danwinslow

Thats right, page 1 is used is a normal manner. Parameters are passed on a 2k heap at the other end of memory.

Does anyone have any linkage or information about a manual or associated documentation for the OSS BAsic XL cart?

Personally, in this case I say screw compatibility. If we want to play old games, we have plenty of ways to do that already.

Well, I'd sure as hell pay more than 700$.

Wow! Thanks Curt.

I just picked up one of these...seems to work, and it seems to have the full CPM upgrade in it. Does anyone have any links to any information about these things? It has a bare rs232 edge connector and several other ports on the back, plus some SIO connectors. Supposedly you can hook up a dumb terminal to the serial port, but I am thrown off a bit by the edge connector deal, never seen that before. http://www.powow.com/oldatarian/atr8000.htm

If you need software help, let me know. Especially if the 65c816 is involved.

Well, depending on what you do, you could probably get away with a c function in an interrupt, at least as far as the ZP stuff goes. CC65 uses 23 or so locations, so you can also save/restore them and there's a call for doing so in the CC65 internals. The actual function call mechanism itself doesn't touch any ZP, but the body of most functions does. 1. Actually, overhead from usage of these functions is only bad if you constantly call them. Using it to get a few blocks here and there during initialization is negligible. Then again, in this environment they really don't do much for you other than keeping you from walking on your own memory...they have no knowledge of any other "reserved" areas besides their own. 2. Yah this is the way to go I think. 3. Nah........I need to be more careful than that with the app I am doing. It'll drive me crazy later if I don't. page 6 is clear even with dos loaded, isn't it?

Thats some great info. But, man, is that web display hard to read. I wonder if he would consider removing the background.

Now, Now. Only he gets to decide that.

My advice about doing a real parser is not to allow for complex statements. Its to keep Batari from going crazy trying to allow for the 80 million different teeny little issues that will be cropping up dealing with things like spacing, tabs, and any combination of unlikely characters. Hand-jamming a parser as you go, even if the syntax is relatively simple, can be very painful towards the end of the development.

If it isn't Lunar Lander using an 'M' for the lander graphics on a black and white sinclair zx80....it sucks.

Batari, the parsing issues are going to drive you insane. I am speaking from personal experience. My advice is to set up a real parser now before you get too much kluged in there. It just gets worse as you go along. You need expression trees, BNF, etc. Yah, lex and yacc are good. Cryptic but they work. Actually, you should be able to find pre-made basic parsers out on the net that you could mod. I will see if I can't find a couple and post them.

He is impervious to argument anyways.

long time eq'er, played a ranger on fennin. Now playing WOW hunter.

Well, from a language perspective, what I have seen so far is only loosely termed 'basic'. It's probably best to think of this as a really specialized basic-like language. I mean, you aren't going to add tons of stuff that is in other basics..like the string functions, IO functions, etc. One thing you might want to consider adding in is some kind of USR() function...that is, the ability to embed blocks of ML inside a string or other data area and then call it from basic. Maybe for this basic you would just allow the direct insert of opcodes with line numbers. 10 rem ml insert 20 LDA PFCOL0 30 etc... Syntactically, the only thing that really jumps out at me is the inelegant way that the sprite data is laid out...having the line feeds embedded in the data is a little funky, although it makes visualization easier. You might want to look at the traditional basic DATA statement. Anyways, it looks very nice overall.

You are just plain ignoring the fact that one one hand, you used the 'we must not change the game!' argument, and now here you are advocating making big changes. See any inconsistencies? No? Unable to notice? This is way different? I'll keep my empty and worthless posts to myself I suppose. They certainly don't have any effect. Say Hi to PP for me, you must be in contact with him, as you seem pretty convinced you know Whats Best.

One thing to do about the spaces is to collapse them down to one right after you read in the line. If you have string literals then you have to exclude them from this. The way I usually do it is to transfer the string character by character to a second buffer, inc'ing the destination pointer only on a non whitespace char or the first whitespace char of a group.

Lol, Xebec...do you really not see what I am talking about or are you kidding? Never mind anyways.

? What are you people on about?

I can read fine, thanks, and I am not confused. My conclusion is that you support changes you like on the grounds that you like them, and you oppose changes you don't like on the grounds it would change the original gameplay. Also, how do you know what PP intended? Maybe he intended there to be closed off guilds and trap spots? Do you have acess to some documentation that we don't?

Xebec, you ranted for like 3 pages worth of messages about how we have to keep the Alternate Reality experience at its originally intended best. Now, you seem to think that its ok to make major gameplay modifications. Whats up with that?

K, good luck Dark! Was hoping to log on soon just got my falcon on the 'net.

Topaz, the short version of all this is that you are not going to get what you hoped for this falcon around here. Nobody really cares about the NIB deal, that only starts working when things are much rarer than Falcons are now. A sinclair zx80 NIB? THERE you've got some cash flow. A Falcon? Nah. YOu never know though, I guess keep trying. You won't get it around here though I odn't think as most of us watch ebay like frikkin hawks.

Used falcons on ebay have been going for around the 300-350 dollar mark, even with 14MB and hard drives. Haven't seen one in a few months, but they will show back up if you watch. I have 3 of them.