For day 4 of my December Adventure, I again consulted the Organiser II which, in a clear cry for help, demanded that I revisit day 2 and, ‘learn about the Organiser Comm Link’.

Tasked with this for a second day, I set myself a goal of transferring files between my LZ64 and my Mac—there’s a nice selection of software out there that I’d love to try out, and I’d like to be able to develop programs on my Mac instead of fighting the A-Z keyboard all the time.

Comms Link

Jaap Scherphuis' fantastic Psion II Page hosts a copy of the Comms Link manual which details how to configure later models of the Organiser II Comms Link to use the new ‘PSION’ protocol1 to talk to a DOS server to send and receive files. While I’ve exclusively used modern software for talking to my Psions, many members of the community use one variant of DOSBox or another to run the original PC software, and it seemed like a good time to try it out.

It turns out that setup is incredibly easy—it’s a matter of a single configuration option to forward a host serial port to DOSBox, after which your DOS software should just see the comm port. In DOSBox-X2 on my Mac, I needed to edit ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox-X 0.83.15 Preferences to ensure the serial section contained the following:

[serial]

serial1 = directserial realport:cu.usbserial-A91MGK6M

With my USB-C RS232 adapter connected and the configuration in place, running the PC server was just a matter of launching CL.EXE from Comms Link 2.11 (see Jaap’s Software for PC listings for the download).

This early implementation of the Psion Link Protocol exposes the PCs file as a share to the Psion, meaning everything else takes place on device using the the Transmit and Receive options in the Comms software; just follow the instructions to specify the local and remote filenames.

Worm2

While transferring files is slow with a maximum baud of 9600 (and you can only send one file at once), I was able to try out Jaap’s Worm2, an incredibly comprehensive snake clone for a 4-line text-only device. This involves copying the 4 OPL procedures to the Organiser II, updating the grid dimensions to match the LZ64’s larger screen, and compiling each, before finally running Worm2—slightly more involved than a modern app store.

  1. An early version of the Psion Link Protocol used by EPOC16 and EPOC32 devices. ↩

  2. On Alex’s advice, I tried with DOSBox Staging which includes support for changing the configuration from within DOSBox itself. Unfortunately, I hit a segfault early on so, while this looks idea, I had to retreat to DOSBox-X. ↩