On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Russ Blakeman wrote:
> Not anything "wrong" just that any program trhat addressed BASICA or ROM
> BASIC directly had to be modified, just like any prorgram source that
> addressed specific hardware features. Actually I like GW-BASIC more as it
> ran nice on all of my early machines and even runs OK on this PII-300.
For "light level" addressing of BASICA (not calling internals, but using
it in batch files, etc.), Compaq and a few others RENAMED their copies of
GWBASIC to BASICA.
For the second version of Xeno-Copy, the publisher (Vertex (may they rot
in hell)) had a fantasy of peddling it to IBM, and thought that that would
be enhanced by having the program ONLY work on "real" IBM machines. To
accomplish that for them, I used the BASIC floating point accumulator for
passing a value to/from an assembly language subroutine. The result of
that was that the Beta copy supplied to John Dvorak would not work in his
generic clone, resulting in a review stating that the program didn't
work. And PC-World, without mentioning that there was also a version for
use with generic clones, used it as "the acid test of compatibility",
stating that it would not work with ANYTHING other than IBM.
OB_trivia: 1) what did GWBASIC stand for?
2) why? and/or when and how was it named?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Sun Sep 30 2001 - 12:51:22 BST