Elliott

Thinks: This is what a nice clean life leads to. Hmm, why did I ever lead one?
-- Bluebottle, in the Goon Show
.

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