26 Nov
2007
26 Nov
'07
3:09 p.m.
I'd have suggested something running "BBC
BASIC" but the Beeb is a fairly
formidable system to understand and the Electron, ISTR, has most of the
Is it? Why? Are you talking abotu understanding how to program it, or
understanding the hardware?
For the former, yes, BBC BASIC does allow local variables, named
procedures/functions, recursion, etc. But you don't _have_ to use them
when you're starting out. You can write spaghetti code if you want to.
For the latter, I necer had any problems understanding the BBC micro
circuit diagtram in the back of the Advanced User Guide (a totally
essential book, BTW). There are 2 ULAs, but they;re both quite simple
functiions (video dot path amd cassette encoder/decoder, basically). The
rest of it is very well documented.
electronics inside a ULA so you wouldn't really
learn anything useful about
it.
Yes. A ULA, CPU, ROM and _4 bit wide_ RAM, basically. Yes, the Electron
has 64K*4 RAM, which is fiddled by the ULA to look like 32K*8 to the
processor. I am not joking.
-tony