Gener-80 Review

by IJC

Gener-80 is a Z80-Assembler/​Editor package for the Nascom from Seven Stars Publishing. The package is supplied on tape along with an A4 photocopied manual which, although not comprehensive, is adequate.

The program is 6.75K long and the copy I was sent loaded with only a slight volume adjustment to my recorder. The minimum system requirements are a Nascom (1 or 2) with Nas-Sys and Cottis Blandford equivalent interface and 8K or more RAM starting from 1000H. A 300 baud copy is also supplied on the tape. The program loads at 1000H which means that there are no problems transferring it to disc. When executed, the program does a self-check and if all is OK it comes up with a sign-on message and proceeds to ask about workspace. The manual is not very clear about how to define your workspace size. You need to define a source (SCE) area and an object (OBJ) area. The purpose of this is to restrict the code to these areas. The source area can be anywhere in memory that is RAM and does not overlap with Gener-80 or the object area. Likewise for the object area. The manual gives the example of £D00 £DFF for the source area which gives the impression that it is purely workspace for temporary storage etc. In practice it is the source code area and therefore wants to be as big as possible in most cases. Likewise for the object area.

Once these have been designated, you are asked for an offset. This is used during assembly in the expected way to ‘offset’ the object code.

Once the program is happy with these values, you are presented with a menu.:–

Command?   A   D   E   L   L?   M   O   P   PA   PAT   S

This gives you the option of:–

A – assemble the source program
D – delete the source program
E – edit the source program
L – load a source program from tape
L? – verify a source program on tape
M – move a block of source program
O – object workspace and assembler offset re-definition
P – print source program