Making an Atari 400/800 Basic cartridge Eprom type? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

22 Jan 2001

...
   	One reason I
would think Atari BASIC would be a bit larger is 
 the fact that it included support for all the advanced features of 
 the Atari hardware, such as collision detection and player-missle  
Jeff, keep in mind that Microsoft BASIC came from the same source tree no
matter what the target CPU.  The interpreter was written in a kind of
macro language and run through a post processor for the target platform.
Because of this there was very little, if any space optimizing done unless
the OEM either got the generated source to work on, or they paid MS for
the task.  A couple of years ago someone posted a bit of this macro like
code to alt.folklore.computers with a brief description of how it all
went together.  A dejanews hunt might even find it. 
	But that has little to do with my comment since Atari BASIC is not
Microsoft BASIC.  MS BASIC was available seperately.  Atari did thier own
interpreter which was written specifically for the 400/800 series machines
and incorporated functions specific to the hardware.  Commodore on the other
hand did not build this same level of functionality into thier variants of
BASIC for the C-64 and I was just wondering if anyone knew if the MS BASIC
available for the Atari had any of it included.  By your comments above, I
would assume not.

	Jeff  (replying to this from work)