Wow, Where is everybody?

Attendees were Dain and Roy. I guess they hung out and looked over Roy's new find; A membrane keyboard with 117 keys. The device plugs into the Apple II Joystick port and can be read by a small driver program. It has a regular keyboard as well as other 'buttons that can be programmed to do whatever you'd like them to. It is very cool with a childrens game overlay and a BASIC programming overlay.

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Saturday September 6, 2003:

This time Ed was there to accompany Dain and Roy.

Where is everybody?
We know Carl is not coming down on a game day, Brian Flood, Greg Nelson, and Matt were obligated to Family functions.
We speculated as to where Bill got off to and just plain missed everyone else. :)

Too bad too, Roy provided a door prize for those in attendance. I got both a Beagle Brothers sticker and a 2.5" cling Apple Logo. Did you?
Thankx Roy!

Further examination was made to the keyboard which is very large. I wish I'd taken notes on the thing.

Discussion was held and lessons taught in 6502 CPU programming. A CPU model with registers and Apple II (64k) memory map was illustrated on the white board.
There are 256 pages of 256 byes of ram, some pages have a predefined use by the Apple II hardware, some do not. Programs can go anywhere in memory, even the pages dedicated to hardware use. It is risky as you may end up confusing the hardware or the hardware may end up over writing your program.
Page 0 - Is used by CPU as quick storage, almost like additonal registers
Page 1 - Stack space for the CPU to put temporary register data and program pointers
Page 2 - Keyboard buffer
Page 3 - mostly free, except for some bytes near the top of this page like the reset vector, this space is commonly used to extend BASIC via the Ampersand (&) routines or other small utilities.
Page 4, 4, 6, 7 - Text page 1 and Graphic page 1, used by the video circuit for the display
Page 8, 9, A, B - Text page 2 and Graphic page 2, used by the video circuit fro the display
Page 20-3f - HiRes graphic Page 1
Page 40-5f - HiRes graphic page 2
Page 60-7f - Hires graphic page 3 (not displayable)
Page c0 - Softswitches for built in hardware and Slot Rom space
Page d0-ff - The Apple II BASIC and other programs in ROM
Keep in mind that there are other things in memory at any given time such as DOS and utility programs.

If you do not use any given display page, you can use that memory space for programming. For example, BASIC uses text page 1 and never text page 2 so it uses memory page 8 for the start of its program code unless changed via a lomem command.

Roy asked Ed about the accelerator project. Ed said he is waiting to acquire some parts. Roy generously donated some Ram.

Ed also updated the club about the VGA daughter board. "I just need to solder it together". The parts total should only be a few dollars, hopefully well under $25 if we want to make a few for members.

It was decide that the next meeting would be the 2nd Saturday in October. If there is room, it will be at Roay's house, otherwise it will be at the church again.