More vintage computer photos. This time it’s a Z80 processor based CP/M system that started life as another unfinished Franklin project. Bob Grieb was designing the hardware and I was developing the software for what would have been a portable CP/M machine. The cool thing was that we were so totally under the radar and had essentially complete control over all aspects of the design. We had a working hardware prototype at Franklin but the bulk of the software was written after we’d left.

A vendor at Trenton Computer Festival had purchased a large amount of Franklin stock but had no idea what some of it was. Bob discovered the bare CP/M PC boards, populated several and coded low level disk formatting routines while I wrote the boot firmware, CP/M BIOS, ZCPR and assorted utilities. The end result is actually a slick little CP/M machine that includes two floppy disk drives and a sizable RAM disk made from extra RAM banks.

I think I christened it the BoGUS board, as far as I can remember it stood for Bob Grieb’s Unusual System or something like that. I’m sure it’s in the source code somewhere.

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Here are photos of Franklin Computer’s unreleased Apple II compatible computer dubbed the CX (code named “Kite”.) Not exactly a lightweight machine at about 25 pounds, the official term for it was “luggable” rather than portable.

Franklin went into bankruptcy before it shipped, but about 20 or so were built from available parts and given to some of the last people out the door, of which I was one.

I donated this machine to someone’s collection so I don’t have it any more.

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Just a quick update on the state of the next version of “Remember?”. I’ve got several significant new features in the works:

• Extending the cut-off year for events from 2018 to 2134
• Safer occasion file updates
• Automatic occasion file backups

The coding for these changes is essential completed but will require extensive testing before I’ll let it at anyone else’s data. Occasion files that contain events beyond 2018 won’t be compatible with previous versions of Remember? and can’t be opened by them.

These are fairly extensive changes so I’m not sure when this version will be ready for public consumption. I’ll post a pre-release test version for the more adventurous after more testing.

Many of my projects must support previous Mac OS X versions including at least 10.3, and in order to do that I have to make sure the PowerPC version is built with GCC version 3.3 rather than 4.x or the app fails to load on 10.3 and earlier. So to handle that I add an Xcode project setting named GCC_VERSION_ppc with value of 3.3 to force the PPC version to build with GCC 3.3 and everyone’s happy.

Ran into a strange problem lately where breakpoints would not work on my G5 tower but worked just fine on my Intel laptop. Same version of Xcode, same everything else I could see. EXCEPT I finally realized that the problem was that special GCC compiler setting. Apparently Xcode 3 can’t debug code compiled with GCC 3.3.

The solution is easy: instead of adding the GCC_VERSION_ppc setting to All Configurations, add it just to the Release configuration. That way Debug builds can still use breakpoints but the final will still run on Mac OS X 10.3.

The downside is you are no longer debugging with the same version of the compiler as the release uses but since bugs are never caused by the compiler that shouldn’t be an issue, right? (NOTE: This is what’s sometimes called sarcasm.)