For the first time in nearly two decades, a new version of Toolkit 2 has been released.

A Toolkit 2 original EPROM cartridge from Care Electronics

Working from SMSQ/E sources, Marcel set out to re-create something resembling Toolkit 2 from them again. Although it proved to be more work than he’d anticipated (not that this ever deterred our Marcel!) Toolkit 2 version 2.30 was born.

Many SMSQ/E features were left intact if feasible, such as LOAD appending a “_bas” extension to filenames of SuperBASIC programs. Some of the new and useful SBASIC extensions were also included. Some features got dropped such as the ALARM and CLOCK and the network fileserver FSERVE (since the networkis critically timed, it may run at different speeds from RAM, rendering it unusable).

The extended MDV driver sources are long since missing and not present in SMSQ/E so Marcel re-engineered that from an existing ROM binary.

Since most people now use the Extended Environment, Marcel decided to drop most of the ALTKEY code since that is better replaced by the Hotkey extensions, but the Alt-Enter last line recall was kept.

Most of the stuff dropped was done to save space in the ROM, as it has to be kept to no bigger than 16K bytes.

Version 2.30 was quickly replaced by v2.31 to fit an old bug in the CDEC$ extension.

It is now available to download in ROM image and RAM-based RESPR version (the RAM-based version includes full ALTKEY code because space doesn’t matter so much here). The source files are also available.

Download from Marcel’s site at https://www.kilgus.net/2017/03/19/toolkit-ii-the-sequel/