Software for the Swyft computer

[dke...@hotmail.com]

Hi
Jack Rubin recently purchased 2 Canon Cats and a Swyft.
He sent the Swyft to me to take a look at. It did take some
minor shipping damage. A taught video cable broke and needed
to be resoldered.
I'd been curious as to how one loaded Forth code from an
editor screen. On the Cat, one first needs to set a switch
in the Forth interpreter ( 0 wheel! ). This didn't seem to be
the case for the Swyft. Some things are quite different.
On the Swyft, there is a button under the disk door ( no door
on the Cat either ) that put one in the Forth interpreter.
I'd gotten this far when looking at Bill Meunch's Swyft a few
months ago. Still, I was puzzle as to how to take source code
from the editor and compile inot Forth. Bill had written a decompiler
( see the file section ) but normally one would enter the source
into the editor and then compile.
I scanned the command table ( what interprets the UseFront
key strokes ). I found what looked like the right command
and it turned out to be the shifted return key.
Sure enough, " UseFront-Shift-Return " would feed any hilighted
text to the Forth interpreter.
That answered that mystery.
I checked the ROMs to see what version they had to compare with
what Al has on bitsavers. It seems to be a newer version. Al's is
vers 330 while Jacks machine is 332. I hope to do a ROM dump
soon. Taking a Swyft apart is difficult but putting it back together
is even more difficult. Things are really tight.
Dwight

[dke...@hotmail.com]

Hi
I just uploaded a file called SWYFTPIN.txt.
It has what I believe the pins on the back of the Swyft
computer are for. At least the parallel printer is
most likely correct.
There are only three people on this group, that I
know of, that might be interested in this information.
Still, it is good to get it written down. If any with Swyfts
want to experiment and remove some of the ? marks
that would be great as well.
Dwight