Exidy Sorcerer II Questions

[ClausB]

The first image I would like is the Sorcerer BASIC. Anyone have a binary to share?

 

[jltursan]

Oh, wow, I'm still loading at 300 bauds :-D

If you add an SD card module to your arduino and with some help of the SD library, maybe you can create a full Exidy library tape emulator .
Btw, about the tearing mod, my Sorcerer has already IC17A-3 tied to IC22A-12!. Seems that the traces to modify are in the bottom side, right?, I'll check if there's already a mod applied. To be frankly, I'm still suffering some tearing.

I have also a strange big rotary switch with cables to IC14D pins 3 & 13 (19.2Khz?) and other ICs under the PSU PCB. Seems something related to the cassette interface, no idea if it enables higher baud speeds or it's simply ruining the experience

The Galaxians game itself recommends a speaker tied to any parallel output pin and GND, no mention to resistors or speaker impedance.

You can download my patched BASIC versión here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-KmfOWpt2ZkMkZRLVpzRGFicDg/view?usp=sharing
Sadly it's a 300 bauds version, more than 8 minutes to load, sorry!

 

[tempest]

Is this the Exidy Sorcerer BASIC as a wav file then or is it the standard Level II BASIC?

Here are all the Sorcerer games that I have wav files for (beware, it's 98MB!). We'll see how long I keep it up: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/sorcerer.zip

 

[jltursan]

Is this the Exidy Sorcerer BASIC as a wav file then or is it the standard Level II BASIC?

Here are all the Sorcerer games that I have wav files for (beware, it's 98MB!). We'll see how long I keep it up: http://www.atariprotos.com/temp/sorcerer.zip

It's the Level II BASIC. I don't have the Exidy BASIC ROM pac; but I have plans to try to adapt it to run from RAM and load from tape (or clone an original PCB)

 

[ClausB]

Oh, wow, I'm still loading at 300 bauds :-D

If you add an SD card module to your arduino and with some help of the SD library, maybe you can create a full Exidy library tape emulator .
Btw, about the tearing mod, my Sorcerer has already IC17A-3 tied to IC22A-12!. Seems that the traces to modify are in the bottom side, right?, I'll check if there's already a mod applied. To be frankly, I'm still suffering some tearing.

I have also a strange big rotary switch with cables to IC14D pins 3 & 13 (19.2Khz?) and other ICs under the PSU PCB. Seems something related to the cassette interface, no idea if it enables higher baud speeds or it's simply ruining the experience

The Galaxians game itself recommends a speaker tied to any parallel output pin and GND, no mention to resistors or speaker impedance.

You can download my patched BASIC versión here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-KmfOWpt2ZkMkZRLVpzRGFicDg/view?usp=sharing
Sadly it's a 300 bauds version, more than 8 minutes to load, sorry!

Interesting that yours already has the mod. Maybe Exidy caught it eventually and issued a service bulletin, or maybe a user group published the fix. Yes, please do look for the cut and jumper on the underside. You still have some tearing, but do you see the horizontal jitter during screen scroll, such as with Monitor command DU 0 FFF ?

My tape sim uses the Arduino serial port to feed the Sorcerer UART directly - no audio is involved. That's why I need binaries, not audio files. But I found the BASIC ROM dumps on this site, so I just have to convert them to tape format to load into my 56K Sorcerer.

 

[ClausB]

BTW it should not be hard to make a replica BASIC cart. Wire up an 8K EPROM and a few gates on a perf board with the right edge connector, put it in an old 8-track case, and stick on a copy of the original label.

 

[jltursan]

Interesting that yours already has the mod. Maybe Exidy caught it eventually and issued a service bulletin, or maybe a user group published the fix. Yes, please do look for the cut and jumper on the underside. You still have some tearing, but do you see the horizontal jitter during screen scroll, such as with Monitor command DU 0 FFF ?

My tape sim uses the Arduino serial port to feed the Sorcerer UART directly - no audio is involved. That's why I need binaries, not audio files. But I found the BASIC ROM dumps on this site, so I just have to convert them to tape format to load into my 56K Sorcerer.

No visible horizontal jitter when executing the memory dump, just the usual tearing, weird.

About the bins, then try with this one: Level II BASIC for Exidy Sorcerer (hires patch)

 

[tempest]

Claus did the mod to my Sorcerer II yesterday and it fixed the jitter issue that I was seeing. Games like Astro Attacker look amazing now with none of the glitching. We also wired up some speakers and got sound out of Galaxian. Do any other games support speakers or was it just Galaxian? Interestingly it also mentioned that you could use a joystick on the parallel port. I wonder how that was wired up?

 

[ClausB]

Yes, we cut and jumpered on the underside. Works great! His board has some other jumpers on the top side which we did not identify.

And today I got Exidy BASIC working from my tape sim! At 20833 baud with a 5-second leader pause, it loads in 12 seconds flat!

About that Level II BASIC from jltursan, what is its load address? Is it 0x100 like a CP/M executable? And is it adapted from the TRS-80, or is it Exidy?

 

[jltursan]

Yes, we cut and jumpered on the underside. Works great! His board has some other jumpers on the top side which we did not identify.

And today I got Exidy BASIC working from my tape sim! At 20833 baud with a 5-second leader pause, it loads in 12 seconds flat!

About that Level II BASIC from jltursan, what is its load address? Is it 0x100 like a CP/M executable? And is it adapted from the TRS-80, or is it Exidy?

I suppose you must to cut trace to pin 9 and jumper it to pin 12 instead, right?. I'll try to fully disassemble my Exidy and check what kind of mod it has.

So do you have the Exidy BASIC working from tape (or your tape simulator)?, cool!, never checked the memory area used by this interpreter (8kB); but maybe its ROM location (A000?) is RAM if you have enough memory.
If the ROM-pac runs from C000, can't see how it can be used without patching/relocating it.

 

[tempest]

If BASIC is only 8K, I can't see a problem loading it into memory on my 48K Sorcerer II. All the programs I've run into required 8K or 16K. Of course it needs to be where programs expect it so that may be an issue.

 

[ClausB]

Yes you cut that trace but must be careful not to break the connection from pin 9 to other circuitry.

Yes I got the ROM binaries from this site and made a tape file for my tape sim that loads in the C000 to DFFF space. That only works for me because I have 56K RAM. It won't work with 48K RAM.

But I was asking about the Level II BASIC file that jltursan posted. Where does that load in RAM?

 

[jltursan]

Yes you cut that trace but must be careful not to break the connection from pin 9 to other circuitry.

Yes I got the ROM binaries from this site and made a tape file for my tape sim that loads in the C000 to DFFF space. That only works for me because I have 56K RAM. It won't work with 48K RAM.

But I was asking about the Level II BASIC file that jltursan posted. Where does that load in RAM?

56K?, that explains all! :-D. Do you have an schematic of what is needed?

Today I'll check the binary, IIRC it's not the usual $0100 as I added a little routine to the end of the file in charge of initialize the hires graphics, you need to jump initially to this routine.

 

[ClausB]

Here's my 56K Sorcerer I board:


the Arduino Mega tape sim:


and BASIC loaded:

The RAM48 program relocates the MWA to the top of 48K instead of 56K so that BASIC will load properly.

Yes, I drew a schematic for the 56K mod. I'll scan it and post it. EDIT: On second thought, I won't. It's a drastic mod with cuts to the DRAM +12 and -5 V lines, replacement of 16K DRAMs with 64K chips, removal of 3 LSTTL chips, and a lot of solder. The II with 48K would not benefit much anyway, and my circuit doesn't switch to 48K when a cart is plugged in (notice that my board has no cart connector). A Sorcerer I could be upgraded to 48K (or 56K) much more easily by adding SRAM.

 

[tempest]

Would it be easier to mod the Sorcerer for 56K or find a BASIC cart?

I wonder if having 56K would cause any issues with programs? I imagine it could only help if you ever get a CP/M system going on it. Didn't most CP/M systems require a FULL 48K?

 

[ClausB]

Would it be easier to mod the Sorcerer for 56K or find a BASIC cart?

I think it would be easiest to make a replica cart with a big EPROM and switches to hold multiple cart images. Or go fancy with a flash ROM like what's available for other 8-bits.

 

[tempest]

How hard would it be to make a reproduction circuit board (8-track cases are cheap )?

 

[ClausB]

Would you want a period correct board that holds 4 2K EPROMs or a modern board to hold a huge EPROM with multiple cart images?

 

[jltursan]

Would it be easier to mod the Sorcerer for 56K or find a BASIC cart?

I wonder if having 56K would cause any issues with programs? I imagine it could only help if you ever get a CP/M system going on it. Didn't most CP/M systems require a FULL 48K?

I say that finding a BASIC cart is an almost impossible task .
I also think that It would be, probably, easier to make a PCB cart replica. There're not too many carts; but maybe some bins can be adapted to ROM pac size (with the aid of some compression routines) and then a bigger EPROM or flashrom would be really cool.

@ClausB: The launch address for the binary is $0000, you can use the Mess' "Quickload" function to test it ;-)

 

[tempest]

Would you want a period correct board that holds 4 2K EPROMs or a modern board to hold a huge EPROM with multiple cart images?

Might as well go with the huge EPROM cart. I think there are only 3 carts: BASIC, Assembly (I forget the real name, Programmers Cart or something like that), and the Word Processor. Of course if you could put other programs on there like games that would be awesome.