Josh -- There are a few BASICS that I can think of: TinyBASIC, Denver BASIC, Lawrence Livermore BASIC, and MINOL TinyBASIC. Some require working disk drives to load/save (and thus, CP/M), but if you get them working you can just use your laptop to capture a listing (the "save") and re-upload it (like typing it in, the "load").Not 100% elegant, but it works. Rich -- Rich Cini Collector of Classic Computers Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator http://www.altair32.com http://www.classiccmp.org/cini On 12/31/11 7:32 AM, "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

Liam Proven wrote: Why do you need the source? It does everything by calling the standard CPM entry point at &0005. If you want a more fully-featured version, there's the BBC Tube version that calls a jump block at &FFxx for the non-filing functions, you just need to implement the code that jump block jumps to. -- J.G.Harston - jgh at mdfs.net - mdfs.net/jgh

Liam Proven wrote: If you want sound and graphics, firstly, the *machine* you are running on must have sound and graphics. A language having sound and graphics won't magically create the hardware for it to function. Secondly, just use the BBC CPM version of Z80 BBC BASIC[1], which passes all non-filing calls to a jump block at &FFxx[2], and write the relevant code at the destination of the jump block. Just as CPM doesn't "know" what a 10*1024-sector disk is, it just passes calls on to the BIOS jump block, and it's the BIOS that understands what a 10*1024-sector disk is. [1]http://mdfs.net/Software/BBCBasic/CPMTube.zip [2]I have a patch program that lets you move the jumpblock as well. -- J.G.Harston - jgh at mdfs.net - mdfs.net/jgh

ard wrote: You don't need line numbers in BBC BASIC either if you don't use GOTO, GOSUB or RESTORE nnnn. JGH -- J.G.Harston - jgh at mdfs.net - mdfs.net/jgh

ard wrote: Only to actually enter the code from the keyboard. The program itself doesn't need line numbers, and you don't need to enter them if you write the code with a screen editor instead of the line editor. -- J.G.Harston - jgh at mdfs.net - mdfs.net/jgh

[BASIC-09] I am not suprised, It wasn't that common. I ran it on my CoCos. In generla, the OS-9 languages were very nice for an 8-bit machine. FWIW, I will happily agree that BCC BASIC is a very nice langauge too, and certainly one of the better BASICS. But if you claim it's 'the best' you have to expect somebvody to challenge you ;-) [...] Hey, this is classiccmp, right? We do 'rare' here :-) -tony

On 1/1/2012 12:06 PM, allison wrote: Yeah, that's pretty much why I asked. I'm just getting the IMSAI going and I'm not to the point where I can get CP/M running (still working out the logistics for the floppy drive, but that shouldn't take long). I just thought it'd be a fun, short, weekend project to get a BASIC running on it just to see it work. (And now the weekend's gone, so I guess it'll have to wait :) ). The Cromemco 64FDC I have has a ROM monitor and that's what I've (mostly) been playing with. It's looking like CP/M for the 16FDC should be compatible as well, something I'll be trying out in the near future. Understood. Thanks for the suggestions! - Josh

On 1/1/2012 5:12 PM, Liam Proven wrote: I am not sure that it did. What I do remember is that Basic and Pascal both could be compiled threaded or direct asm code. Ben.

It's a very nice OS given the sort of machines it ran on. It'smultitalksing and even multiuser, it's device-independant (like unix, oyu can direct progam output to any device or to a file), it has a directory tree structure (a lot of the OSes for 8 bit micros didn't have subdirectories at all), and it's very modular (you can load new modules, decvice drivers, etc even when the system is running). And that would run on a 1MHz 680 with 64K RAM. [..] THe simple answer is 'no', but there's rather more to it that that. Does C have grapgics or sound facilites? The only mentions of graphics I can find in K&R is defining structs for points, rectangles, etc. The only mention of sound I can fidn is that \a produces a bell character. But of course we all know you can write graphics and sound programs in C. There will generally be libraries of functions to perform particular operations (plot a point, draw a line, fill an area, etc). You call those One advantage of languages like C is thst there are extendable. You can have libraries of extra functuions that cna be used like hte built-in functions of the language. The same applies to to many other languages (forth being an obvious example). In genral, BASICs were not extendable like that. It is very difficult to add new keywords ot a BASIC interpretter, and the way to do it is not often docuemnted. Suppose you took a typicval 8 bit micro (say a C64 or a Spectrum) and interfaced it to a high-resuloution grapgics unit. There's no easy way to add or rewrite commands line LINE or SET. BBC BASIC is a better. You can write soem PROGs to call machine language routines (if necessary) to talk to your hardware. Even so, you have to write some part of it in BASIC (the definitions of the PROCs), and the names of the added commadns all start with PROC. But it's certianly a lot nicer than most other BASICs. But BASIC-09 lets you call add-on routines. They're essentially OS-9 modules. You could write hte graphics routines in any language you like and call them from a BASIC-09 program. Adding graphics and sound routines is entirely possible, just as it is in C. -tony

I thin kthat's right. The other languages yo ucould easily get for OS-9 (read : Radio SHack sold them on CoCO-format disks) included PASCAL-09 (which was full ISO Pascal) and C (which iIRC followed the origial K&R). No brillieant on either front! The Text mode was 32*16 characters, upper case only (porgamming C was 'entertaining, sicne lower-case was displayed as inverse video), The highest resolution graphics mode was 256*192 dots in 2 colours. Sounds was a 6 bit DAC, entirely software driven I seem to remember the OS-9 console driver accepted certain contrl sequecnests to sset graphics mode, plot a point, on the CoCo. You could certianyl do that from BASIC-09 (and fro many other language, I remember wriing programs in Pascal to plot various fucntions). With the CoCo3 (there was no Drago nequivalent), you had the same sound facility, but mcu better grpahgics (80*24 text, upper and lower case, 640*192 graphics, selectable colours, etc). I am pretty sure, again, you could access this from OS-9 probably by sendign the right control sequences ot the console driver. Of course, you could write routines to send said contor lsequenes (or get osmeboy else to write them) and then call them from your program. Yes, I understnad. Of course The COOC had a ROM BASIC too, which had grpahicvs and sound commands. But that wasn't multi-tasking, it didn't let you access an OS-9 filesystem, etc. Oh,I amsolutely agree. It seems that modern PCs are not intended to be programmed by the user (look at the adverts, they talk of storing music, photos, etc, nothing about programming). For all my comments about BASIC-09, I do thin the BBC Micro is oen of the all-time great machines, and that it was probably the best educational computer ever made. The BASIC was good, it was easy to get 'something to happen' but you could go further if you wanted to. The idea of the user prot got a lot of people trying simple interface that is now much arder to do. (Yes, I do know there are USB-parallel ICs available. It's a lot harder to wire one of those up, get the driver to behavem etc than to simply wire a pin o nthe user prot connector to a transistor and then to a relay and enter a simple memory-reference commant to turn on a light or something). An amateur is somebody who does something because they love it (think Latin), it has nothing to do with ability. -tony

I thought hte original Spectrumn had only single-bit sound, a DAC was certainly an improvement on that. I wouldn't be suprised if later vertsions of the Spectrum had AY3-8910 (or simialr) ICs, like the Amstrad CPCs. There were 2 Radio Shack sound cartridges for the CoCo that I know of. One was claled 'Orchestra 90' and was a pair of 8 bit DACs (stereo sound. The ROM in siad cartridge allowed you to play music, you defined the ratios of the harmoncs for each instrument (rather like the drawbars on a Hammod), entered the notes, it calcualted the wave tables nnd played it. The oterh was the 'Speech/Sound Pac'. This contains an SPO-256 speech syntheiser chip, a microcntorlelr to do text-to-speech and an AY-3-8910 (probbalby an 8913, actually, since it wouldn't need the I/O ports) for sound/ .That was quite nice, but very little software used it. As for the graphivcs, the machine was essentialy the Motorola application circuit for hte 6883 SAM and 6847 VDG, and thus you were limited to what those ICs could do. The COCO 3 replaced them with the GIME chip which did a lot more. Actually, I mis-rememebred. I've just dug out my BASIC-09 manual for the CoCo 2 version and it appears you got a library called 'GFX' with it. This incldued funcitos toset the graphics mode (and go back to text mode), set/reset points, test pixels, draw lines and circles and (oddly) to rwad the joysticks. You coudl do thins like RUN GFX("line",0,0,24,65) to draw a line fron (0,0) to (24,65) Yes, 've heard about it. Personally I think the Beeb was a ratehr better educational machine because it encouraged you to try hardware too. I am not convinced that python is the best choice of lanuage either. Actually I beelive there was a podule to add soemthing like that. There certainly was an internal expansion board for the A3000 to add a user port (I have it in mine). Of course there wsas an I2C bus on a cuuple of pins of the system bus (it was used for the intenral real time clock chip, but Acorn deecided to make it avaialble to hackers too). Adding a user prot to that is a matter of a PCF8574 chip. Sorry. This is a pet hate of mine. I am an amateur when it comes to electronics, computing, etc. I do it because I like it, I am entirely self-taught. And even if I say so myself, I donm;t think this makes me totally clueless. But there are those who claim that because I don't have the right bit of paper I cna't possibly know how to do <foo>. I amsolutely agree with you there. I don't think I've found any game for the last 35 years or so to be enjoyable. OK, I'm strange, but I got a lot more enjoyment out of the HP67 games pac (a set of magnetic cards to run on an HP67 clacualtor, a amchine with no sound and jsut a 7 segment numberic dispaly) than I did when a friend convinced me to try Doom (or soemthing) on his PC. That's why I stick to the older machines I can understand. They do all I want, I see no reaso nto replace them with somethign that can execute instructions many thousands of times faster, but it won't execute the isntructiosn I want. -tony

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Yep. It was pretty much 1970s Microsoft BASIC all the way through, starting with the PETs in 1977. That's not a C21 issue... look back 20+ years and build something graphical on Amiga's Intuition API or for X... I never very far into the graphic aspects of either platform, and I'm way beyond the amateur developer stage. I dug in the other direction - systems programming and embedded programming - I haven't done much with graphics since I moved up from the Commodore 64 (where I did a _lot_ of it, but did all the graphics and sound stuff myself, at first in BASIC, then in assembler). -ethan

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: I'm sure it was a cost-based decision, and since they sold over 17 million C-64s, from a business standpoint, not a terrible one. Sure, it wasn't easy to program sound and graphics from BASIC, but I think if you analyze the customer base, far more purchasers were more interested in purchasing high-quality games written by professionals than writing their own code. Commodore owned their own fab line, so they leveraged that which they were good at - selling large quantities of hardware with a high profit margin (when the C-64 was retailing for $99 USD, manufacturing costs were running around $14 per unit). While I'd heard of the Archimedes in the mid-1980s, I didn't know a place to see one, but there were a couple of places close to home that sold Amigas. I didn't know a single Archimedes owner on this side of the pond. The Archimedes didn't sound like a terrible platform, but it just didn't have that much presence here (less than the BBC Micro, which I _did_ see here, including working at a place that wrote software for it). -ethan

Actually, in the case of C, much of the standard library _is_ standardized - and more is standardized if you include POSIX, which, while not properly part of C, is closely related. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 02/01/12 5:59 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: BBC BASIC has a powerful built-in assembler - with macro-ish facilities if you use its structured constructs. In general it makes MS BASIC look pretty mediocre. :) --Toby

That's not quite right. If you knew your stuff, for example, you could put USR() to very good, er, use. One of my earliest hacks was something that looked at the RAM under ROM on a C64. I wrote a USR routine that got its argument from FAC#1, turned it into an integer, banked out ROM, copied out a value, turned it back into a float and stuffed it in FAC#1, so I could either PEEK() or USR() an address. Even SYS/CALL/etc. could be made more useful if you knew the BASIC routines to get and grab parameters. jsr $aefd:jsr $ad9e:jsr $b7f7 is burned in my brain (check for and skip a comma, call BASIC FRMEVL to get an expression and then turn it into a 16-bit integer at $0014-5) allowing stuff like SYS49152,3+35*X to work. My current idiom on the C64 is BASIC for stuff that isn't speed critical and assembly for the rest. Such stuff benefits from simple tools like that. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "Garbage in -- gospel out" -------------------------------------------------

Actually, for those Microsoft BASICs with a CHRGET routine in RAM, easier still was to wedge (hence the name) into that. On PETs that was the only way you could do it, in fact. Its chief drawback was speed. For that matter, altering the tokenizer vector (such as ICRUNCH on the 64) is a better method than trapping errors. Lots of C64 tools added commands in that fashion. But for my own projects, I usually just use SYS/USR and extensions to get parameters. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- The fact that it works is immaterial. -- L. Ogborn -------------------------

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: I wrote at lot of hybrid BASIC/6502-machine-code programs back in the day. In the Commodore world (PET BASIC all the way through the C-128), you had the USR() function, which was handy if you wanted to pass one floating-point arg to your program and/or wanted your routine to pass you back a value - just POKE the address of your code into the documented USR() vector location so BASIC could hit it via a JMP-indirect instruction ($6C), or if you didn't need to pass args in/out (or you were willing to play parser tricks), just directly call your routine with SYS. It was all clearly described in the manuals - I wouldn't call it a kludge, just a method that was probably present in Microsoft BASICs that might not have been present in versions of BASIC that was, for lack of a better term, more Dartmouth-like. I didn't ever have much experience in the past with HP BASIC or DEC EDUsystem BASIC, so I can't guess what, if any, mechanisms there were for those commonly-encountered-at-school environments. I guess if you were writing your own machine code, as I was doing, you'd know your entry points, vs trying to make use of someone else's code, where I can see how it might seem arbitrary and kludgey, especially if they didn't prepend things with a jump table. -ethan

Ethan Dicks wrote: In the C64 (and maybe VIC20), someone at Commodore hacked the Microsoft BASIC to have RAM hooks that could be used to add statements or modify expression processing. The work was clearly done by someone who wasn't really all that familiar with the internals of Microsoft 6502 BASIC, because the hooks were installed in suboptimal places in the ROM code, making it slightly trickier to add those extensions than it needed to be. In early 1982, I wrote a program that added structured programming statements, hexadecimal constants, and various other useful stuff, but the company that was going to sell it flaked out. I had been using their Commodore equipment, which I had to send back to them, and I didn't have the money to buy a C64 (then $595) and 1541 (then around $400) to continue development. I suppose I should have found another company to sell the software, or just given it away. Hindsight is 20/20.

On 3 January 2012 01:06, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I think I once knew that, 20+y ago, and had forgotten. It was a very odd machine, though. I think the unreleased C65 would have been a much better upgrade. The 80col mode was good, but WTF was the Z80 and CP/M doing in there? It was completely inappropriate to the VIC/C64 market segment, added unnecessary cost and did not enhance the functionality of the CBM side of things at all. A truly bizarre addition. Mind you, the C16 and +4 were pretty bizarre aberrations, too. I really don't know what Commodore management was smoking, but it made for some epically bad decision-making. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 02/01/12 8:17 PM, Liam Proven wrote: Well, you might ask the same of the BBC Micro Tube (which hooked up a coprocessor of various families including Z80, 68000, etc). One assumes it was a "crossover" attempt to appeal to small business (given that many small businesses used affordable home computers at the time): A way to get much more capability but relatively low cost compared to the dedicated business brands. In the case of the BBC Micro, the educational computer during the middle years of my high schooling, it meant that schools could have installations of CP/M business software to familiarise students with WordStar, Turbo Pascal, and other tools that they'd soon encounter after finishing high school. --Toby

On Mon, 2 Jan 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote: Right. The mind blower is that David(?) Simons was 13 or 14 when he sold the software to Commodore. :) I suspect there were other non-cart BASIC enhancement packages. Adding new keywords to CBM BASIC was pretty well understood. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: That should be "did make sense". I didn't add new keywords or bizarre parsing except perhaps an experiment or two following instructions on calling machine code directly with SYS and grabbing a few bytes after the fact (like making "SYS 40960:1 2 3 4" do something useful); certainly nothing that I ever depended on in any "useful" program. -ethan

Toby Thain wrote: And, the whole core principle of the Tube, you could use the BBC computer as a simple I/O system for non-6502 development. The initial development for the Archimedes line was done with an ARM coprocessor on a BBC. I did a lot of ZX Spectrum Z80 coding with my BBC Z80 CoPro. JGH

I'm pretty sure that was the intention, though Bil Herd "accidentally" designed the Z80 into the motherboard as a way of getting around having to make the 128 compatible with the CP/M 2.2 cartridge. That said, the C128 implementation of CP/M Plus was designed early in the 128's lifecycle. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Everything! Is my! Delusion! -- "Dead or Alive 2" --------------------------

On 3 January 2012 05:08, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: Blimey. That seems like a lot of work! Not high, AIUI, from a little Googling. Yup! But also, I th ?I -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

From: Liam Proven Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 4:07 AM On 3 January 2012 12:05, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Indeed it was, and the first ever <hack><retch><spit> "killer app" in the microcomputer world. The market pressure of Fortune 500 employees purchasing Apple II systems to run Visicalc was what led to the creation of the IBM Personal Computer. There was far more business software written for CP/M at the time, and the creation of the Z-80 Softcard ("the CP/M card" in an Apple II) let the typical business user run both Visicalc and CP/M word processors, accounting packages, etc. I actually doubt that they were used to run many CP/M-based spreadsheet programs, but I'm prepared to be wrong on that. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Not very common. The local Commodore user group I was a member of had a CP/M section in their newsletter, but it was never demoed much at meetings, and I think I used it a grand total of twice. It was fun to explore, though. C128 native mode, on the other hand, was awesome. Too bad not much exploited that either. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- The world is not enough. ---------------------------------------------------