Serial and a terminal

The DB9 socket turns any laptop into a second way in to your ACE. You don't need it — the machine has its own keyboard and its own screen — but there are a few things it makes much easier.

Why you'd bother

• Copy and paste. Paste a program listing straight in instead of typing it.
• Scrollback. Look at what went past.
• Saving to a real file on your computer, so listings can live in a folder or in version control.
• Mixed case. The ACE's own keyboard types capitals only; text arriving over the serial line keeps whatever case it was written in.
• No monitor needed. With no VGA cable connected, the whole console — splash, prompt, everything — comes out here instead.

Setting it up

A USB-to-serial adapter into the DB9 socket, and a terminal program on the other end set to:

19200 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit — usually written 8-N-1.

Any terminal program will do: screen or minicom on Linux and macOS, PuTTY or CoolTerm on Windows. On a Mac, screen /dev/tty.usbserial-XXXX 19200 and you're in.

Press reset on the ACE and you should see the splash appear in your terminal.

Esc versus your terminal

Some terminal programs swallow Esc for their own menus. If pressing it doesn't stop a running program, use Ctrl+C instead — it does the same job. See The keyboard.

Note that this is a second way in, not a replacement: the ACE's own keyboard stays live the whole time, and both feed the same BASIC.

Moving files over the cable

LOAD and SAVE with no filename don't touch the memory card at all. They transfer over the serial line instead, using XModem — the file transfer protocol every terminal program has had since the 1980s.

To send a program to the ACE, type:

LOAD
XMODEM RX READY

The machine is now waiting. In your terminal program, start an XModem send and pick the file. It arrives, and you're back at OK with the program loaded.

To pull one off the ACE, type SAVE with no filename instead. You'll get XMODEM TX READY, and you start an XModem receive in your terminal.

Either way you've got about a minute to get the transfer started before the ACE gives up and hands you the prompt back. If that happens, nothing is harmed — just type the command again.

A terminal on the other end of the cable: the same banners and the same OK prompt the ACE's own screen shows.

The receiver starts it, and every block is answered. That is why nothing happens until both ends are ready — and why a bad cable shows up as a transfer that never begins rather than a file that arrives wrong.

Writing listings on your computer

Once you've got a terminal, the comfortable way to work on anything longer than a screenful is to write it in a text editor on your computer and paste it in. Type it as plain text with the line numbers in place, select all, paste. BASIC reads it exactly as if you'd typed it — and it's a good deal faster than typing forty lines by hand.

The emulator has a paste button that does the same job without any cable at all.

For anything bigger, bastok converts a text listing into the compact form LOAD expects, so it transfers in a moment rather than a line at a time.