Welcome to Dragon Basic Source Restoration!

[davidlinsley]

👋 Welcome!

At the moment I write this it has been five weeks since the Dragon Meetup 2022 (October 22-23 in Port Talbot, Wales), and finally we are kicking off! Until now I've felt like George Costanza with the Penske File having transferred the original listing file to a fire and waterproof case and little else but some basic research. The first commit is just the raw scans we took at the Meetup, though they have been rotated to the correct orientation.

The Original Listing

The listing appears to be final output from the RASM09 assembler from a Motorola Exorset development system. RASM09 Manual and comprises 14 files over 4 bundles of tractor feed totaling 341 pages.

ECBCOM.SA is partially present at the top of the first page of each file, defining the name (NAM directive) of the section the file represents and setting the printer line width. This file otherwise does not seem to be available in its complete original form.

Bundle #1
CCI10222022_0001 - 0008 ECBRAM.SA
CCI10222022_0009 - 0056 ECBBAS.SA
CCI10222022_0057 - 0071 ECBBS2.SA
CCI10222022_0072 - 0083 ECBTAB.SA
CCI10222022_0084 - 0093 ECBDNL.SA

Bundle #2
CCI10222022_0094 - 0114 ECBPU.SA
CCI10222022_0115 - 0149 ECBMTH.SA
CCI10222022_0150 - 0183 ECBEXT.SA
CCI10222022_0184 - 0225 ECBGRP.SA
CCI10222022_0226 - 0269 ECBMOD.SA

Bundle #3
CCI10232022 - 0041 ECBM64.SA

Bundle #4
CCI10232022_0042 - 0057 ECBOEM.SA
CCI10232022_0058 - 0070 ECBO64.SA

The Restoration Work

I'll be making other posts with some thoughts, suggestions and notes about what I've found so far, but please speak up about anything either through a reply or a new discussion thread. There are no commitments (or commits!) needed from any volunteer, and all ideas are welcome. I'm so excited that this project is finally here!

Special Thanks

Duncan Smeed for being the original BIOS author, integrator, listing printer and then guardian for 39 years before spending much of his time at the Meetup scanning.
Richard Hardy for prodding Duncan over at least three years to find the listing, organizing the Meetup and bringing his A3 scanner.
Tim Gilberts for helping Duncan and I scan over the two days.
Everyone else for the great conversation while we scanned.

[davidlinsley]

The Motorola assembler manual is now available in the docs directory.

[davidlinsley]

I'm not read through extensively, but a few notes and findings:

• All files in bundles 1, 2 and 3 look like they are from Microsoft as they each start with a Microsoft copyright notice.
  • ECBMOD.SA scan CCI10222022_0231 contains the Dragon copyright 1982 startup screen behind a METTOY conditional and the EXEC initialization to go to 64k mode.
  • ECBM64.SA scan CCI10232022_003 contains the Dragon copyright 1983 startup screen behind a METTOY conditional
• The two files in bundle 4 have no copyright notices and appear to be the BIOS from Dragon Data for the Dragon 64:
  • ECBOEM.SA the 32K ROM
  • ECB064.SA the 64K ROM.

A few other ECBMOD.SA notes:

• CCI10222022_0228 Finds top of RAM - Tandy 4/16/32k support?
• CCI10222022_0229 mentions 60Hz and check for Disk ROM (Tandy?)

[davidlinsley]

ECBBS2.CA page 1 (ocr\ECBBS2.SA\CCI10222022_0057.txt) has a missing sequence number indicating SPCSW was zero or not defined. Is this another system type?

00729 0000 A IFNE SPCSW
00731 ENDC IFN SPCSW

It is also referenced in other locations in ecbbs2.sa. I wonder if it's related to SWTPC?