• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Exidy Sorcerer II Questions

@jltursan: I added the Extended BASIC binary to the tape sim and it loaded and asked for memory size. But it shows gibberish when I type. Must be it has its own keyboard scanner and it doesn't understand my 3rd party keyboard (I had patched the Monitor's keyboard scanner). Thanks anyway.

@tempest: I have the BASIC ROM binary but not the others. Do you? Are they 8K too? Yes, games are ROMmable if you add a little relocation loader.
 
ClausB said:
@jltursan: I added the Extended BASIC binary to the tape sim and it loaded and asked for memory size. But it shows gibberish when I type. Must be it has its own keyboard scanner and it doesn't understand my 3rd party keyboard (I had patched the Monitor's keyboard scanner). Thanks anyway.

@tempest: I have the BASIC ROM binary but not the others. Do you? Are they 8K too? Yes, games are ROMmable if you add a little relocation loader.
Click to expand...

A pity that it didn't work :-(. You can check it anyway using MESS emulator, it's a fully functional TRS-80 Level II BASIC; very nice having in mind the huge library of BASIC listings the TRS-80 has.

Indeed the games can be packed and unpacked/relocated from the ROM area to its original RAM position. Probably sizes between 10K-12K binaries would work without problems, an LZ algorithm gives a good amount of compression :)
 
I believe those are all the roms I have. I really want a Basic cart so I can try all those games that have a B in the title (I assume that means BASIC).
 
tempest said:
BTW has anyone every found a copy of Wizard's Castle for the Sorcerer? I'm seen it mentioned in a few places but I can't seem to locate a copy. Sounds like it may have been a BASIC type-in program:

http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1381
Click to expand...

Oh, wow! I read that article and it mentions New Dimensions in Computing, the East Lansing store where I worked in 1981. We sold Exidy Sorcerers, Atari 400s and 800s, and Vector Graphic S100 CP/M machines. I vaguely remember playing Wizard's Castle there. And I remember a bearded geeky customer who bought a Sorcerer there. I wonder if that was Joe?

That's where I got my Sorcerer board. The boss had that customer's Sorcerer with S100 box in for repair but he had no S100 cards to test it with. I suggested he use one from the Vector Graphic and he plugged one in and turned it on. POOF! Turns out there was some difference in the power circuit. The Sorcerer was dead and he had to replace the main board. I felt terrible but he didn't blame me. Instead he gave me the dead board after he removed the cart connector and the PIO connector. Not knowing enough then about electronics to troubleshoot it, I just unsoldered every chip and soldered in sockets and bought new chips and got it working. It cost over $200, still much cheaper than a new one. I couldn't afford an Exidy keyboard and case, so I bought a surplus keyboard and built a small circuit to change Exidy's 5x16 matrix to 8x8 plus shift. I disassembled the Exidy monitor ROM on my Atari 800 to find the keyboard routine, then patched the keycodes, burned an EEPROM, and it worked. I also modded the RAM to 56K as posted above. The plan was to build a CP/M machine out of it for my friend but I never got around to writing a BIOS for it or finding a disk interface.

So now it's alive again with a tape simulator and I'm building a software library for it, thanks to you guys. If you find Wizard's Castle, I'll put it on there and come full circle!
 
Wizard's castle?, that definitely rings a bell. I'm sure that I've seen it between my stuff. I'll check it later and post back my findings...
 
Apparently it was ported in the day to TRS-80, PET, and others, and later to DOS and Windows. This site has some history and code: http://derelllicht.com/winwiz.html

Perhaps one of those ports could be edited back to Sorcerer BASIC using the magazine listing.
 
ClausB said:
Apparently it was ported in the day to TRS-80, PET, and others, and later to DOS and Windows. This site has some history and code: http://derelllicht.com/winwiz.html

Perhaps one of those ports could be edited back to Sorcerer BASIC using the magazine listing.
Click to expand...

In fact, the magazine listing IS the original Sorcerer's version; so it's just a matter of typing it and generating a WAV file. I'll check if there's some tool to create a BIN basic file from a text file (that I can generate with some OCR tool)
 
The Sorcerer Monitor has an input redirection function. If you OCR the source you could then "print" it from a PC into Exidy BASIC through the serial or parallel port and then CSAVE it.
 
ClausB said:
I'll draw it up if you want to build one.
Click to expand...

I'd love to build one, but that is beyond my skills. Mostly likely waaaay beyond my skills. :)

I think a few of us are interested in one, maybe you or someone else could build them and sell them?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top