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3 Aquarius Programs I Made


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1 hour ago, Intelligentleman said:

My first computer programming introduction was Microsoft QBASIC back in 1997 or 1998. It was a high school class.

Yes, I remember QBasic.  I started writing some simple games with it when I was in high school; this would have been around 1993-1994.  I ran into a few snags that I could easily work through now with what I've learned since, so I've actually been thinking of digging one of them out again and finishing it!  QBasic was a big step up for me from GW-BASIC, which I'd been using previously; it supported VGA graphics modes, and it didn't require line numbers!

 

1 hour ago, Intelligentleman said:

I just learned how to do simple things in Logo this weekend.

So far, so good!  You're using Logo exactly as it was intended to be used: as a way to explore computers and programming.

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Nice!  I'm reminded of one of my own early experiences with BASIC, when I was about six or seven years old.  The TI 99/4A user's manual had a collection of type-in sample programs, one of which was an "inchworm" demo.  It used character graphics to draw a blocky inchworm; it "crawled" across the screen with a simple animation effect, and when it reached the end, it beeped an "uh-oh!" noise and then "crawled" back the other way, repeating forever until the user entered a break.  I spent a lot of time squinting at the fuzzy 13" black-and-white TV that I was using as a "monitor," debugging the program with my mother and rooting out my typos, and it felt like quite an accomplishment to finally get it working!  Then of course, I got to work finding creative ways to modify it, which lead to hours of experimentation.  A humble beginning, but it set me on my path.  Now that I'm teaching classes in Computer Science, I'm always looking for ways to recreate that sense of discovery for my own students.

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That's fantastic.

 

I can relate entirely to this. Several years before my QBASIC class, in 6th grade or so, I had a computer class. It was once a week for maybe an hour. On Apple IIs.

 

i would bring in my 321 Contact magazines, which usually had a program to try. I’d spend the whole time entering in the code, but I can’t recall ever getting anything to work. Probably due to typos, ?

 

If you dl the video of the bouncing balls you'll hear my 6 year old cackling with glee when they start moving. But he quickly notices the balls move in the same direction every time.

 

I told him we could change that, but by then he really wanted to do some Legos. 

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7 hours ago, Intelligentleman said:

This is cool! So I could use my computer instead of the Aquarius for the development of a program and then just save it to cassette maybe?

Definitely. If you are using, for instance, Virtual Aquarius (the oldest surviving emulator) or AquaLite (the latest) you can enter your code just in Notepad and then copy it to your clipboard, then selected UTIL > PASTE (or just CTRL+V in AquaLite) to paste it in. Then to save it you can type CSAVE "name" and then press enter a couple times - the "Save As" will open and you can save it as a CAQ cassette file. This can then be converted using CAQ2WAV.exe which outputs a WAV file that can be recorded to a cassette or transferred from cable directly to the Aquarius.

 

 

On 6/27/2021 at 3:22 PM, Intelligentleman said:

One question about that stuff, though. Is it possible to make the shapes appear larger on the screen? Or do we need to work with them exactly as they are?

Although Aquarius has a fixed character set, part of that set includes "bloxels." This allows you within BASIC/Assembly to effectively split each tile into a 2x3 or 2x2 grid space (PSET and PRESET utilize these to construct up to 80x72 resolution graphics). So with some creative adaptation you can reconstruct the character set or design your own at a 4x scale. This is how Astromash's graphics were created. It can be a pain to figure out the coordinates to plot for such uses, but I developed a free Aquarius Draw utility earlier this year that allows the full range of graphical capabilities of Aquarius - and then allows you to generate BASIC or Machine Language code on the fly (a gallery of Aquarius-compatible user art is here).

 

image.thumb.png.1283b20fbe5e553032100b958c25bc16.png

 

image.thumb.png.65617840e162283d425fd3b6a823dba4.png

Edited by MattPilz
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15 hours ago, MattPilz said:

Definitely. If you are using, for instance, Virtual Aquarius (the oldest surviving emulator) or AquaLite (the latest) you can enter your code just in Notepad and then copy it to your clipboard, then selected UTIL > PASTE (or just CTRL+V in AquaLite) to paste it in. Then to save it you can type CSAVE "name" and then press enter a couple times - the "Save As" will open and you can save it as a CAQ cassette file. This can then be converted using CAQ2WAV.exe which outputs a WAV file that can be recorded to a cassette or transferred from cable directly to the Aquarius.

 

 

Although Aquarius has a fixed character set, part of that set includes "bloxels." This allows you within BASIC/Assembly to effectively split each tile into a 2x3 or 2x2 grid space (PSET and PRESET utilize these to construct up to 80x72 resolution graphics). So with some creative adaptation you can reconstruct the character set or design your own at a 4x scale. This is how Astromash's graphics were created. It can be a pain to figure out the coordinates to plot for such uses, but I developed a free Aquarius Draw utility earlier this year that allows the full range of graphical capabilities of Aquarius - and then allows you to generate BASIC or Machine Language code on the fly (a gallery of Aquarius-compatible user art is here).

 

image.thumb.png.1283b20fbe5e553032100b958c25bc16.png

 

image.thumb.png.65617840e162283d425fd3b6a823dba4.png

Thanks MattPilz. I remember discovering Aquarius Draw several months ago. I knew I would be coming back to it, so It' been saved in my bookmarks ever since. With the bloxels, essentially it's like "drawing." Or maybe like painting with different brushes? Not sure if that's the right way to look at it, but that's what it seems like in my mind, at least.

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On 6/28/2021 at 10:57 PM, Intelligentleman said:

This is cool! So I could use my computer instead of the Aquarius for the development of a program and then just save it to cassette maybe?

Sure, or make a rom file. Maybe you also find this item useful, made by someone in the Mattel Aquarius FB group

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154442047508

 

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