DEBUG by Adrian Ryan (c)2013
I was going through some of my 'junk' as my wife calls it, 'goodies' to me, and I came across a box of 3-1/2 720K disks. I was just about to sling them when curiosity overcame me, and Instead I opened the box and took a look inside. To my intense surprise, there were a set of disks containing some software I wrote for the Tandy Model 100/102 and the Olivetti M10 way back in the late eighties. I'd almost forgotten about those days.
Back then I was the Station Engineer at a place called Carp, just outside of Ottawa in Canada. The satellite ground terminal which was my domain was part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's world-wide communications network, and it was all my 'toy'.
I had at that time a Model 100 which was my constant companion at the site for all sorts of purposes, note taking, calculation, testing, you name it, the M100 helped me do it. Whilst I was quite happy to use BASIC, as a machine language programmer from way back in the dark days of 16 bit minicomputers, Honeywell, DDP-516s and the like, with paper tape punches and readers, Teletype ASR-KSR 33s as I/O terminals, etc, I was much more interested in programming the M100 in 8085 assembler to make the most of its memory and limited speed.
What I needed was something like DEBUG for MS-DOS, so, on a month's holiday back in England to amuse myself I took my M100 and designed and started to write DEBUG for the Model 100. This project grew, and the end result is a fully relocatable machine language DEBUG. It has a built-in assembler, disassembler, move memory, verify memory, search memory, all the usual stuff, but in addition, it can single-step any machine code, even in ROM and has the single step, walk, and go features.
I have occasionally visited your site, and I was expecting to see this there somewhere because I'd published this in one of the Model 100 magazines back then, and also posted it on the CompuServe bulleting board (Remember that?) but it seemed to have vanished without trace. So, rather than consign this to the bin, I thought you guys might like it. I've tested it with Virtual-T and it seems to work perfectly, even with the 'illegal' op-codes.
So, I would like to donate all this software, as well as the complete source code package for DEBUG, and anything else that might be of interest. It would be a shame to simply 'ditch' this if someone out there could make some use of it. As a example, I'm attaching the PDF version of the User Manual for DEBUG. If you guys don't want/need this, then that's fine, I don't have a Model 100 anymore, except as Virtual-T and I don't see them for sale anywhere, so much as I loved it, I guess they are now mouldering away in landfill sites somewhere - pity, they were THE most useful machines, they never crashed, were instant-on, didn't need constant connection the Microsoft to update them because of programming faults, were simple to use, and, like multimeters, oscilloscopes, spectrum analysers, power meters, were part of my standard tool kit - happy days!
Adrian Ryan
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