SmartBox experimentation with DOS, RISC OS and C#/WinForms

Monday, 6th November 2023

My latest eBay purchase was influenced by a desire for some practical test/prototype equipment, a bit of nostalgia and a desire to learn something new.

A lot of my projects involve some sort of microcontroller running some software that will take inputs, perform decisions on them, and produce outputs. Getting to that stage tends to involve quite a lot of "boilerplate" hardware and software setup, and I'd quite like something that I can just plug in and get cracking with and write some quick test code instead of having to assemble a circuit on a breadboard or faff around with a clumsy IDE.

When I was at school in the 1990s one of the devices that got me into microcontrollers in the first place was a computer control system based around the Economatics SmartBox. This plugs into a computer via a serial connection, has eight simple digital inputs, eight simple digital outputs, four analogue inputs and four motor drivers. Programs could be written in a BASIC-like language or in flowchart form, and once you'd run and tested them on the SmartBox you could program them to a PIC microcontroller to run without the host computer.

      

All along I'd assumed that the SmartBox was a simple interface box that relied on the host computer to do all of the processing, but doing some digging I found a thread on StarDot that delved into the heart of the machine and saw that there's a 65C02 CPU inside along with 32KB of RAM and the OS runs from a socketed 8KB ROM. As a long-term Z80 fan I thought it was time I should see how the other side lived – in spite of my fondness for the BBC Micro I don't own one and have not programmed any 6502 assembly, so a SmartBox seemed like it would also provide an affordable 6502 computer for experimentation.

Of course, one challenge was going to be finding the supporting software for the venerable SmartBox. Fortunately in the StarDot thread people had shared archives of the DOS, BBC Master and RISC OS software. One of the many handy features of DOSBox-X is its ability to connect an emulated serial port to a physical one in the host system, and so after building a serial cable for my SmartBox (using a pinout found, once again, via the StarDot thread) I was able to hook it up to my PC and get it working with SmartMove, the BASIC-like programming environment for the SmartBox.

When the software is first run it needs to download SmartMove code into the SmartBox. This is because the programming environment and interpreter is actually running on the SmartBox itself, and the SmartMove software on the host PC is simply loading that interpreter onto the box (found in an accompanying file of 65C02 machine code named AL.COD) and then providing a user interface to that environment as a sort of terminal. This means you can close the SmartMove software (and unplug the serial cable) and your program will continue running on the SmartBox.

This ability to load and execute code directly on the SmartBox is one of the things that intrigued me as a way to get into 65C02 programming, but for the time being I was interested in digging deeper into the how the existing SmartMove software was interfacing with the box with the intention of writing a simple Z80 host interface that I could then adapt to the Cambridge Z88, my CP/M computer and maybe even the TI-83 Plus calculator series. Fortunately the documentation for the serial protocol used by SmartMove application has been documented so I was able to prototype a crude version of the software in C# using WinForms. It needs some serious tidying up before I can release it but as a basic test it does the job:

The ability to build new versions of the interface software for different platforms without needing to worry about porting over the BASIC interpreter seems sensible considering there were versions of SmartMove available for DOS, BBC Master, RISC OS and Apple Macintosh. All could use the same AL.COD but would just need to provide the relevant UI, input and output routines specific to their host platforms.

I had been using the DOS version of SmartMove as the initial inspiration of the user interface for my C#/WinForms implementation, however the screenshots of the RISC OS version in the user manual looked rather more visually appealing and an archived copy of this software was available. Unfortunately, I don't own an Acorn Archimedes, I was unable to get the software running properly on modern RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi (even with various compatibility shims in place) and I couldn't find an emulator that handled the serial port in a similar fashion to DOSBox-X. However, the excellent Arculator has source code available and armed with a copy of the 6651 UART datasheet I thought I'd have a go at hacking in the feature myself.

"Hack" is definitely the operative word and though my code is abominable it does work well enough to get the available RISC OS software working on my PC. It's downloadable from here and requires the addition of the host PC's serial port name to arc.cfg (e.g. serial_port = COM1).

The above screenshot shows the RISC OS version of SmartMove which provided some additional inspiration for how a GUI version of the software should work. As I'd previously loaded some procedures onto the SmartBox via my C# version I could then bring the same procedures up for editing in the RISC OS version of the software. Handy!

The Logicator software can be used to build programs using flowcharts instead of a BASIC-like programming language. As far as I'm aware Logicator directly accesses the inputs and outputs from a number of different host interface boxes and doesn't rely on 65C02 code loaded onto the box like SmartMove, but this does mean that when you close Logicator your program stops aas it's relying on the host PC to run the show. However, included with the archive of RISC OS software is an application called SmartFlow which first loads a flow chart "interpreter" into the SmartBox:

Once loaded you can then load a Logicator-format flowchart onto the SmartBox where it can be run without being connected to a host PC:

All in all it's been quite interesting to dig into the SmartBox and get a feel for how it works and what can be done with it. To this end I recorded a video demonstration of the SmartBox and its usage within RISC OS, though so far I feel I'm only really scratching the surface!