software via radio

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun Oct 24 16:21:09 2004

> Fair enough. Your reference to Elektor is interesting; I just stumbled
> across a reference to an optional filter module for the Dragon, details
> of which were published in Elektor. It doesn't say which issue
> unfortunately.

I probably have the right issue somewhere, but it will take me some time
to go through them all....

>
> > The other problem you may have with the Dragon, and which I had with the
> > Mdoel 1 is that Basicode sort-of assumes a 40*24 text display. It's not
> > supposed to (you're supposed to call a subroutine loaded as part of the
> > compatibilty routines which loads a couple of variables with the screen
> > size), but many programs didn't bother, or didn't do the right thing if
> > one or both of the dimensions was smaller than expected.
>
> So Basicode's basically a language in its own right, and they sold
> interpreters for different machines? When I first heard about it I

It's BASIC, using a pretty minimal set of commands. You could use things
like PRINT, LET, INPUT< FOR, NEXT, etc.

What you couldn't use -- directly -- were things like clear screen, which
was CLS on a TRS80, HOME on an Apple ][, printing some graphics character
on a PET, etc. Or positioning the cursor. Or many other things that were
done differently on different machines

There was a set of subroutines that you loaded along with your program.
The subroutines were machine-specific, and came with the translator tape.
I forget the exact details, but maybe GOSUB 110 was clear screen, GOSUB
120 was postion (text) cursor at the location given by the variables X
and Y, and so on. Your program -- which was then machine-independant --
started at line 1000 IIRC.

So you recorded this machine-independant program from the radio. The
first stange in translating it was to get it into your machine. It was
basically CUTS 1200 baud tones and format, it was untokenised (of
course). You then merged in the machine-dependant subroutines (which were
the same for all Basicode programs) and ran the result. On most machines
it was somewhat automatic. You loaded the translator (which was in the
machine's native format), it loaded in the Basicode-format tape and stuck
the subroutines in memory too.

-tony
Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 16:21:09 BST