The SC/MP... it lives!

[Stan Barr]

Hi,

river said:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got a few old SC/MP-II chips and I decided to try and do something with them.
> 
> It appears that only 2 of the chips actually work, but I've just proto-typed a small
> system with 4K ROM, 4K RAM, an 8251 USART and an 8255 PPI. I got the
> comms going yesterday and the PPI is fine. Excellent old vintage stuff.

Excellent!  I've a soft spot for the old SC/MP, and I still have my old
Science of Cambridge (Sinclair) Mk14, which still works.  Before that
I had a home-brew system based on a board produced by a local firm here.
This was about 1976/7

> 
> I forgot how cumbersome the SC/MP instruction set was, but it's fun trying 
> to
> code around its deficiencies. I've got a listing of the original KITBUG for 
> the
> SC/MP, but I'm going to expand on it to provide more functionality. I'll 
> try and
> base the monitor off the old Intel 8080 SBC monitor.
> 

The instruction set has an elegant simplicity :-)
It makes position independent code easy though, and I wrote an operating
system for the Mk14 that allowed me to load numbered programs from tape,
with auto-run if required, multiple resident programs (in 1K ram!), and
would recover the memory vacated by deleted programs.  Good fun...

I did start to write an emulator, the basics of which I prototyped
and it works, but other projects got in the way.  Not sure where the
code is now.




-- 
Cheers,
Stan Barr  stanb at dial.pipex.com

The future was never like this!