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On 15/03/12 08:55, Gordon Henderson wrote:
So my little project that I've been playing with since the new year was on-show at the LUG meet last Saturday... And it's a BASIC interpreter... I know, I know... why, etc. because it's there... It's a personal project that I want to share with anyone who's interested. Started off by wanting to get a 32 year old BASIC program going again in C, so initially I was going to hand re-code the 3000 or so lines it in C, but I thought what the heck, lets write a new BASIC. So I have. So while it does use line numbers (as all good BASICS do!), it can be programmed without them if you use an external editor and don't use goto or gosub... (and I may yet build a simple editor in) It's got most of the nice stuff in modern structured language while/until, named procedures & functions, recursion, local variables as well as some graphics - fairly plain old 2D stuff, low and high resolution as well as "turtle" graphics which are fun to play with. (well, I think so!) http://unicorn.drogon.net/rtb1.png I'm thinking of adding in sound of some sort (don't know what, yet), and some sort of "sprite" handling - but I'm not really intending for it to be some general purpose thing for people to write the next big financial, maths, simulation, etc. app in like what we used to do, more something just for a bit of fun.... (but hey, I'm not going to stop anyone!) Then there's this Raspberry Pi thing, and while it wasn't actually in my mind when I kicked this off, I'm now thinking I'll produce a turn-key system for it that boots directly into RTB (for that's what I've called it) and so I've started to write a teaching/reference manual for it too. I know the RPi folks are dedicated to Python, but it's always nice to have choice (and BASIC didn't do me any harm ;-) I've successfully compiled it in an QEmu system running the RPi Debian image and although it's a bit slow on my workstation (1.75GHz Athlon!) it does work an is very usable. So does anyone fancy having a play with it? There's a few bugs I need to iron out and I'd be keen to get some feed back and suggestions for features, etc. I'll GPL the source code eventually, but not for now. Let me know if anyones interested and I'll put a package together. It uses the SDL libraries, so if you can run any SDL program (e.g. tuxpaint) then this ought to run, but I know there are issues running binaries over multiple distros, etc. although I'll look at a statically compiled version if if gives issues. It's compiled under Debian Squeeze and runs on Lenny OK, so I don't see any problems with it running under Ubuntu... Back to my 32 year old BASIC program - well, I went out and bought a real Apple II and got it going and my 32 year old 5.25" floppys are still readable. All I need now is a serial card to transfer the program over as I really don't fancy typing in 3000 lines of BASIC!!! http://unicorn.drogon.net/lode.jpg (that's not my program, but an old game I used to play!) I'll put up some more over the weekend, a bit busy with other "stuff" today & tomorow )-: and I need to do more work on the manual as my writing style is somewhat creative... Of anyone wants a quick preview, open an xterm and: wget http://unicorn.drogon.net/rtb.tar -O - | tar xfB - cd rtb ./rtb (it's 104KB, so not going to break your ADSL allowance!) If you can run tuxpaint, then this ought to run too as it uses the same libraries, but if it doesn't run, please let me know. It ought to pop open a 640x420 window which you can type into.. Try this: load turtl3 run There are some simple programs included then use the dir and load commands to find and load then & type run to run them (don't add the .rtb when using the load command) If you want it full-screen, then try ./rtb -f d which will list the modes avalable on your display, then ./rtb -f -m 0 where 0 is the mode/size you want from that list. It defaults to 640x480. The screen font is 8x8 and might be a bit small on the higher resolutions. (the exit command will get you out of rtb back to normal without having to kill it!) If you write some of your own stuff, one thing to look out for is a bug in the parser to do with handling minus calculations - this will be parsed incorrectly: a=colour-1 but this will work fine: a=colour - 1 so use plenty of spaces, but I'd appreciate fedback on any other bugs or oddities you find! Enjoy, Gordon
Hi Gordon,The demo you gave us and the walk through of some of the code was the most impressive thing i have seen in a long long long time! lol. So well done!!! It's very cool :-)
Not sure I have the skill/time to play around with it to any large degree - but maybe..... :-)
Best wishes roly :-) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq