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OSS BASIC XE and the XFormer10 Atari Emulator?


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I have seen various posts about BASIC XE by OSS and would like to hear the definitive word from this thread...

 

All questions and info below is for running under the XFormer10 Atari Emulator - which generally is running great.

 

BASIC XE 4.2 freezes when booting with the OSS Extensions disc (I have 4.00).  Actually, not quite true - it generates some sort of error.  I can do a "GRAPHICS 0" command to get back to a prompt (even though it looks frozen), but obviously, I'm not too comfortable that something is hosed.  Does anyone have a fix/suggestion for this?

 

It looks like I can generally boot BASIC XE 4.1 or 4.2 w/o the extensions disc, but I am still seeing sporadic lockups in BASIC XE.

 

Thoughts/suggestions/comments?

 

Extra tidbit - I love OSS programming software and really want to be able to write some old fashioned BASIC programs in BASIC XE to finally get that string array support I always craved as a nerdy kid in the mid 1980s.

 

I could dust off my old Atari130XE, but prefer my tactile PC keyboards.  (Plus I don't have an OSS BASIC XE Cartridge) :(

 

Dave Snyder

Waukesha, WI

 

 

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Yes, I really prefer my IBM Type-M keyboards, all model 42H1292. Bought a bunch at a flea market years ago, $5 each. On my second one now.

 

Anywhoo, BASIC XE 4.1 AFAIK is completely stable and usable on any platform. The extensions work, with the exception of the CALL/PROC bug I mentioned previously. Symptoms of the bug are the program randomly stops, return variables may be set to zero, and sometimes the display will blitz out.

 

4.2 I did not test extensively because without the extensions it's not all that useful. The cart seems to work correctly, but as soon as you load the 4.2 extensions, it fails to function. 

 

I don't see any reference to OSS carts specifically on the XFormer 10 page, it just says 16KB carts, but Mihocka's not an idiot (at least he didn't used to be when I met him) so presumably they should work.

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wasn't it discovered the extension disks are paired to the revision and though we all named the extension disks the same... the correct extension disk (there are two out there) must be matched up with the correct revision BXE cartridge.

are we saying it's still broken even with the correctly matched extension disk?

Edited by _The Doctor__
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Yes the extensions disks are tightly coupled with the cartridge. There are two build files for BASIC XE, one builds the cart and the other builds the extensions. Basically the extensions build has .OPT NO OBJ for all the included cartridge source files. Now it may be happenstance that say the 4.1 extensions will work with a 4.0 carttridge, I don't know if the vector table in $CCxx is fixed or not. I would assume that you must have the matching extensions if only because it was built with the addresses in the same cart version, and those are very unlikely to be the same across versions. I know that the 4.2 cartridge is very different than the 4.1 just in the first 100 bytes, so I would not expect the 4.2 extensions to work at all with 4.1.

 

Unfortunately we don't have the source for 4.1 so it would be very time consuming to see what was changed between 4.1 and 4.2, it would be a massive disassembly. I think the listing for 4.2 is 400KB or so.

 

Yes, 4.2 extensions completely breaks the 4.2 cartridge. I don't know if it's because it overlays the jump table improperly or if the code itself is bugged.

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