SC/MP programming book?

[SiriusHardware]

To be honest, I had forgotten that distinction.

[circuitryboy]

I believe this is the required book. My records show I'd requested it for the British Library visit when I was primarily looking at DDJ annuals.
I found another {online auction} item with better pics of Contents pages. Compare the logics pattern on pic 2 with Phil's 'References'.
The back cover says SCMP and NIBL with 2 extensions possible.
I've read numerous TAB books. The proof-reading is not great.

[Chris55000]

Hi!

I believe this is the required book. My records show I'd requested it for the British Library visit when I was primarily looking at DDJ annuals.
I found another {online auction} item with better pics of Contents pages. Compare the logics pattern on pic 2 with Phil's 'References'.
The back cover says SCMP and NIBL with 2 extensions possible.
I've read numerous TAB books. The proof-reading is not great.

So do I – I've just bought a copy !

For anybody whose wanting to try out CuriousMarc's SC/MP program listings – beware – they're all written entirely in French and his handwriting isn't particularly brilliant – it's many months of hard work with a magnifying glass and a PC to re–do all of these into English !

Chris Williams

[Phil__G]

Thanks everyone, that has answered the question.
I'd buy a copy but the best offer I could find yesterday was one for £28 (delivered from usa) on A----n, but this morning that one has gone up to £32 delivered, which I cant really justify

[SiriusHardware]

Probably our collective fault - we all went off looking for it and Amazon's robots must have noticed a sudden surge in interest in it. If we all spend the next few weeks whistling and looking the other way, the price will come back down.

[Phil__G]

My lad was peeking over my shoulder: "Whats that, another nerd book?"
"its an old one I've wanted for 40 years but its £32"
"thats less than a quid a year", leans over and clicks 'buy it now' and tells me its my birthday present (thursday)!
(he's always been a lateral thinker...)
Happy chappy!
Phil

[Herald1360]

Happy Birthday Phil

Kids can be great!

[SiriusHardware]

Thanks Chris, now we all feel bad because we didn't get him anything...

(Hope you enjoy your book Phil).

[Phil__G]

You all helped by identifying the mystery book!
(which is on the slow boat...).

[Chris55000]

Hi!

I have just received my copy and I can confirm it matches Phil's extract he posted initially!

Full details of the book are :–

"How To Design, Build & Program Your Own Advanced Working Computer System"

By Robert D. Haviland

Tan Books Inc., First Edition, Fourth Printing, 1981

ISBN 0–8306–1332–3.

The picture of the cover with the pincushion–shaped patterns of red, yellow and blue squares at top and bottom posted by Phil G in post no. 11 is indeed this book, which is a sequel to "How To Design, Build & Program Your Own Working Computer System", by the same author, Tab Books No. 1111!

Chris Williams

[Phil__G]

Excellent, a mystery solved!
Still waiting on mine... on the slow boat somewhere...

[circuitryboy]

A footnote to this Detective Tale:-
Who here uses their local Library?
And once therein can you make a request for a book not found in your local Catalogue?
For me the answers are Yes and Yes. And the plea to the nation is an 'ILL', an InterLibrary Loan.
I use this occasionally. Supply as many details as possible, especially ISBN.
Sometimes it comes back "unable to locate any lending locations".
But it's a 'no win no fee' system. So I thought "Let's have a go".
And got a quick result! Collected it yesterday evening. My first ever from British Library. They can come from anywhere that's willing to loan.
(When I said before that TAB proofreading wasn't good, I meant to add that the photographs can be bad too .)

[SiriusHardware]

When Phil mentioned the British Library earlier in the thread I went so far as to check the online catalogues of the National Library Of Scotland (ironically much closer to me than the BM) and the National Library Of Wales, and drew blanks.

It used to and may still be the case that the British Library held a reference copy of every book ever published in Britain, although if that's still true I don't know where they keep them all.

[Phil__G]

Yay, my Birthday book has arrived, perfect condition full of SC/MP stuff and so much I'd forgotten about. There are still copies around, I'd recommend it to any scamper
Really sorry but its survived 40 years in perfect nick so I dont want to risk breaking its back on a photocopier. Has anyone invented a thin photosensitive sheet that you can slide between the pages of a closed book?
Why not?

[SiriusHardware]

Glad it got there OK.

There used to be hand held scanners like a short single ended rolling pin which you could 'swipe' down a page. I haven't seen one for a while. If you were determined to archive it electronically you could always set up an overhead digital camera, open the book no more than 90 degrees and use a clean glass sheet to hold the page to be photographed down flat. Quite a lot of effort to get the lighting, etc, right, I agree.

I may buy one when the interest (and therefore inflated price) sparked by this thread has faded away.

[Slothie]

Originally Posted by Phil__G

Yay, my Birthday book has arrived, perfect condition full of SC/MP stuff and so much I'd forgotten about. There are still copies around, I'd recommend it to any scamper
Really sorry but its survived 40 years in perfect nick so I dont want to risk breaking its back on a photocopier. Has anyone invented a thin photosensitive sheet that you can slide between the pages of a closed book?
Why not?

Perhaps if you spot anything of particular note or novelty you could create a document with quotes and photos of diagrams as a sort of "highlights" . I'm sure that quite a lot in the book is available from the other sources we are familiar with, but there will be the odd gem that can be extracted. Of course, this presumes some available spare time!

[Phil__G]

One particular piece looks very useful, "The long arm of P3" is a very clever subroutine handler, basically you point P3 at the handler and thereafter leave it be.
For any subsequent call or return the required address is placed inline after an XPPC P3 call to the handler. Its easier, more logical, more legible and if you have several calls its shorter code!

I'll transpose it to San Bergmans SBASM and post it, it will be easier than trying to explain!

Cheers
Phil

[Mark1960]

It’ll be interesting to see the detail of that. I was thinking of something similar that would also check interupt status first, then if interupt service that interupt and return, if not interupt then perform the call. It could also use one of the other pointers as a stack pointer. Problem is that testing the interupt would slow down all subroutine calls.

[Timbucus]

I have seen a magazine article with a subroutine dispatcher like that with in line address for the subroutine but, my index system fails to locate it as I probably forgot to record it. It did however remind me of a neat trick I came across in Practical Electronics Feb 79 (page 60) has hardware subroutine instruction extensions and computed goto using undocumented instruction XPAL 0 (x'30) which exchanges the Acc. with lower half of PC so jumps to AC+1 - lots of tricks. A similar version is used in the 1 dimensional life program.

https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Pra...9-02-S-OCR.pdf

[Michael Haardt]

While that was news to me as well, it is not undocumented, just not documented explicitly. The assembler manual does say that PC is P0 and makes it clear that the ptr bitfield in opcodes has values 0-3 for that reason, which makes the opcode x'30 with ptr 0 documented.

It is still a cool feature that would have deserved an example in the manual.