Monthly Archives: June 2018

Oregon Trail, Update and Online

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Last July, I posted about finding a copy of an early version of Oregon Trail.  I was going to get it running on an emulated PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E.  I managed to get it all typed into the emulated computer, but it was not running very well.

Recently, I cleaned up my ability to print listings from my emulated PDP 11/70.  One of the listings I printed right away was for Oregon Trail.

Last night, I spent about half the night working on Oregon Trail.  I loaded up the PDF of Oregon Trail in Creative Computing (V4N3 May/June 1978) and set the size at 200%.  Working with the printed listing and a ruler to mark my place, I went line by line through the program and made corrections on the printout.  In some instances I increased the size setting to as high as 1600% in order to clarify what was in the magazine.  I spent a matter of a few minutes making changes from the listing to the program and as a finale step ran a cross reference listing and found one variable that was not really supposed to be there.

I believe I have it running now and have put it in the games library so others my try it out.

 

Creating PDF of Basic-Plus listings using WF-2630

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In the past I have tried to get usable listings posted in blog postings and they don’t fare well for me anyways.  While I was working on getting my emulated 11/70 to print I tried out something that works out pretty cool.

I have an Epson WF-2630 multifunction printer.  It prints, scans, and faxes.  It can create PDF documents as it scans and has an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

When you print out a listing it stacks up first page on the bottom to last page on top, so first thing I did after printing a listing is to reverse it so the header page is on top of the pile.

After I looked at the first couple of listings I had a thought about creating a PDF of one.  I took the stack and put in the ADF of the printer facing up.  I ran the Epson scan program and just told it to scan using the ADF.  For the size setting I used “Letter [L][11 x 8.5 in.]”.  After scanning the whole document I saved it.

The first couple of times I tried it I was using the size setting of “Letter [8.5 x 11 in.]” and then when I opened it using Adobe Reader I would rotate the image.

Choosing the “Letter [L][11 x 8.5 in.]” setting saves me from having to rotate the document to view it.

Looking at the PDF this creates is very much like looking through an old fanfold listing.

Here is a listing of a program I typed in called Star Merchant:
STMRCH-BAS

Emulated 11/70 Printer

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I have emulated a PDP 11/70 to run RSTS/E for decades.  The big thing that was missing for me was the ability to print.  Almost two years ago I switched from SimH, a great emulator, to Ersatz 11.  Ersatz 11 has the ability to print using the host computers printer.

When I switched over I got the printer working but, it wasn’t quite right  I seemed to loose a few lines of text over the page breaks.  The other night I had time to sit down and work though it.

If I print the traditional way, I could only get 80 columns.  Ersatz allows you to rotate the output to get wider printouts.  I had already rotated the output, but while I got the wider printouts I was loosing a couple of lines across the page breaks.  A little tedious trial and error resulted in a setting I could work with.  This line in the ersatz init file sets up the printer:  ASSIGN LP0: OSPRINT: /LANDSCAPE/ROTATE:90/FORM:LETTER/SIZE:132×58

Once RSTS/E was setup I changed the spool command file

FORCE KB: LP0:/DFL:55/LEN:55/HEAD:1/WIDTH:132

You will notice that the init file defines a page size of 58 lines of 132 characters, but the spool file defines it as 55 lines of 132 characters.  They don’t match but they do work on my Epson WF-2630.

The print out is not perfect.  The header pages from QUE are a few lines to long to fit on a page but the rest of the print out is great.