24 Oct
2004
24 Oct
'04
8:18 a.m.
On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 17:36 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
I've never seen the translator program for the
Dragon, but there's no
reason why there shouldn't have been one, and AFAIK no extra hardware
would have been needed.
Fair enough. Your reference to Elektor is interesting; I just stumbled
across a reference to an optional filter module for the Dragon, details
of which were published in Elektor. It doesn't say which issue
unfortunately.
The other problem you may have with the Dragon, and
which I had with the
Mdoel 1 is that Basicode sort-of assumes a 40*24 text display. It's not
supposed to (you're supposed to call a subroutine loaded as part of the
compatibilty routines which loads a couple of variables with the screen
size), but many programs didn't bother, or didn't do the right thing if
one or both of the dimensions was smaller than expected.
So Basicode's basically a language in its own right, and they sold
interpreters for different machines? When I first heard about it I
assumed they'd transmitted different programs at different times for
different machines and that Basicode was just a front-end for the native
interpreter which knew how to decode the incoming radio signal to the
machine's native Basic format.
cheers
Jules