Microsoft BASIC or Microsort BASIK? - Going down a rabbit hole

[DjayBee]

7 minutes ago, drac030 said:

"Mine" is actually yours. I only applied few amendments, among which the most important (for me at least) is the one which makes it run under SDX

I know but I thought it less confusing if I mention all versions.

 

Btw.: IMHO it's strange that SDX crashes if something modifies MEMLO.

[drac030]

8 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

IMHO it's strange that SDX crashes if something modifies MEMLO.

It does not crash. Nor "modifying" the MEMLO is the problem. SDX tries to prevent programs from overwriting the system (the "Cubbyhole optimization" fellowship & consortes). Everything between $0700 and MEMLO is considered the system, thus if a binary file tries to load a segment into that area, it gets shot down mid-loading with "179 Memory conflict" error and the system returns control to the shell.

 

Here the MSBASIC sets MEMLO first to $6A00, then tries to load itself between $1E00 and that. Since the MEMLO points to $6A00, the loader thinks everything below are resident system components, and therefore does not allow loading.

Edited January 17 by drac030

[DjayBee]

Kay Savetz pointed me to "Instedit (Microsoft BASIC Version) v2.0" by APX which is a charset editor.

 

I ran it successfully with my patched-to-run XEX of Microsort BASIK.

Loaded a charset, changed a character, saved it back to disk and finally reopened the file for verification.

 

So it is proven that the fake version is based on something useful which was subsequently and intentionally screwed up to become the fake.

[DjayBee]

Yesterday at tenth glance I detected that I had misread the fake's copyright message all the time and that the number is not 800 but “eight capital-o capital-o”.

 

So here it is in its full weird glory (by copy/paste from Altirra, what I should have done already in the first place):

 

ATARI 8OO BASIK V2.7
(C) 1981 MICROSORT

Edited January 19 by DjayBee

[+Larry]

My original MS Basic 1.0 disk had been MIA for some time, and I ran across it by chance today.  So I decided to make a backup using my (Happy) Archiver drive and the backup appears to run perfectly, but there are a couple of interesting things...  First, my original disk will boot from a Happy 1050, but it clearly takes longer to boot.  It would appear that the copy protection does not like the Happy fast mode (track buffer).  This was true on both the original disk and the backup.  If I set the slow mode, it boots faster.  Second, on my original disk, I consistently get 19863 bytes free after booting.  On the backup, I get 21022.  That is the same number that is shown in several other posts, including at Atarimania.

 

Can anyone suggest an explanation?  Both original and copy appear to enter and run programs fine, although I have not tested them extensively.