Date   : Wed, 13 Jan 1993 10:09:40 GMT
From   : matthew@... (Matthew Sweet)
Subject: Re: Real Time Clock (and other subjects)?

Happy New Year to all.

Ian writes:
>   Does anyone have a design for an Acorn compatable real time  
>clock? I remember discussing this with Mathew last summer. Could we  
>put together a production run? (How about it Richard?).

I was thinking of using a chip with 2k-8bytes of NVRAM as well
as a battery backed RTC. This and a bit of glue logic & space
for some other RAM...I _might_ even be able to get a good price
on the RTC chip as Tadpole buy them in quantity.

>(I'm gona get my hard disc REAL SOON. honest!)

I know the feeling. I still have not got around to getting one.

>                                              Also does anyone have a  
>commercial (ie good quality) C compiler?

I have most of a copy of CC's Beebug C compiler (which compiles
ANSI C to P-code, and emulates a P-code machine). Sadly, I am
unable to lay my hands on one of the two ROMs, which is missing.
CC will sell either the entire package (50+ sterling) to anyone,
or the single ROM (12+ sterling) to the original purchaser of
the software.

I have been unable to persuade CC to part with just the second ROM,
despite having proof of a direct line back to the original purchaser.
I have contacted the original purchaser, and he is unable to buy the
ROM and sell it on - even as a favour. The educational site he works
for have got rid of their BBC 'C' package (to me) and can no longer
buy things for it. He did send me a rather nice letter, but CC won't
accept this.

(Any chance of tcc sometime Ian?)

Does anyone have some cheap modems & S/W? - I need a way of getting
stuff from work to home (and back). Currently this is very hard, as
nothing at work understands DFS or ADFS format disks.

>   Finaly remember that just 'cause the BBC is old, it doesn't  
>mean that it can't do everything it could when you bought it. 

Too right. After using SPARC & 88110 stuff at work it is quite fun
trying to get the trusty old BBC to do something meaningful!

Sometime soon I shall post my fixed-point 6502 assembler routines,
and the mandelbrot program that spawned them. I suspect that there
is a much better (but similar) algorithm to the one I use, but haven't
finished playing with the set-up yet.

Matthew Sweet
matthew@...