Sprites on the BBC Micro

[TMR]

when am i ever going to use DOS?

I thought you were working on text-based adventures, the kind that need to save and reload the player's progress...?

[Ranger03]

I thought you were working on text-based adventures, the kind that need to save and reload the player's progress...?

how will DOS help though? i don't want to learn an entirely new language

[tschak909]

sigh, I want to say so much to you, Ranger03, but it would just go over your head.

 

-Thom

[TMR]

how will DOS help though? i don't want to learn an entirely new language

How would the Disk Operating System, the thing that deals with reading and writing to disk, help with loading and saving...? Meh, who knows but it might come in useful at some point.

 

[sigh] This is why people think you're a troll, if you honestly didn't know what DOS stood for then perhaps you shouldn't be bouncing around between different platforms and BASIC dialects like a bloody coked up jackrabbit! If you're actually serious about learning then for Rassilon's sake stop trying to do all the things at once! Pick just one machine, settle down, set yourself simple but at least slightly challenging goals and actually learn how to program.

[carlsson]

Ok. The question was about the # symbol as in BGET#, BPUT#, CLOSE#, EOF#, EXT#, INPUT#, OUTPUT# and PTR#, all regarding file handling. Some of those like INPUT# definitely needs the hash to separate it from the regular INPUT. The others probably could have omitted the symbol, but for clarity it seems that Acorn chose uniform syntax at the expense of one more character to type.

[tschak909]

(for the record, Acorn's BASIC is one of my more favorite BASICs)

 

-Thom

[Arnuphis]

(for the record, Acorn's BASIC is one of my more favorite BASICs)

 

-Thom

Amen. I think the Beeb/Master are the best 8-bit machines ever made but the fanbase is obviously dwarfed by that of the 64/Spectrum/Atari crowd. It's certainly a lonely life being an Acorn fan here in the US!

[tschak909]

Well, it's ironic as hell, that I've been porting my PLATOTerm software to every vintage computer under the sun, and the Beeb is on the list, but getting together a C toolchain has been a bit rough...there is a CC65 branch, but it needs stuff added to it, am going to complete more ports, and circle back around.

 

-Thom

[Ranger03]

Well, i took your guy's advice and am focusing solely on the BBC Micro. just checking the user guide for now

[TMR]

Well, i took your guy's advice and am focusing solely on the BBC Micro. just checking the user guide for now

It's got a nice BASIC but once you move to assembly language things get a little more... well, tricky. The video RAM can take up to 20K from the available 32K on a model B depending on which is selected so, despite having twice the CPU welly of an Apple II or C64, it's got over twice as much bitmap data to push around, no room for a second screen for double buffering and none of the latter's extra features like character-based screens or sprites.

 

The recommended way to write to anything is through firmware calls - I found the documentation a little hard to follow personally - and it's not like the Atari 8-bit or C64 where you just write to a register to change the background colour, even in a two colour mode that's eight register writes per colour if going directly and a firmware call that takes a multiple scanlines to process otherwise. Oh, and the sound chip is clocked at an odd speed so everything tends to be higher pitched than you'd expect...

 

I've spent quite a bit of time swearing at the Beeb recently, but still like it as a challenge... it's just that I wouldn't recommend it for a novice programmer personally.

[Ranger03]

so, stay in teletext mode, got it

[TMR]

so, stay in teletext mode, got it

I'm assuming you haven't looked into how Teletext mode handles colour... I haven't even tried getting my head around that one yet but it's not a nice, simple to understand attribute RAM like the Commodore 8-bits or Spectrum have.

[Ranger03]

I'm assuming you haven't looked into how Teletext mode handles colour... I haven't even tried getting my head around that one yet but it's not a nice, simple to understand attribute RAM like the Commodore 8-bits or Spectrum have.

Well, i did manage to make a sprite, if you can call it that. My bigger issue is going to be saving anything i make

[carlsson]

Have you considered cross development? While I don't know exactly how the resources look like on the Beeb, even if you work in BASIC it should be possible to cross dev with tokenizer that generates binary files.

[Ranger03]

Have you considered cross development? While I don't know exactly how the resources look like on the Beeb, even if you work in BASIC it should be possible to cross dev with tokenizer that generates binary files.

most cross compilers such as pasmo have you use notepad. I find that inconvenient. I'd rather just use Archive.org and Micro User

[TMR]

most cross compilers such as pasmo have you use notepad. I find that inconvenient.

No, they just require a text editor and something like Crimson Editor works well, being able to call commandline compilers or assemblers from hotkeys if set up to do so; I've got Crimson configured so that Control/3 launches PASMO and builds a TAP file for the Spectrum for example, but ACME is bound to Control/1 and Xasm on Control/2 as well so all told it can be used to edit and then assemble code for the C64 (stock or with a 65816 via the SuperCPU), C128, VIC 20, 264 series, PET, Apple II, Atari 2600 , Atari 8-bit, Sinclair Spectrum and Amstrad CPC.

[carlsson]

So for now you are typing in listings from old magazines in order to learn? Well, that may be good start if you indeed pick up something from those listings.

 

To be honest I've never tried to understand the finer details of the BBC Micro, despite at one point owning 4 of them. However I suppose you could mount a blank disk image into the emulator and save your work there somehow, or the very least take a snapshot of the current state.

[TMR]

To be honest I've never tried to understand the finer details of the BBC Micro, despite at one point owning 4 of them. However I suppose you could mount a blank disk image into the emulator and save your work there somehow, or the very least take a snapshot of the current state.

The best emulator is, according to various Beeb bunnies I've talked to, B-Em, but I found the save states for it to be [ahem] rather fragile shall we say? And saving to disk varies depending on which DOS is present, with some models of Beeb not having support at all - I've got B-Em set up as a Master 128 which does, but there's lots of other options to make things more... fun?

[carlsson]

Yeah, if you got neither a 8271 nor a 1770/1772 FDC, you likely don't have a filing system as well. But in an emulated world, I would suppose that is a matter of configuration through menus or in the worst case a text file so the fact a bunch of Beebs are tape only wouldn't primarily affect the ability to program for them. At a later point one might need to come up with a way to convert a disk based game to a tape based game either for download or physical release but at the moment it doesn't seem we're quite there.

 

Or bite the POKE bullet and go with the Commodore route after all, as those all have support of both tape and disk built in. Use Simons' BASIC if one has to, just to get the syntactic sugar needed.

[Ranger03]

might have to...crap!