Getting ZCN across for the first time with a minimal serial lead
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Not so very long ago, I needed to transfer a copy of ZCN outside of
ZCN itself for the first time in, well, literally years. (I'd been
doing some low-level messing about for a speccy game `port' and had
managed to crash the machine *and* trash the first 16k of my memory
card. Not very nice.) This was when I found out that 1. the ROM
software needs more than a minimal three-pins-connected serial lead to
do an XMODEM file transfer, and 2. my serial lead was sufficiently
worn out that it was effectively such a lead. :-/

After exhausting the other alternatives (not difficult), I tried
something which clearly wouldn't work - doing `receive document'.
Surely that would only work for plain text files... but apparently
not. It passes through 8-bit values unmodified! So as long as you have
some way of getting the bytes to the serial port unmodified (`cat
zcn.bin >/dev/ttyS1' or similar on Unix if the terminal settings are
right; `copy /b zcn.bin com2:' or similar on MS-DOS), and the transfer
is perfect and no characters are lost or anything, you *can* transfer
ZCN across a minimal three-pins-only lead.

Here's how:

Cold-boot the NC100 by turning it off and, while holding down
Function, Stop and `<-Del', turning it back on.

Next you should do the following:

Key				Reason
---				------
Function + S			go to terminal program
Menu, down*3, left*2, Stop	set speed to 2400 baud
<type a few characters on the NC100 and `remote' computer to check
 the link is working ok>
Stop				quit terminal program
Function + N, x, return		create junk document
x				put junk in it
Function + L			load document
Menu, T, R, tmp, return		receive `tmp'
<send the file with `cat', `copy' or whatever>
<wait for transfer to finish>
Function + B			enter basic
"*LOAD TMP 6000"		load system (omit the quotes :-))
"CALL &6000"			start ZCN

(It might be a good idea to check the byte count given on the NC when
the transfer finishes against the size of `zcn.bin'. They should
match, or the former might be at most one byte larger. But the most
important point here is that if the size the NC reports is *smaller*
than the real size, the transfer failed.)

Now, if *that* doesn't work, you really do need to get a decent lead
off somebody. :-)

-Rus.
