Re: Applesoft BASIC PRINTs 7 bit data?

["Joel" <joelbuckley54.nospam.@hotmail.com>]

Boy,this takes me back 20 years.
I seem to remember Applesoft (on a ][+) always set the hi bit when printing
a character.
( The normal (non-inverse, non-flash) were mapped to video with the hi bit
set.)
This was a problem when writing to other than the screen.
Most printer interfaces masked the hi bit and setting the hit bit for
printer graphics was done in non-standard ways, often peculiar to each brand
of parallel interface card.
If you look at old versions of Print Shop, you had customised drivers for
each printer and for each printer interface.
I seem to remember that writing to a DOS 3.3 disk text file had the same
problem-
printing chr$(0-255) didn't result in that being written that way on disk.
I believe the INPUT routine also strangled bit 7.
I can't remember if some of these problems were corrected on the //e ,
ProDOS and Super serial card.

I do remember writing ML outines for 8 bit printing (and input).
I suspect they're down in the basement somewhere.

I was just rummaging through that box to answer some old DOS 3.3 question
last week or two.

But it wasn't a trivial task.

What are you writing to?
Serial to another computer, printer, disk file?

If you jsut want to do file transfer to another computer, there are plenty
of modem programs to handle that.