29 Jun
2007
29 Jun
'07
4:43 p.m.
On Jun 29, 2007, at 6:27 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Neat! I used one for years, at a fairly technical level, and
never knew that.
Are you
sure the AT has ROM BASIC? I don't remember that at all.
Yes I am 100% sure my AT has ROM BASIC (that's the machine I am typing
this on, BTW). It's the later (8MHz) model, so I assume the older ones
had it too, certainly the manuals I have imply that. It's pretty hard to get to in most AT ystems
because it'll boot
from the
floppy or hard drives rather than run ROM BASIC. But I suspect you
could
pull the disk cotnroller card and it'll go into BASIC.
...and that's probably why I never knew it. ;)
Another way to see it's got the ROM BASIC is that
the same disk BASIC
runs on the PC/XT?AT machines _but not on the compatibles_. The IBM
disk
BASIC is much shorter than the BASIC for compatibles becasue much
of the
BASIC is in ROM
Ahh yes I remember that...I had an XT clone for a while (an 8MHz
V20; quite the screamer at the time!) and I managed to find copies of
the IBM BIOS w/BASIC, and ran those in the board...worked nicely. As
I recall, the BIOS was one EPROM and the BASIC interpreter was the
other four, and they were optional.
I recall something about BASIC.COM (or was it BASICA.COM?) being
basically a wrapper around the stuff in the ROMs...Did it add any
routines like disk I/O or anything like that?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL