Monday, August 7, 2023

PIONEER R1 update

These are the changes for the 2nd release R1 of my PIONEER project:
  • I extended the 6-char 7-segment LED display to 16 characters
  • I introduced Intel's 8279 Programmable Keyboard/Display Interface
  • The first PIONEER game is available: Haunted House text adventure
  • Alphanumericals ("0"-"9", "A"-"Z") and punctuation symbols are available now
  • I moved to rasm assembler because of support for undocumented instructions
  • I provide binary ROM and Intel hex format images
Unfortunately I finished the R1 release more than one year ago but due to other life projects unrelated to retrocomputing I didn't manage to update the documentation and clean up the code until now. Hopefully there will be no complaints :-)

A few comments:
  • Intel's 8279 PKDI device is used to access the 20-key keyboard and the 16-character display
  • Haunted House is Robert Arnstein's text adventure published in 1979 for the TRS-80
  • It's impossible to obtain a unique, unambiguous representation of all letters of the Latin alphabet with a 7-segment code but the correct interpretation results from the context
  • PIONEER R1 is a Haunted House-only release

A detailed description of all changes will follow soon.