Aquarius basic reference

[barnieg]

Is there any reference or guide to the commands available in Aquarius Basic particularly in comparison to something like GWBASIC?

 

Barnie

[the-topdog]

Is there any reference or guide to the commands available in Aquarius Basic particularly in comparison to something like GWBASIC?

 

Barnie

 

CHR$ Ctrl[sPACE]

CLOAD Ctrl[Z]

COPY Ctrl[9]

CSAVE Ctrl[A]

DATA Ctrl[F]

DIM Ctrl[E]

FOR Ctrl[-]

GOSUB Ctrl[7]

GOTO Ctrl[5]

IF Ctrl[3]

INPUT Ctrl[T]

LEFT$ Ctrl[V]

LIST Ctrl[2]

MID$ Ctrl

NEXT Ctrl[=]

ON Ctrl[6]

PEEK Ctrl[;]

POINT Ctrl[L]

POKE Ctrl[']

PRESET Ctrl[K]

PSET Ctrl[J]

READ Ctrl[D]

REM Ctrl[W]

RIGHT$ Ctrl[N]

RETURN Ctrl[8]

RUN Ctrl[1]

STR$ Ctrl[,]

THEN Ctrl[4]

VAL Ctrl[.]

 

To break/stop a program, press Ctrl[C]

To interrupt the LISTing of a program, press Ctrl

To repeat the entire last line you typed, press Ctrl[R]

To get the machine to beep, press Ctrl[G]

[jaybird3rd]

I have scans of both the Aquarius Guide to Computing (a reference guide to the built-in BASIC) as well as the Extended BASIC manual. I'll be converting the former to PDF once I'm done with the multi-cart project; the latter has already been converted to PDF by someone else.

[barnieg]

thanks for the help I'm trying to get braincells working that haven't done any programming for years, and this is a nice diversion from the Atari stuff!

 

 

Am I right in saying then that to do anything graphical beyond the bloxels pokes are required? i.e poking to location 12288 with a character value displays the relevant character in the border and so on for screen positions. Adding 1024 to the screen location is the colour value which I presume is both the foreground & background colour from what I can see with my random pokes how is the colour decided i.e which bits represent foreground and background colours?

 

Barnie

Edited December 6, 2010 by barnieg

[jaybird3rd]

thanks for the help I'm trying to get braincells working that haven't done any programming for years, and this is a nice diversion from the Atari stuff!

 

 

Am I right in saying then that to do anything graphical beyond the bloxels pokes are required? i.e poking to location 12288 with a character value displays the relevant character in the border and so on for screen positions. Adding 1024 to the screen location is the colour value which I presume is both the foreground & background colour from what I can see with my random pokes how is the colour decided i.e which bits represent foreground and background colours?

The Aquarius version of Microsoft BASIC is actually fairly decent, and isn't nearly as crippled as its reputation might suggest. Some people--who've probably never seen an Aquarius--have said that it eliminated FOR loops or other such nonsense, but in fact, it squeezed in everything except the ten commands included in Extended BASIC: drawing, line editing, cursor repositioning (which you can actually do with a little machine language in regular BASIC), numeric function definition, and a few others. Using BASIC is slow for certain operations, as always, but Aquarius BASIC is certainly a lot faster than TI BASIC on the 99/4A.

 

Regarding the colors: there are a total of sixteen colors, which can be represented in four bits. When you use a POKE to write an eight-bit number into the color matrix, the rightmost bits represent the background color, and the leftmost bits represent the foreground color.

 

To make it easy, here are the color codes:

 

0: Black

1: Red

2: Green

3: Yellow

4: Blue

5: Violet

6: Light Blue-Green (Light Cyan)

7: White

8: Light Gray

9: Blue-Green (Cyan)

10: Dark Violet

11: Dark Blue

12: Light Yellow

13: Light Green

14: Orange

15: Dark Gray

 

Choose the foreground and background colors that you want from this list, then multiply the foreground color code by sixteen and add it to the background color code to get the final value that you would write into the color matrix using a POKE.

 

For example, the default screen color is black on light cyan, so the color code is (0 * 16) + 6 = 6. If you want to change a cell to yellow on dark gray, the value you would POKE into that cell would be (3 * 16) + 15 = 63.