Doug wrote:
If you are satisfied with BASIC as a solution, peek and poke should be sufficient for control if the motor control hardware is memory mapped on the Apple. If machine language routines are actually needed, its likely that folks here can write them for you easily since integrating them with BASIC is a known quantity.
Which brings us back to my original problem. For the program I wrote in Lego LOGO, there are places where I need to check the status of a motor -- is it on or off -- before proceeding. Motors are mapped (by you the programmer) to ports 0-5 on the interface box. You can turn a port on/off, but there's no way to read its status! Crazy yet true. That is why I had the idea of adding such a command, and why Dean in turn figured it could be done by disassembling the code, before realizing that Lego used some not-easily-disassemblable method. Ergo we (collectively the people in this thread) considered using BASIC instead or a custom LOGO instead of Lego LOGO. We apparently settled on BASIC. That's fine with me. I would like it better on the Apple II platform :) but the path of least resistance is on an IBM PC because Lego already provides that option. Ben G. loaned us the IBM PC card with his Lego robotics kit. Glitch is currently working on building a replica card for VCFed to own, and then I'll mail the original back to Ben. Hopefully the replica will be ready in time for our February workshop. Then me, Dean, and anyone else who's interested can see about making it listen to (not just talk to) the hardware (but it won't work if the card only toggles, as stated earlier). Doh!!!