Articles tagged “Sharp Pocket Computer”
40-column text modes on Sharp organisers with the 16-column IQ-707 BASIC card
Recent posts on here have taken a bit of a detour into Sharp Pocket Computer territory. When hunting down parts or accessories for them on eBay I'll occasionally be recommended other Sharp devices, such as their calculators or organisers, if an exact match for the thing I'm actually hunting for can't be found. Calculators are indeed a useful tool, so I appreciate those recommendations, but mid-1980s electronic organisers are not usually the sort of thing I'd be too interested in. However, some of Sharp's organisers are definitely worth a look, and these are often considerably cheaper to pick up second-hand than pocket computers or calculators.
ESR-L Ghidra IQ-7000 IQ-707 IQ-7400 IQ-8000 IQ-8920 Sharp Electronic Organiser Sharp Pocket Computer
Highlighting and tape loading PC-1500 BASIC programs on the web
I don't think I've had a proper dose of "man-flu" since COVID and I haven't missed it at all. This journal entry has been written in a state of sleep deprivation whilst being tanked up on Lucozade and Lemsip (expiry date: March 2020) so hopefully it still makes some degree of sense. In my current state the most obvious project is to subject myself to the banshee howls of tape loading. I've implemented some degree of tape loading support to my site before by taking tokenised BBC BASIC programs and running them through a web service that converts them to UEF files that can be played back in the browser with PlayUEF, and with my recent interest in the Sharp PC-1500 it would seem like a sensible idea to do something similar for that computer.
Relocatable Quick-Tape installer for the Sharp PC-1500
After my previous journal post about faster saving and loading of Sharp PC-1500 programs to and from tape I discovered that I was using a somewhat out-of-date version of Sharp Pocket Tools. The later version I upgraded to adds support for the "SuperTape" and "Quick-Tape" formats, and also includes copies of the PC-1500 programs for those formats. Both formats appear to support file names and verification of the recorded data (a minor gripe I had with the Fast Load was its lack of these features).
Fast Load PC-1500 Quick-Tape Sharp Pocket Computer SuperTape Tape loader
Faster tape loading on the Sharp PC-1500 with Fast Load
After I've typed a program into my Sharp PC-1500, I tend to save it to my PC for long-term storage using the CE-150 cassette interface. I use the same cassette interface to download programs shared by others over the Internet, and have written a previous post about resampling those shared wave files if you're struggling to load them. Loading a program this way is quicker than typing them in, but not by much! The Globe application is 5697 bytes in length but takes the best part of seven minutes to load from tape.
Resampling Sharp PC-1500 tape recordings
This is a quick post about problems I'd been having loading tape cassette recordings from my PC to a Sharp PC-1500 Pocket Computer along with a potential solution for anyone having similar issues. Sharp PC-1500 Pocket Computer connected to the CE-150 Printer and Cassette Interface The Sharp PC-1500 is a small computer from the early 1980s that can run programs primarily written in BASIC. Programs can be saved to and loaded back from cassette tape but to do this requires it to be connected to the CE-150, a cassette interface that also includes a four-colour plotter.