Maury Markowitz Posted September 17, 2002 Share Posted September 17, 2002 Of all the BASIC's I've found only four work: Atari BASIC (rom image), Microsoft BASIC 1.0 that I found on some other disk, TurboBASIC XL 1.5 (mislabled) and Frost BASIC 1.4 (cut down Turbo). The emulator ran the Ahl bench in Atari BASIC at the same time to within a few seconds at 6 minutes, 46 seconds. A second run was 30 seconds faster, which is interesting. Anyway the emulator seems to be close enough that _relative_ speeds are OK even if the exact numbers aren't. Then I fired up Microsoft and the time dropped to 1.34 for every run. Much faster! However the RND function doesn't work and always returned 1. Do I need to seed it? The math was less accurate too. And then I moved onto Turbo. 38 seconds! Almost TWENTY TIMES as fast as Atari BASIC! Better accuracy as well. So I need working copies of... MS 2.0 OSS BasicA, BASIC XL, BASIC XE There's images for these (and lots of others) on the 'net, but they don't run. Does anyone have working versions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Callipygous Posted September 17, 2002 Share Posted September 17, 2002 Might give this one a try: http://www.jeff-jackson.com/Atari/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bcombee Posted September 18, 2002 Share Posted September 18, 2002 For Microsoft BASIC, you may need to change how you call RND. If its consistent with later versions of MS BASIC, here's the usage: >>>> The Rnd function returns a value less than 1 but greater than or equal to 0. The value of number determines how Rnd generates a random number: If number is Rnd generates Less than zero The same number every time, using number as the seed. Greater than zero The next random number in the sequence. Equal to zero The most recently generated number. Not supplied The next random number in the sequence. <<<< By calling RND(0), you always get the same number back. Try RND(1) or RND() for that benchmark. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindfield Posted September 19, 2002 Share Posted September 19, 2002 Turbo Basic rocked. Back in the day, Frank Ostrowski was my programming God. It was hella fast, it was structured, and it even compiled! Frank continued to be my programming God when I moved on to the ST and discovered he wrote my other favourite language: GFA Basic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted September 20, 2002 Share Posted September 20, 2002 i still write my tools nowadays in turbobasic xl... and run the stuff in atari800win in fast mode... even pc stuff i do with turbo basic... as its setup very quick and i do not have to open visual c++, borland or whatever... i used omikron basic on atari STe as it was delivered with the machine... later on i discovered that the software company "omikron" was based in the same city as i came from... pforzheim... and they are still alive... doing data mining... http://www.omikron.net/english/contact.html Heaven/TQA ps. time's going buy...i had even an excel clone for atari st from them... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maury Markowitz Posted October 3, 2002 Author Share Posted October 3, 2002 Not supplied The next random number in the sequence. Ah-ha! Thanks. Maury Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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