Category Epson PX-8

Kim Kimberley, Zork & CP/M

Retrocosm Leave a comment

I had a spare hour or so today and decided to hunt around for some games for my PX-8.  Given the limitations of the display and my own fondness for interactive fiction I decided to see what text adventure games I could find for CP/M.

A quick search for CP/M games took me immediately to the Retroarchive where I’m pleased to say the first three games of Infocom’s excellent Zork series were to be found along with a number of other games.

Pleased with this result I wondered if there were any CP/M versions of Level 9’s adventure games out there and I quickly found Snowball and Lords Of Time here.

Annoyingly my plans for a bridge machine with both USB and network support remain exactly that, plans, for some reason Filink will not run on the Pentium III under DOS and I have therefore been forced to resort to my Fujitsu in order to transfer files to the PX-8.  The downside of this is I have to burn a CD every time that I want to transfer files downloaded with my Mac on the Fujitsu for transfer to the Epson.

Nevertheless I was soon transferring the games I had downloaded with Filink from the Fujitsu directly on 5.25 floppies via the PX-8 (picture below.)

All of the Infocom and Level 9 games appear to be working fine.  Some of the location descriptions are too long for the PX-8 to display without some of the text scrolling out of view and if I’m honest the LCD on the Epson is not one of the best I’ve seen, in fact the PX-4 has a much better screen with clearer better contrast.

However the keyboard is a joy to use, it has that lovely clackety clack that you don’t seem to get with modern day equivalents so I shall get stuck in again to the world of Zork and see what I can remember.

I’ve copied Zork 1 to the ram disk and will store my save games on cassette for the shear hell of it.

I am indeed standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. Maximum verbosity.

That reminds me, I’m sure there was a another version on the Vic 20 called The Colonel’s House?  Oh, and I’ve also discovered that you can play Zork in your browser at ifiction.org.

Epson PF-10 Disk Drive Working Again

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I recently stripped down my two PF-10’s and managed to reassemble one working drive from the components.  The drive is working quite well, the only real problem is the battery is only lasting about 30-40 minutes before needing a lengthy recharge.  However this at least gives me enough time to perform a few tasks.

Today I formatted some disks using Copydisk, I found some old 1.0 MB double sided double density disks which seem to work well, the high density ones that I tried did not work.  I then daisy chained the TF-20 and the PF-10 to the PX-8 by running the cable from the TF-20 into the back of the PF-10.  This required opening up the PF-10 battery compartment in order to flick a dip switch to ensure there were no drive letter conflicts.

This set up gives you the PF-10 as drive F and the TF-20 dual drives as D and E.  The PF-10 came with some old disks and I took the opportunity to copy their contents using PIP onto some 5.25″ disks just in case the PF-10 dies again.  This included some original copies of Microsoft Basic and Compiler.  That proved to be enough work for the main battery and the back-up battery light began to flash.  It’s a shame the unit won’t run off of the AC adapter however I’m just thrilled it’s now working at all.

I shall use Filink to further back up the files I transferred today onto my bridge machine and I shall see if there’s any chance of building another working PF-10 from the left over components.

Epson PX-8 & PF-10

PX-8 Intelligent Ram Disk Working

Retrocosm 2 Comments

I was pleasantly surprised to find that a PX-8 that I’d recently bought on Ebay (to secure a PF-10) came with the Intelligent RAM Disk add-on that sits like a wedge under the machine.  Initially however both of the PX-8’s I tried it with would continually give BDOS errors whilst it was connected.  I came to the conclusion that the batteries in the unit were causing the problems as the unit is in very good condition and shows no obvious signs of damage or harsh treatment.

I don’t have a manual for the unit, however yet again FJ Kraan’s excellent site comes to the rescue with a PDF of the manual.  As Fred Jan pointed out BDOS errors can be caused by the Write Protect Switch being in the on position however I’d already tried the unit with the switch set to off.

My original PX-8 needed charging so I decided to attach the RAM Disk again and give the machine a full charge.  On turning on I was still presented with BDOS errors.  I then did the following things, stupidly I can’t remember in which order.  I initialised the machine by pressing the reset switch whilst holding down Right-Shift and Num-Graph.  I unscrewed the RAM Disk and with it still connected by cable disconnected the PX-8’s main battery and flicked the switch next to it back and forward and reconnected the battery.  I also opened the ROM cover under the machine and pressed the Initial Reset button.

On reassembling and turning the unit back on I was presented with the Initialisation Screen and was then given the option to format the RAM disk which worked, hooray.  I now have an unfathomably large 120k RAM disk to play with!

Don’t you just love it when you try something and it works even though you were pretty sure it wouldn’t.  I’m now referring to using Filink to transfer files between the two PX-8’s.  I was attempting (again) to resuscitate one of my PF-10’s with no luck when I somehow ended up with the drive cable actually connecting the two PX-8’s together.

Fed up with the PF-10 and inspired by my cable stupidity I moved the cable from the serial ports to the RS232c ports and attempted to transfer some files between the PX-8’s confident that the cable would be incorrectly wired.

However Filink immediately sprang into life and happily transferred files back and forward between the two machines.

Going back to the PF-10’s I’m now working on the assumption that the on board backup batteries are dead.  I note in the manual for the drive on page 1-4 it states:- When using dry batteries, the PF-10 may not operate if the sub-battery is not sufficiently charged.

These sub-batteries are soldered onto the boards so swapping them out is a task beyond my abilities however it’s certainly something to consider for the future.