      Ron's Week'n'ADAM

      December 11, 1997

      I should be writing Christmas cards now that the Canadian
mail strike is over. Cannot seem to warm to the task somehow...
... omorrow maybe.

      Now that the ADAM card has been safely dispatched to Bob
Slopsema  (r.slopsema@worldnet.att.net), I'm left sitting here 
with two of my four ADAMs turned up, and the two DOS boxes 
turned off.  That is a much saner and more satisfying configur-
ation than anything else   I've tried lately. One ADAM is run-
ing TDOS 4.59, and the other  Generic CP/M.

      Yes, that's right, generic CP/M, as it came from Coleco.
      During the course of producing the ADAM Multimedia
Christmas card this year, I succeeded in crashing my IDE hard 
drive, once again proving that Murphy is alive, well, and eager 
to strike when it's least convenient. Christmas card content 
was stored on the EOS portion of that hard drive where I was 
working on it.  Fortunately, consistent with hard past exper-
ience from the school of self-taught hobbyist computing, I had 
taken the precaution of saving all the powerpaint screens and 
MIDI files on disk as well as on the 486 prior to getting into 
my file processing and conversions.
      I'm still one of these people who does not feel warm and
fuzzy until my files are stored on something that I can remove
from the computer - any computer.

      Let's hear it for multi-platform redundancy. Some of the 
MTAG greeting had just been received via FTP transfer on the
Internet, and had been checked out with Marcel DeKogel's Power-
paint Utility.  That program is a real milestone, and I'm sur-
prised that more ADAMites haven't used it. 

      At any rate, the card production continued following
several moments of panic which subsided after I realized that 
this time for once, Murphy had done his worst without effect. 

      Then my 486 DX4/120, nicknamed Gates, (because I don't like
it really, and it doesn't like me either) began making noises
about 'illegal operations' being performed by running software
doing important things for me. At that point I shut the door to
the snake pit, put on my jacket and went for a walk. After all,
Bob Slopsema had only waiting patiently for about 7 days. He
wouldn't notice a few hours more.

      The co-operativeness of a computer system is inversely 
proportional to the time available for the task at hand.  Walking 
in the fresh night air and deep breathing helps. So does cursing 
ANN, Gary Kildall, Bill Gates, Bob Slopsema, my mother, and any-
one else not within earshot.

      The job got done. Somewhere in the heat of the battle, I
had to boot my failed IDE with something other than it's normal
TDOS system. Guy Cousineau regularly advised members of the ADAM
User Friendly Group in Ottawa to keep at hand a TDOS system disk
set up only for a disk drive and data drives. It provides a place
to start in rebuilding sick hard drive boot tracks, because it
doesn't know they're there and carrys on without them. 

      Of course I didn't have a TDOS disk like that, at least not
at hand. Murphy ate it. What I did have was an old generic CP/M 
2.2 system disk, neatly labelled by my son Jeff about 10 years
ago. That did the job, and now that it's all over, I'm sitting
here with that disk loaded again. It's caused me to reflect on a
few things.

      On that disk, inter alia, was the one of the few Z-80
assembly language program that I ever wrote. I can recall actually 
uploading this program to a local Ottawa BBS feeling as pleased as 
can be with myself. COLCHNG.COM was a utility meant to allow an 
ADAM CP/M user to change the default ADAM screen colours, letter-
ing, background, foreground, and each third of the screen simply 
by using the Smartkeys. You could toggle through the various 
choices available, leave the program, and have your chosen colour 
scheme remain in effect until you changed it or re-booted. 
      It was a cryptic piece of work, had absolutely no
introduction, no prompts, no assistance of any kind.  It took me 
a while to remember that the Escape key ended it. But nonetheless 
it worked.

      Attached to COLCHNG.COM was a personal memory of my 16 year
old son (he's now 26) asking me why I was even interested in doing
such things. I can recall being unable to answer the question. 
      Looking back I think it all began with some kind of irrat-
ional wish to do something useful with the information in the
back of the CP/M 2.2 manual provided by Coleco. That data was so 
completely incomprehensible that I felt somehow that I had to find 
a use for it. 

      On the same CP/M 2.2 disk there were some other goodies.
MBASIC, Microsoft's version 5.2 of the BASIC language was there,
along with a program called AUTOBOOT.COM. Nasty bit of work, that
one.  Once you gave it a program to autoboot, it would boot that,
and  only that forever. It was difficult to change. That was
another of Guy Cousineau's warnings to AUFG, to be careful when
using  AUTOBOOT.

      Also on this old disk of mine was a pair of programs called
GS.COM and COM.COM. GS.COM would write the contents of a Coleco-
vision game cart to a CP/M COM file. You could then run it like
you ran any other CP/M program. COM.COM was part of a process
for converting game carts previously saved to disk or tape with
Peter Hinkle's program (Hacker's Guide to ADAM). Some of us
didn't particularly trust this method of saving games, and prefer-
red the CP/M versions. I'm not absolutely sure what role COM.COM
played in the process. Perhaps someone with a better memory can
enlighten us.

      Finally, there was ABP25.COM on this dusty old generic CP/M
2.2 disk of mine. ABP25 stood for ADAM BIOS Patch, version 2.5,
written by Tony Morehen. This Tony gave me not long after I'd 
written my COLCHNG.COM program, when I said that some of the 
escape sequences in appendix B of the Coleco CP/M manual didn't 
seem to work properly. He confirmed that that was in fact true, 
and that Coleco's implementation of CP/M was 'buggy' in a number 
of respects. Tony had fixed all that with ABP25.COM, which later 
evolved into TDOS. 

      To end this ramble on a completely obscure philosophical
note, it's funny how time changes one's perspective on things.
This particular disk that I found carried a singularly strange
mix of memories in addition to its magnetic content. There was 
a son growing up, and a husband and wife tuning eachother out. I
think it was somewhere around 1987 that I was trying so desparate-
ly to become an ADAM programmer of note, to the exclusion of 
everything  else in my life. The part that I focussed on seemed 
to be so much fun, and such a challenge. It turned out to be a 
dead end, pure and simple.

      Ya win some, ya lose some. It's been quite a ride, and
Murphy has always there to help, bless his pointed little head.

      Perhaps I'd better get to the Christmas cards.


-Ron Mitchell