The first computer I owned was a Ohio Scientific (OSI) Superboard II. The choice was dictated by price. At that time it was the only computer I knew of, which had a real keyboard could be hooked to a TV monitor and yet was cheap enough for a middle school student. I used it for about three years, until I could afford an Apple II.
Some 20 years ago I had the forsight to store some of the programs I had written for the Superboard II on an Apple Floppy. Later these were transferred to the Amiga hard disk and then over to any other computer I owned over the time. So I still have the images. From them I extracted my old programs, with the intent to try them on the xmess emulator.
With a little help on my side, since version 0.79 mess and xmess emulate the Superboard II (superbrd) as I remember my real Superboard II computer. You just need this ROM set.
If you want to build it from the sources, you need to execute these commands:
tar xjvf xmame-0.79.1.tar.bz2 cd xmame-0.79.1 make -f makefile.unix TARGET=mess
Then you can try it with a command like this:
./xmess.x11 -effect 1 -biospath ~/Webhosts/claudio.ch/SuperboardII -cassette ~/Webhosts/claudio.ch/SuperboardII/Programs/brickout.bas superbrd
Obviously you need to adjust the path to the locations where you have stored the ROM set and the BASIC programs.
When the display appears press the "C" key, and type twice the return key for default memory and screen size. If pressing the "C" key shows no reaction, then you need press the "Shift Lock" key (the following section "Note on the keyboard" tells you where to find it) and then retry the "C" key. To load the program from cassette type "LOAD" followed by a carriage return. You will see the program scroll through. When it stops press the space bar and a carriage return to make it return to read from the keyboard. Then start the program with the "RUN" command. See the page with my little programs for instuctions on how to use them.
Note on the keyboard
The current emulation in MESS reproduces faithfully the layout of the which you can see e.g. on Mark S. Csele's Superboard II page. This emulation works correctly only on US keyboards. Thus if you have a non-US keyboard you should switch it to US layout when using the superbrd emulation.
Here the layout, so you are able to find the keys on your keyboard:
! " # $ % & ' ( ) * = RUB
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 : - OUT
LINE
ESC Q W E R T Y U I O P FEED RETURN
+ SHIFT
CTRL A S D F G H J K L ; LOCK REPEAT BREAK
< > ?
SHIFT Z X C V B N M , . / SHIFT
---SPACE BAR---
The BREAK key is part of the keyboard matrix, but is connected to the reset line of the processor. In MAME this is done with the F3 key.
Note on sound
The Superboard II did not have any speaker. But it had the provision to build a rudimentary 4-bit DAC. You needed to just solder four diodes and resistors into the prepared places on the board. You could use this to drive a tiny loudspeaker.
The DAC is driven by four of the signals used to select the keyboard rows (R2..R5). Thus when the computer is idle waiting for user input, and thus scanning the keyboard, a noise is emitted through the loudspeaker. The same behaviour is shown by the emulation. Use -nosound to disable the sound when emulating programs not needing it. Of my programs, only brickout.bas takes advantage of the sound facility.
