Foenix F256 SuperBASIC Part 6 - DEMO1.BAS (impress friends & family)
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- This video continues the discussion on structured programming through the lens of a DEMO program, which is a modern, "full featured" but extremely short 19 line program that I stole from Paul Robson's github.
I say "full featured" because it accepts user input (sort of) and produces output; not in that order.
To be honest, it's nothing more than a single-line program and better, a single command; but THAT single command is a named PROCedure that calls other PROCs to display bitmapped graphics on the screen and cycle through a set of colors until user input (ummm, a joystick button press) is encountered.
You can impress your friends by making this your own and modifying it to do something more.
This video picks up the screen editor discussion that we started earlier in the series, and specifically, the manner in which nested statements are rendered; but watch out for a familiar GOTCHA!
The last minute of the video is a text-only explanation of something I realized during editing; the conflict of how the '?' character is used in the BASIC that I grew up with, and how it is used here in SuperBASIC (a distant cousin of Acorn BBC BASIC; the original Acorn manual is linked below for reference). I'll probably pull together an advanced topics video that deals with operators at some point; as far as I'm concerned, BASIC should be content with parens, the commonly accepted mathematical operators, logicals, and postfix 'type' designations such as '$' for string and '%' for integer. But that's just me.
** The normal stuff
SuperBASIC is the native BASIC interpreter that ships with Foenix F256 platforms. In the github repository (link below), the developer (Paul Robson) deemed it an "improved BASIC". Paul is modest.
As mentioned in the intro, these videos are shot in a single 'take' with a minimum of edits and are based on a short script with an aim to be consumed in 10 minutes or less; so keep your notepad handy. They are slow-paced, but focused tutorials.
Constructive feedback and questions are welcome, and clicking the SUBSCRIBE button is much appreciated. We are just getting started, but have big plans for this channel.
** Links and/or references mentioned:
github.com/pau...
Foenix Retro Discord server invite: / discord
Foenix Retro home page: c256foenix.com
Link to the Foenix Marketplace app store:
apps.emwhite.or...
Link to an early BBC Micro User Guide :
bbc.nvg.org/doc...
Link to a great BBC Micro resource for public domain publications:
8bs.com/othrdnl...
Thanks for bringing special focused attention to this demo. You can never be sure of how people will enter this machine's content and in which order. This is a good vetted entry point into what most people would want to tinker with initially as they surely move into fabricating an embryo of a game, even if they're ultimately interested by assembly eventually.
Love the music at the end!
It's a little ditty and completely random, but thank you; there will be more. Contrary to what you might have guessed, it's captured live in one go (thanks to the onboard arpeggiator driven by an analog clock source) on a $5000 (USD, not hexadecimal) analog synth, not a $40 SID IC or 2 of them... and it's a dry signal path. Google OB-X8. Tom Oberheim is still at it.
the line numbers are "left aligned to 5 characters" (because the max line number is 65535) then a space, then the code
Indeed. Similar to other versions of BASIC, line numbers are stored in 16-bits. Note that SuperBASIC does not have a renumber facility, but offers many features supporting procedural development with which functions can be defined and called regardless of what line number they are on.
Also, program text is stored in clear ASCII so editing can be done offline or within a soon to be released text editor OR can be developed off platform and loaded into the system through a utility (the author of SuperBASIC, Paul Robson, documented this, however I've not yet tried it). Thanks for the comment.
You really should get your mic away from the keyboard. The constant loud clicking gets rather annoying. Suggest using either a lapel or a directional mic.