MITS Programming System II

Announcements about the Altair 8800 Clone including software and hardware updates.

MITS Programming System II

Postby AltairClone » January 1st, 2014, 6:31 pm

Several updates related to the The MITS Programming System II have been added to the Altair Clone support page.

The MITS Programming Package II allows development of 8080 assembly language applications on the Altair 8800. The package consists of an editor, assembler, debugger and a monitor that allows you to run these programs as well as any programs you may develop. What makes the package historically significant is that it was for sale and in use when floppy disks, CP/M and Altair DOS were not yet available! The package allowed development and debug of assembly language programs using just a teletype and papertape, or a CRT console and cassette.

Updates to the support page include:
  • The Programming System II User's Manual has been added under the "Original Altair Manuals" link.
  • Under "Cassette Interface Support Files," audio of the Programming System II files has been added to the "Altair Cassette Audio" zip file. In addition, the new files have also been added to the "MITS Tapes.dsk" disk image so that the files can be written to cassette using the audio cassette interface.
  • The Programming System II files are directly accessible in the new "MITS Programming Package II" folder.
  • In order to run the monitor with serial input interrupts enabled, the firmware in the Altair Clone must be updated to version 1.5. After updating, use the "Interrupt Vector Assignment" menu in the Administration menu to set the Serial Port 1 vector to "7" and to disable interrupts from the 88-VI/RTC real time clock. (The MITS Programming Package enables the RTC interrupts even though it does not have an interrupt handler in place to handle them!) Note, you do not need to update the Clone firmware if you run the monitor with interrupts disabled (A9 up during the boot process).
New videos on the "Altair Experience" page demonstrate how to load and use the MITS Programming Package II.
AltairClone
Site Admin
 
Posts: 632
Joined: April 5th, 2013, 10:55 am

Return to Announcements

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests

cron