Paul.Birkel@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (04/06/88)
My son turned three a couple of months ago and has taken an inordinate interest in my wifes PC-compatible. Actually its not so inordinate since Daddy spends his entire day playing with 'puters. He's got his own floppy now, but it doesn't do anything (yet). Anyway, the PC compatible was moved to work (for my wife) and I'm thinking about giving him an older CP/M system. So far his interest has been based on getting characters to print at the dos-prompt, and overloading the buffer 'til it beeps. Pretty simple. He's only three, so at this stage I envision that a simple program which displays a *BIG* character on the display in response to a keystrike will be pretty entertaining 'til he learns where most of the keys are. Then I figured that I could down-size the characters from 80x24 to maybe 5x7 so that he could work on words. As I'm under severe pressure to finish my dissertation I would prefer not to spend the time writing this (admittedly simple) code. Actually, any simple program that would respond to keystrokes with pretty significant environmental changes would probably be interesting. Adventure-like games are a little too advanced, might as well hack at the system prompt ... Anyway, can anyone point me to CP/M "kiddy"/"educational" software? Anything public-domain? I'd bet that there must be some for the C64/128, but it's probably in cartridge form. I need 5 1/4" format. I haven't a C compiler and am not prepared to go back to ASM. I do have an old BASIC somewhere ... maybe BASIC source would be my best bet. Anyone have any source? Even PC-based BASIC code for a mono, non-graphic environment would be useful. The terminal is an ADM31 I believe (a Morrow system); don't recall whether there is a graphic font. BTW, what's the easiest way to get a beep into a CP/M system? Seems I could cycle a bit on a parallel port and drive an amp; I could simply gate an oscillator with the bit (NE555?); or I could drive a synthesizer chip. Suggestions? What's a cheap, easy-to-use synthesizer chip? Pointers, help, suggestions gratefully accepted. Other folks must have (have had) kids in a CP/M world. What do (did) they do? paul Paul A. Birkel Dept. of Computer Science Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-8893
cwwj@ur-tut (Clarence Wilkerson) (04/09/88)
I have a program that draws large letters on the screen. The source code is in Turbo Pascal. What machine do you have?