Blinkenlights! :)

[Greg Jewett]

So, when I am not using my 8088 Arduino Experimenter, and I want it to look busy, I have heard a lot of humor around having it blinking light (not random), but in an execution or a program.  

I have the Expansion Bus and LED Register Card (not yet assembled).  However, I want the LEDs on the front of the Experimenter to do the "blinkenlights".

Is there a way to have the Experimenter blink lights when using BASIC or address the LEDs via BASIC, to do say binary counting, or literally random lights, or other patterns?

Is there a program I can load on the SDCard or above to make this happen?
Thanks!

[Chris Davis]

I like to run Kill-the-Bit.  Turn on the Altair-Duino, raise SW1 and SW8, toggle AUX1 down.  

[David Williams]

From BASIC, probably not the lights on the front. Kill-the-Bit and Pong light them by accessing the high addresses that they represent in loops. You could try doing the same thing with PEEK statements, but I suspect that you'll have trouble getting the loops tight enough for them to be bright and clear. If you do try this, I'd suggest using one of the standalone BASICs rather than MBASIC in CP/M. CP/M lives up in those high addresses, so every time BASIC uses I/O, you'll have random activity lighting them as well.

[HAL 9000]

I know this is pretty late, but I was visiting for the first time in a few years.

I wrote a couple programs to do "blinkenlights" that may fit the bill. They were both done machine language (one toggled, the other assembled in CP/M)

https://groups.google.com/g/altair-duino/c/29e48Q8FW9k

https://groups.google.com/g/altair-duino/c/Z3RzM60Oz0k

-J

On Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:04:32 AM UTC-6 jew...@ejewett.com wrote: