Making an Atari 400/800 Basic cartridge Eprom type?

From: Hellige, Jeff SK2 <hellige_at_mediacen.navy.mil>
Date: Mon Jan 22 10:23:45 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)
Received on Mon Jan 22 2001 - 10:23:45 GMT