30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
5:03 p.m.
On 30/10/11 6:10 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/30/2011 01:17 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
BBC BASIC has an inline assembler for 6502?? Wow, that's wild. What
hardware would I need to cobble together to run that?
It's a good little assembler. Because of the integration with BASIC, you
get nice macro-ish facilities as well.
It runs on the BBC Microcomputer, and the BBC BASIC ROM is the usual
standard 16KB language ROM. You can probably get a BBC Micro on ebay; I
have no idea how many, if any, were sold in North America. The BBC Micro
Model B with 5.25" diskette drive (Watford DFS) was the first machine I
had at home, and I used it for hours every day (writing assembler when I
wasn't writing BASIC).
The machines were networkable and we had a laboratory of about 20 of
them, hooked up to a LAN file server with a 5(?)MB hard disk,
hierarchical file system, and user directory/permissions system. This
was around 1982-1986. I had a lot of fun playing with (abusing) the
network primitives, such as sniffing the administrator password... For a
long time I was never not in possession of that password. :)
I still have the Econet programmer's reference - handed to me, a
student, na?vely by the Acorn reseller; the sought-after pieces of
information were the control block layouts and system call details.
Armed with this you could cause quite a bit of havoc on the LAN; but we
did use it for peaceful purposes as well. A friend set up a dozen
machines playing the various instruments in Handel's (or Mozart's?
memory fails me) Requiem and we used the network commands across the LAN
as a music conductor, to achieve a synchronised beginning.
--Toby
Hmmm.
Interesting. I wonder if I can remember enough BBC BASIC to
implement a very crude Lisp in it. :?D
Wouldn't be my weapon of choice, but if you really love BBC BASIC, then
go for it. Maybe you could actually compile to BASIC source (& even
exploit the inline 6502 assembler) :)
-Dave