I wonder what’s on at #Dendy….
OH.
I guess I won’t be going anywhere near there for a bit.
(Pretty much every screen has been eaten by the Mario Galaxy movie. Which, meh)
Not enough time tonight either, only time for more thoughts:
5. I should try the Subor's cartridge on an actual Famicom.
6. I need to learn how to adapt my 7-pin NES accessories to the 15-pin port on the Subor. Hopefully it uses the same pinout as the 15-pin expansion port on the Famicom.
7. I know a Famicom Disk System won't work with PAL timings, but I wonder if a Famicom Network System modem adapter would?
More thoughts:
3. I have long harbored a dream of building a conventional 80s-style home computer that uses the NES chipset, but my designs always wind up being essentially just a differently shaped NES. This Subor is not much more than that, but researching it I have learned about other, later Famiclones that are. It has opened my mind to possibilities and inspired me a bit.
4. I wonder if the Subor's printer port is bi-directional.
Not enough time tonight to toy with the Subor, but I have thoughts about it.
1. FloatBASIC has a LOAD command, but apparently no SAVE command. There's also no obvious way to attach I/O peripherals to the Subor for saving and loading. The LOAD command seems to just cause the machine to hang.
2. I wonder if FloatBASIC would attempt to LOAD from cassette if I connected a FamilyBASIC keyboard into one of the controller ports and used its cassette ports.
I'm sticking with FloatBASIC. However, without a manual, much less one in a language I can read, I don't know the commands available or the syntax required. I can't even interpret all the error messages. And, beyond knowing that it's a modified version of BASIC originally intended for another machine, I don't have much to fall back on. It seems to be based on MS BASIC and has a somewhat modified ASCII character table, that much I have figured out.
It's interesting trying to use BASIC when you don't know what dialect the machine wants.
The Subor SB225-B has two flavors - G-BASIC and F-BASIC, or GameBASIC and FloatBASIC. GameBASIC is a modified FamilyBASIC, as published by Nintendo based on HudsonSoft and Sharp's PlayboxBASIC. FloatBASIC is... complicated.
Apparently, it's stolen from another Chinese computer company called Fei Suo, who in turn stole it from a Japanese computer company.
Arcadiagt5
prokyonid