[sci.electronics] INS8073 "Tiny-BASIC CPU".. remember these?

elmquist@SSESCO.com (Chris Elmquist) (01/09/91)

A long, long time ago... in a land far, far away... there existed
these little CPUs..  made by National I believe.  I built a little
board based on one of them... and it worked fine.  However, I was
always frusterated that I couldn't figure out how to write code
that could poll the serial port to see if a character was waiting.
Far as I could tell... you could only do INPUT statements that
would suspend execution until input terminated by <CR> was entered.

Does anyone know how to do single character input with this CPU?
Is there a way to PEEK some register to see if a character is
waiting?  I've got a little project that could use the limited
intelligence of this CPU... if I could figure out the single
character I/O.

Any tips would be appreciated.  Thanks!

Chris