BASIC program in From Beyond

[Frozone212]

i know this seems odd that it's here but in the film From Beyond, when the machine is going haywire, there is a BASIC program running. Here's the weird thing: The commands seem to be a mix of Microsoft Basic, Extended Basic and other versions of it. Has anyone ever tried to type it in? what does it do?

i can't find the scene but it's in the movie, a brief segment with the screen flashing on and off and the Basic text is green Phospor

[wierd_w]

The whole program is not visible.  Part of the display suggests it is part of a function plotter program.

 

 

Subsequent images suggest the plotter program is stopped from the disk getting full, while attempting to BSAVE the data stored in an array. (This is usually used to store raw image data from MS Qbasic.)

 

 

This halts the program, and drops it the basic interpreter prompt. Some of the program's listing is displayed.

 

Key portions of the program are not in the listing. However, the program appears to be an Fx(X,Y) function plotting program, with routines to save the plotted function's image to disk, and functions to print the resulting function graph to a printer of some kind.

 

 

[The Usotsuki]

Definitely looks like GW-BASIC.

[Krebizfan]

The BSAVE code should be saving the text screen contents to a file named "SCREEN0." DEFSEG=&HB800 puts the start of the segment at the beginning of the memory assigned for text screens. BSAVE "SCREEN0" assigns the file name; ",0" starts reading memory from &HB800; ",4000" will save 4000 bytes or the contents of a 80x25 screen including the attributes. 

 

The second version BSAVE "SCREEN2",0, &HB800 looks like a mistake. Trying to save 41K out of 4K might cause problems even if the screen memory is duplicated over the entire 32K range.

 

It looks like multiple programs were used with the third screenshot showing a possible demo program designed for the movie that BLOADs the previously setup SCREEN0 (simulating some complex application) followed by outputting a graph.

 

[Frozone212]

interesting comments. thanks for the help guys