"James Harris"  wrote in message
news:p3guas$7vd$1@dont-email.me...
> On 12/01/2018 22:56, James Harris wrote:
>> On 11/01/2018 16:04, Jim_64 wrote:
>
> ...
>
>>> But, please try the alcohol cleaning again first.  It really should
>>> work.  You could also move some contact around to see if the issues
>>> follow the contacts or there is some issue with the PCB/cabling.
>>
>> Again, that's good advice. I have cleaned them a few times with the
>> isopropyl alcohol and some more keys are working. There is no great
>> staining coming off on to the cotton buds but I guess there could be
>> enough which has built up over time.
>>
>> They are not all working yet but I'll keep at it - at least until the
>> new pads arrive.
>
> Success! I have a working Pet. Lots and lots of rubbing the black pads
> with a cotton bud dipped in isopropyl alcohol did it.
>
> This must be the first time I have used a Pet in decades and it's a really
> strange nostalgic experience. For example:
>
> I'd forgotten how one has to make space to insert characters but I
> remember how cursor movement characters show up if too many spaces are
> inserted - similar to the effect of typing an odd number of double quotes
> on a line.
>
> It was really weird that keyboard shortcuts like typing L shift I as a
> shortcut for LIST came back to me immediately as if it was more a muscle
> memory that a mental one.
>
> I remembered Pets being ready as soon as the phosphor glowed but I'd
> forgotten how slow they are in Basic; characters appear on the screen as
> if they were coming over a modem! When I was of school age a friend and I
> wrote some machine code and were blown away with how fast it was compared
> with the Basic programming we were used to. Speaking of which, I remember,
> with regret, the absence of a repeat key and writing a machine code
> routine to try to provide autorepeat - unsuccessfully, IIRC.
>
> I took a look at the character set and I'd forgotten that some Pets - like
> this one - had no lower case. IIRC later Pets did but I'm not sure what
> they did with the graphics characters which they presumably displaced to
> make the lower case chars available.
>
> Anyway, just a few reminiscences. This has transported me back to many,
> many years ago!
>
>
> --
> James Harris
>

All Pets have lower case. You have a choice between upper-case/graphics or
upper-case/lower-case (graphics retained on the non-alpha keys). I can't
remember what the pokes were to change the character set.

With the earlier Pets you would have to use the shift key to get lower-case.

Steve

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