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Kaypro 4 and strange behavior with certain CP/M games.

VERAULT said:
Id have to open mine to find out, but I think the 4/83 is very much similar to the kaypro II. My Kaypro 4 has an onboard modem (so the transformer sticks out at you when you open it) and the Battery for the RTC. Yours doesnt have that so it looks like a 4/83
Kaypros naming convention is awful, the kaypro II should be the kaypro I, the kaypro 4/83 should be called the kaypro II.. Its pretty confusing if you try and follow. someone did a video covering it on youtube.
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So the video link I posted up above with the guy running Aliens in text mode... is that a newer model than mine and is that why he can run that game in text mode and I can't properly? I just want to make sure before I call this restore project complete that everything is in proper working order. Make sure there is nothing wrong with my motherboard or something like that. I could care less otherwise playing games on this thing as they are so primitive, fun is hard to be had out of them. LOL. Although I do like a game of Ladders, the Donkey Kong text mode clone.

I also had a VERY weird thing happen last night that I have never seen in my 40 years of tinkering with computers. I formatted a DSDD floppy disk as a SSDD disk in the 22DISK utility so I could dump a SSDD TD0 image onto the floppy using Teledisk. It worked fine, BUT here comes the really weird part. When I do a directory listing of the floppy in Drive B I see completely different files than when I do a directory listing on Drive A on the SAME disk!!!??? I may have had data on it previously as a DSDD formatted disk, but still... why in the heck would the two drives read it completely different???

If you want proof on this I can make a short video. Really strange, but I am thinking it has something to do with how I formatted the disk in DISK22. Any ideas or ever run across this weird behavior? Maybe the heads on the two drives are slightly aligned differently and reading the disk differently? Like data left over from when it was a DSDD? My brain hurts after farting around on the Kaypro all day.
 
liqmat said:
So the video link I posted up above with the guy running Aliens in text mode... is that a newer model than mine and is that why he can run that game in text mode and I can't properly? I just want to make sure before I call this restore project complete that everything is in proper working order. Make sure there is nothing wrong with my motherboard or something like that. I could care less otherwise playing games on this thing as they are so primitive fun is hard to be had out of them. LOL. Although I do like a game of Ladders, the Donkey Kong text mode clone.

I also had a VERY weird thing happen last night that I have never seen in my 40 years of tinkering with computers. I formatted a DSDD floppy disk as a SSDD disk in the 22DISK utility so I could dump a SSDD TD0 image onto the floppy using Teledisk. It worked fine, BUT here comes the really weird part. When I do a directory listing of the floppy in Drive B I see completely different files than when I do a directory listing on Drive A on the SAME disk!!!??? I may had data on it previously as DSDD formatted disk, but still... why in the heck would the two drives read it completely differently???

If you want proof on this I can make a short video. Really strange, but I am thinking it has something to with how I formatted the disk in DISK22. Any ideas or ever run across this weird behavior? Maybe the heads on the two drives are slightly aligned differently and reading the disk differently? Like data left over from when it was a DSDD? My brain hurts after farting around on the Kaypro all day.
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Ok a couple things. I have aliens and both kaypro 4 and 4/83. If you message me friday as I am out of state right now I would be happy to test the game on both units and see the difference. I suspect the 4/83 has no graphics mode and is utilizing text instead. Just a guess but it makes sense.
as to the floppy drive... well could be disk corruption, bad ram, or your machine is a Frankenstein with two different types of floppy drive densities.
 
Thanks for that. I will do that. I have seen two versions of this game running. One in a graphics mode like Tezza's video he posted earlier and the other like this Wiki points out, text mode only:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Aliens_(Kaypro_video_game)

So I do not see why the early Kaypros could not run the game. Maybe they are using special text mode characters that only the newer models can display is one theory of mine.

As for the drive, I have a spare new old stock Tandon drive, so maybe I will switch them out and see what happens. I did notice that Drive B is a tad flaky. After reading a new disk for a few days it would all of the sudden say there were bad sectors on the disk. When I would go to format the disk on another drive the disk was fine. Almost like the drive is corrupting data over time. So it is acting up a bit.
 
old floppy drives need calibration, they need new belts, they definitely need thier heads cleaned. a 5.25" cleaning disk is essential. Try the spare drive. OR swap A and B on the cable. (dont forget the jumper)
 
Yeah. Cleaned the heads already. A good source for new belts on those drives?
 
Ebay, there are sellers selling fistfuls of various sized belts for under $2.00 US. Get one of those orders and match the size up. Great for replacing belts on old cassette drives too.
 
I have a couple flights thursday night and /I get in, in the middle of the night. Dont forget to send me a pm so I remember to check for you.
 
liqmat said:
I also had a VERY weird thing happen last night that I have never seen in my 40 years of tinkering with computers. I formatted a DSDD floppy disk as a SSDD disk in the 22DISK utility so I could dump a SSDD TD0 image onto the floppy using Teledisk. It worked fine, BUT here comes the really weird part. When I do a directory listing of the floppy in Drive B I see completely different files than when I do a directory listing on Drive A on the SAME disk!!!??? I may have had data on it previously as a DSDD formatted disk, but still... why in the heck would the two drives read it completely different???.
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This may be normal behaviour. CP/M gurus (of which I am not) may correct this but from memory if you change a disk in a CP/M machine you need to press CNTR/C to initiate a warm boot before typing DIR (or in fact before doing anything). This clears all junk out of the buffers. Did you do this before reading the disk in the A drive? If this isn't done, it's possible you'll see the directory of the disk that was being used previously.

Tez
 
tezza said:
This may be normal behaviour. CP/M gurus (of which I am not) may correct this but from memory if you change a disk in a CP/M machine you need to press CNTR/C to initiate a warm boot before typing DIR (or in fact before doing anything). This clears all junk out of the buffers. Did you do this before reading the disk in the A drive? If this isn't done, it's possible you'll see the directory of the disk that was being used previously.

Tez
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This is true, although another issue is how SS vs DS is handled. The Kaypro DS diskette has it's directory on the second side, in other words in an incompatible location w.r.t. single sided. How a diskette is formatted is one thing, another is how the files are written to the disk (you can write files to a DS diskette in a SS form factor), but the OS (CP/M) must also agree on whether this diskette is SS or DS. As I recall, the older models are SS only, so if you copied files to a diskette as DS then tried to read in a SS system you would be unable to see the directory - or in other words you would read some part of the disk that is not a directory. depending on what random data is there, you may get garbage or an "empty" directory.
 
I apologize in advance, I have a ton of things going on (TSA basically raped my luggage last night which is lots of fun.. ) So I booted up my kaypro 4 and 4/83 to load the same exact aliens.com file from the same floppy disk. And just to reiterate the kaypro 4 has the built in modem and real time clock and battery. The kaypro 4/83 runs the same disks as the kaypro II. IF you want rom revisions I have to open the machines up to take pictures, so just let me know.
Ok so here are two attached photos, again sorry the quality is abysmal. The kaypro 4 has graphics, you can see solid structures and such in the game.kaypro 4.jpg

Now the Kaypro 4/83 (again which by all my experience seems to be quite similar to the kaypro II) shows text rather than graphics and the game looks,, well unplayable.kaypro 4-83.jpg

So I think its obvious here, the 4/83 has no graphics support natively. And the kaypro 4 does (honestly I didnt realize this until this thread so its quite interesting)

Liqmat, it seems your machine works perfectly fine! Just as it was intended. I hope this helped.
 
VERAULT said:
I apologize in advance, I have a ton of things going on (TSA basically raped my luggage last night which is lots of fun.. ) So I booted up my kaypro 4 and 4/83 to load the same exact aliens.com file from the same floppy disk. And just to reiterate the kaypro 4 has the built in modem and real time clock and battery. The kaypro 4/83 runs the same disks as the kaypro II. IF you want rom revisions I have to open the machines up to take pictures, so just let me know.
Ok so here are two attached photos, again sorry the quality is abysmal. The kaypro 4 has graphics, you can see solid structures and such in the game.View attachment 43286

Now the Kaypro 4/83 (again which by all my experience seems to be quite similar to the kaypro II) shows text rather than graphics and the game looks,, well unplayable.View attachment 43287

So I think its obvious here, the 4/83 has no graphics support natively. And the kaypro 4 does (honestly I didnt realize this until this thread so its quite interesting)

Liqmat, it seems your machine works perfectly fine! Just as it was intended. I hope this helped.
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Thanks for doing this. This still does not explain why there are some early Kaypro models that will play this game in text mode properly. Like I linked before this guy on Youtube is playing this game in text only mode correctly on a Kaypro II which was almost identical to the Kaypro IV/83 in capabilities. If you watch this video you will see Aliens running in pure text mode. This game ran in both graphics and text mode depending on the Kaypro model.

https://youtu.be/0NtlmA8jha8?t=112

So I did a little more digging and low and behold Wikipedia had this little tidbit of info and it all makes sense now. Apparently the Kaypro II and the Kaypro IV also referred to as the IV/83 use different screen addressing and that is why it looks fine on that guy's Kaypro II in text mode and not on the model IV/83. Too bad the programmer was not able to correct that.

From Wikipedia:

"The Kaypro IV and later the Kaypro 4 have two double-sided disks. The Kaypro 4 was released in 1984, and was usually referred to as Kaypro 4 '84, as opposed to the Kaypro IV, released one year earlier and referred to as Kaypro IV '83. The Kaypro IV uses different screen addresses than the Kaypro II, meaning software has to be specific to the model."

So really the Kaypro IV/83, in my opinion, is the least capable machine, or at least supported, of the series. It's too bad because I really like the stark look of the IV/83 the best of all the models.
 
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liqmat said:
Thanks for doing this. This still does not explain why there are some early Kaypro models that will play this game in text mode properly. Like I linked before this guy on Youtube is playing this game in text only mode correctly on a Kaypro II which was almost identical to the Kaypro IV/83 in capabilities. If you watch this video you will see Aliens running in pure text mode. This game ran in both graphics and text mode depending on the Kaypro model.

https://youtu.be/0NtlmA8jha8?t=112

So I did a little more digging and low and behold Wikipedia had this little tidbit of info and it all makes sense now. Apparently the Kaypro II and the Kaypro IV also referred to as the IV/83 use different screen addressing and that is why it looks fine on that guy's Kaypro II in text mode and not on the model IV/83. Too bad the programmer was not able to correct that.

From Wikipedia:

"The Kaypro IV and later the Kaypro 4 have two double-sided disks. The Kaypro 4 was released in 1984, and was usually referred to as Kaypro 4 '84, as opposed to the Kaypro IV, released one year earlier and referred to as Kaypro IV '83. The Kaypro IV uses different screen addresses than the Kaypro II, meaning software has to be specific to the model."

So really the Kaypro IV/83, in my opinion, is the least capable machine, or at least supported, of the series. It's too bad because I really like the stark look of the IV/83 the best of all the models.
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I think the more pertinent questions is why is that guy parading around in a furries costume? Anyone else skeeved out?
Also, honestly the image was so dark I have seen two different model II's one light greay and blue,. and some Grey just like the model 4's, I cant see what his is.
 
VERAULT said:
I think the more pertinent questions is why is that guy parading around in a furries costume? Anyone else skeeved out?
Also, honestly the image was so dark I have seen two different model II's one light greay and blue,. and some Grey just like the model 4's, I cant see what his is.
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Looks like he has the early Kaypro II which had no graphics and displays Aliens in text mode properly which the IV/83, that I have. does not which I am guessing is due to what that wiki info said. At least I have an answer as to why it is so garbled on the IV/83. Not that I understand the programming side of it at all.
 
liqmat said:
Looks like he has the early Kaypro II which had no graphics and displays Aliens in text mode properly which the IV/83, that I have. does not which I am guessing is due to what that wiki info said. At least I have an answer as to why it is so garbled on the IV/83. Not that I understand the programming side of it at all.
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There must be two different copies of aliens/invaders for the Kaypro. I have one for the H89 which is customized to the H19 graphics, so there's a third copy. Perhaps the game could have a terminal-specific segment overlayed to customize it for certain displays. Even the text-only version had to use cursor positioning codes, although both series of Kaypros used the same basic ADM-3 control codes as their foundation. And, the terminal control codes were part of the ROM so could theoretically be changed by just swapping out the ROM.

I don't see a big mystery here (other than why that guy was parading around in a costume). If the game were capable of adapting to different screens, it should have done that. But I doubt the software even tried to do that. Software of that era simply couldn't be that fancy. The garbled screen is the result of the ROM terminal emulation failing to understand the graphics codes and just "punting". I've seen that sort of thing before, when a program was setup for a different terminal than the one it was running on.
 
durgadas311 said:
I don't see a big mystery here (other than why that guy was parading around in a costume).
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It's a big mystery to me as I never have had the pleasure in dealing with a Kaypro or CP/M until a few months ago. So learning as I go. The costume, on the other hand, is so David Lynch(esque). I love it.
 
liqmat said:
It's a big mystery to me as I never have had the pleasure in dealing with a Kaypro or CP/M until a few months ago. So learning as I go. The costume, on the other hand, is so David Lynch(esque). I love it.
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well I have already proved that the same version shows with and without graphics. BUt I ahve seen videos of people having the wrong boards in their kaypro models. do you have a photo of your board and ROM revisions?
 
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ok, if you want maybe tomorrow I will open mine up and check the rom versions and board number. my advice would be to reach out to costume mc wolfie over there and see if he can do the same. I Get the feeling his board isn't right for his machine.
 
Ok I took some more photos of ROM versions and board marking:IMG_20180128_104950393.jpgIMG_20180128_104956372.jpgIMG_20180128_105002137.jpgIMG_20180128_105437491.jpg
according to Don Maslins kaypro ROM site http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/roms/kaypro/index.html my two roms in the picture 81-146 and 81-232 are listing as for the Kaypro II AND Kaypro 4/83

I really think this guy on your video had either a different ROM or a different logic board installed. Both my Kaypros I bought from an older gentleman who repaired these things in the early 80's. He explained to me that alot of times you would just shove in a board to get the machine to boot then reconfigure the floppies to work. I am guessing there are alot of frankenstein kaypros' out there.

Both your 4/83 (you should post your rom versions just to verify) and mine behave the same way, I am expecting that they should.

Also my board has a number stenciled in it of PC81-240A and another number that looks hand drawn or silk screened as 35370... serial number?

Tezzas' Kaypro 4 is like my other unit with a modem (you can see the transformer on the board pic and the RJ-11 jack on the back as well as where the RTC battery should be, he has two wires running to another power source I am guessing) so his SHOULD have graphics.


Are you still doubting this Liqmat?
 
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