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Myarc XBII ('Advanced BASIC') Tips and Tricks


RobertLM78

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Since there doesn't appear to be a manual for 'Advanced BASIC' on whtech (at least not one that's not buried in some inconspicuous disk), I thought I'd start a support thread for advice and tips.

 

So far, I've found that many XB programs can be used exactly as they were designed with just a few adjustments to the program. If you used WDS# for the drive on the TI, it needs to be changed to HDS# for ABASIC on the Geneve. The other important thing is the GRAPHICS subprogram:

Set screen to 32-column mode:
CALL GRAPHICS(1)  

Set screen to 80-column mode:
CALL GRAPHICS(4)

Note that in 80-column mode, CALL COLOR(S,F,B) doesn't work, you must use CALL SCREEN(F,B). (This information was found on mainbyte).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Here's a text of collected commands. This is pretty much all from the sparse documentation that currently exists, but saves having to dig through generically named RTF files.

 

ABASIC-collected.txt

Edited by RobertLM78
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I thought the whole ABASIC manual was on WHT somewhere--I thought it was part of the final version package. . .

It might be, buried somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Actually, I have seen the errata doc that Omega posted, but it's still a good link to have up.

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It might be, buried somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Actually, I have seen the errata doc that Omega posted, but it's still a good link to have up.

Here's what I've found on whtech. Under /geneve/mdos/advanced_basic_software/, there are two files mybeven.zip and mybodd.zip. These seem to contain the individual page scans of the ABASIC manual.

 

Mike

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I thought the whole ABASIC manual was on WHT somewhere--I thought it was part of the final version package. . .

I have some of Jim's disk images (thanks to Ben) which contained manual updates. But I don't recall ever seeing a completed, final document.

 

A.Freuh was working on an updated Geneve manual that corresponded to MDOS version 6.0. I don't recall if he had updated Advanced BASIC. I am not sure what I did with those files and will add that to my list of things to look for

 

Robert, if you have programs that use assembly language be sure to download the updated Advanced Basic files. There was an obnoxious, long-standing bug that I found that was causing much trouble. There are also some things in XB programs that ABASIC doesn't properly understand, so if you get some weird syntax errors, particularly in complicated IF/THEN/ELSE statements, you may have to break things apart.

 

Edit:

Here is more recent MDOS and GPL manual. However, it needs work as it isn't current. I believe Andy was in the process of incorporating the latest changes into this at one point. I may have the word .doc somewhere.

MDOS_and_GPL_6.0_Manual.pdf

Edited by InsaneMultitasker
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I have some of Jim's disk images (thanks to Ben) which contained manual updates. But I don't recall ever seeing a completed, final document.

 

A.Freuh was working on an updated Geneve manual that corresponded to MDOS version 6.0. I don't recall if he had updated Advanced BASIC. I am not sure what I did with those files and will add that to my list of things to look for

 

Robert, if you have programs that use assembly language be sure to download the updated Advanced Basic files. There was an obnoxious, long-standing bug that I found that was causing much trouble. There are also some things in XB programs that ABASIC doesn't properly understand, so if you get some weird syntax errors, particularly in complicated IF/THEN/ELSE statements, you may have to break things apart.

 

Edit:

Here is more recent MDOS and GPL manual. However, it needs work as it isn't current. I believe Andy was in the process of incorporating the latest changes into this at one point. I may have the word .doc somewhere.

attachicon.gifMDOS_and_GPL_6.0_Manual.pdf

I have ABASIC 403/404 on the Hard disk from Tony, but I found a version 405 in an archive file on whtech- so I should replace 404 with that 405 archive (which appears to be complete, rather than a patch)? I did notice that TEXTLOADer didn't work, which uses assembly, so I wonder if a the new version will fix that. It would be a pain to have to start TI-Ext. BASIC just to use that - never mind all the other stuff that has assembly on it that I haven't tried yet :).

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I have ABASIC 403/404 on the Hard disk from Tony, but I found a version 405 in an archive file on whtech- so I should replace 404 with that 405 archive (which appears to be complete, rather than a patch)? I did notice that TEXTLOADer didn't work, which uses assembly, so I wonder if a the new version will fix that. It would be a pain to have to start TI-Ext. BASIC just to use that - never mind all the other stuff that has assembly on it that I haven't tried yet :).

Yes, 405 is the version I modified to correct the parameter passing problems with CALL LINK. I cannot guarantee TEXTLOADer will work, I can only tell you it is more likely to work in 405 :)

 

Edit:

Come to think of it, I am not sure that programs with embedded assembly (i.e., produced by SYSTEX) work with ABASIC. When I fixed the parameter passing problem I was using object code and never went back to testing my systex assembly loader. Hmmmm.... I'd be interested in your findings.

Edited by InsaneMultitasker
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Yes, 405 is the version I modified to correct the parameter passing problems with CALL LINK. I cannot guarantee TEXTLOADer will work, I can only tell you it is more likely to work in 405 :)

 

Edit:

Come to think of it, I am not sure that programs with embedded assembly (i.e., produced by SYSTEX) work with ABASIC. When I fixed the parameter passing problem I was using object code and never went back to testing my systex assembly loader. Hmmmm.... I'd be interested in your findings.

Cool, then you'll be happy to know I just tested TEXTLOADER, but disappointed, because it didn't work :(. On another plus note though, the new version loaded and seems to be working fine (except for TEXTLOAD, of course ;)).

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Cool, then you'll be happy to know I just tested TEXTLOADER, but disappointed, because it didn't work :(. On another plus note though, the new version loaded and seems to be working fine (except for TEXTLOAD, of course ;)).

PM me with the program and if I have time in the next week or two I'll take a quick look at it. No promises.

 

Fortunately, loading XB is also easy with the Geneve.

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PM me with the program and if I have time in the next week or two I'll take a quick look at it. No promises.

Fortunately, loading XB is also easy with the Geneve.

Send TEXTLOADER or the program I'm trying to load? The program I'm trying to load is just a trivial test program in DIS/VAR 80 format for TEXTLOADER. Here is TEXTLOADER on whtech though (in ark form).

 

Yeah, loading XB isn't much harder than typing 'GPL E:\GRAM\T1\TI-EXB110' at the prompt, but it would save time not having to go back and forth. Although with 80-columns, ABASIC command line isn't so bad itself for coding. I could probably TEXTLOAD the first draft and debug in ABASIC as a compromise ;).

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In the Amiga world, there are a couple of people who have produced ready-to-run installations with the OS and various "must have" tools. Is there such a thing for the Geneve? (This was spurred by the talk of utilities and various versions of Myarc BASIC.)

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Send TEXTLOADER or the program I'm trying to load? The program I'm trying to load is just a trivial test program in DIS/VAR 80 format for TEXTLOADER. Here is TEXTLOADER on whtech though (in ark form).

 

Yeah, loading XB isn't much harder than typing 'GPL E:\GRAM\T1\TI-EXB110' at the prompt, but it would save time not having to go back and forth. Although with 80-columns, ABASIC command line isn't so bad itself for coding. I could probably TEXTLOAD the first draft and debug in ABASIC as a compromise ;).

 

From the documentation:

 

 

This program taps directly into certain areas of the. Extended BASIC module and may therefore not work with your particular module. It does work well with TI's Extended BASIC version 110 and MICROPAL's Extended BASIC version 110.

 

I don't think you're going to have much luck with this program given ABASIC's itself is built on all-assembly and is built for the Geneve. :(

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  • 3 weeks later...

I actually have the printed manual - but not scanned (yet). Although I do have a flatbed scanner, I'll first check whether I can get it scanned with a document feeder.

I dug through my paper files today and confirmed I no longer have an ABASIC manual, either given away or lost during my move. I thought WHT had a copy of the manual, though like others I find it contains only a handful of updates. It seems Jim's full manual, if there was such a beast, was lost when he passed away.

 

If you have time, could you check whether or not the manual contains a section (or appendix) covering the ABASIC memory usage in detail? I fixed the LINK parameter passing last year but am finding some other oddities in the interpreter and legacy programs. It also appears any XB assembly LINK routines related to file IO, particularly those using PAD RAM (83xx) pointers cannot run given the MDOS IO requirements.

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Are we talking about this manual: (first 8 pages)

 

BTW, I tried tesseract for OCR, see the attached txt file.

Nice PDF scan! This looks like the right manual to me. ;)

 

The OCR would be nice if someone has the time to import Jim's corrections into the full document. I know that Foxit and others allow you to annotate comments into a PDF but that isn't quite the same as editing the document directly.

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OK, if that is the correct document I can carry on with scanning. Will take some hours, but only once.

 

We should consider converting scanned documents to text in order to make them more useful, searchable etc. I did not know much about tesseract, but it seems to deliver some good results. I also tried that with the scanned Editor/Assembler manual with good results as well. It will take some time to post-process it (checking unrecognized characters, formatting), but this should be worth it.

 

The question I'm still not quite sure about is the document format. Due to the simple graphics, a plain text may be sufficient. Beyond that I'm favoring LaTeX or OpenDocument, from both we can produce a PDF later, and ODF can also be saved as DOC to be read by MS Word. Or a self-tailored XML language; using an XSLT one could produce multiple formats, also HTML for web pages.

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I just uploaded the Advanced Basic manual on WHTech. Use our Geneve home page to get it: http://ftp.whtech.com/info/geneve.html

 

I scanned the pages with 300dpi, but this would have created a 150 MiB PDF file, so I resized all pages to 150 dpi before creating the PDF. Praised be ImageMagick.

 

I still retain the 300dpi files; maybe I can do a OCR on them later.

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