ALTAIR 8800 micro Users Manual
©
Briel Computers
2010
page
26
Once you copy BASIC onto your SD card, remove the card and place it in the Altair 8800 micro SD card slot.
With the SD card ready, plug in your VGA or composite TV/monitor. I use a 19” LCD VGA monitor for the
VGA output and a 7” widescreen LCD TV for the composite. Choose the monitor that you feel is the best for
you.
Next, plug in your keyboard into the PS/2 keyboard port. Look for an arrow on the keyboard plug connector.
That will be the top of the connector and should plug right in.
Now you are ready for the power supply. First, make sure the power switch on the front panel is up in the off
position. Plug your power supply connector into the port on the rear and plug it into your wall outlet.
Before you start, make sure all switches 0-15 are down.
To start the system so it will load BASIC, you must put the front panel switches in a specific mode. First, we
need to put the AUX switch up so the system will know we want to load a file. With the AUX switch up, we
need to flip up switch 11 so the system knows we are using the SIO onboard terminal system. With both AUX
and SW11 up, we can now power up the system. At first, on the panel you should see INT status LED light
come on. On your monitor it should display the Altair 8800 micro greeting message along with a prompt asking
for a file name. If you do not see the INT light come on and no greeting message on your monitor after a few
seconds, turn off the Altair micro and recheck all your connections.
If you are going to load BASIC now and want it to run after it finishes loading, flip the RUN/STOP switch
down to RUN so that the system will start running when loading is finished.
If you get the prompt “File name to load?” then type in the name of the file of the version of basic you wish to
load. In this example, we will load 8K BASIC, so type in
8KBASIC.BIN
You will notice that you are typing in uppercase, that is ok, and the system will adjust automatically for the
filename. If you make a mistake typing it in, there is no backspace, so you must turn off the system, wait a few
seconds and turn it on and try again. If your file name is 8 characters long followed by a period and the file
extension, it will not wait for ENTER to be pressed and will attempt to load the file. If you typed the name in
incorrectly or it can not find the file, it will respond with “Opening failed”.
If you typed in the name correctly and it finds the file, you will see the LED’s on the address display start to go
up. The system is now loading BASIC into the system. When it is finished, if you have the RUN/STOP switch
down to the RUN mode, it will attempt to start BASIC. At this point you will see the message “MEMORY
SIZE?” If you don’t see this message and the RUN/STOP switch is on RUN, then BASIC failed to load
correctly. At this point, you should turn off the Altair and start over.
BASIC has the ability to check how much memory you have available. If you press ‘ENTER’ BASIC will
check how much memory you have available. The next question BASIC will ask is “TERMINAL WIDTH?” If
you press enter, the terminal width default used, 80 is the screen width on the Altair 8800 micro. The last
question asked is “WANT SIN-COS-TAN-ATN?” You must answer Y or N for this. If you choose N, you will
not have trig functions available. If you are loading 4K BASIC, it will just ask “WANT SIN?” Choose Y and
continue with ‘ENTER’
You should now get the BASIC version info and an OK. You are now ready to program in BASIC.
