Posts by ZXDunny

PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi

There's a lovely little parallel port hack that gets you both RGB and RTG on the same monitor - the Picasso96 video driver for the RTG holds pin13 on the parallel port active while it's working, and an HDMI switch attached to the parallel port automatically switches between both inputs.

It's a nice solution but requires some work. There's a new device in development (tentatively named "Mipidipidoo") that siphons the Amiga RGB signal off the relevant motherboard components and pipes it into the Pi's camera port where the videocore driver then composites it into the RTG display. That will only require one video cable to be connected; the one on the Pi.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

You're pretty much spot-on there; BASIC is used by enthusiasts that grew up with their TRS, their 81 or Speccy, their C64 and want to have fun with that. Now of course there are people who grew up with VB looking for exactly the same thing. There are outliers that have heard that BASIC is the easy language to learn, so they start there but they tend not to stick around in the main, as they quickly realise that the retro stuff doesn't have a modern UI or that say, graphics hardware support is not as complete as they'd like.

I wrote my interpreter purely because I wanted to recapture the joy I felt as an 8 year old making terrible games in front of a wedge and a TV on a sunday evening. By golly I've achieved that, but under no illusions that I'll ever actually use it to make anything serious.

Re: SpecBAS

I have made considerable progress in getting it to build in FreePascal/Lazarus - there's just a few small issues to solve regarding how I handle strings and pointers to their contents that FPC really, really doesn't like. There's another chap has taken up the challenge to port to Linux, so with a little luck my horrific abuse of pascal won't hold us up for long.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: The man in the mirror

That was the very first issue, wasn't it?

Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi

There are some caveats - bear in mind that the screen resolution is a lot bigger, and that attributes have gone as each pixel is individually coloured...

But yes, it shouldn't be too hard to do - and if you have problems or find an incompatibility that shouldn't be there, feel free to drop me a line, I'm always ready to fix things that go wrong!

D.

Re: Big deal?

I don't know, but the reason I use the Sinclair-related terms is quite plainly that it is heavily based upon Sinclair BASIC. You'd see that if you tried it, both in the way that the BASIC is entered and the way the language is constructed. Sure, I could call it "A Dartmouth BASIC Remake" but although DMB is at the very roots of my implementation, it was the feel of coding on a Spectrum that I wanted to replicate.

Judging by the response in the Speccy community, I got that part right at least.

D.

Well, I did have some comments but it seems the comment system went awry and my first post got repeated rather than my second post that included info on procedures and suchlike. Shame :)

Re: Procedures????

Yes, you can use line numbers (in fact, as in Sinclair BASIC, you must use line numbers). Procedures were added due to demand, and they can be quite useful as they support passing parameters by reference or by value, support local variables and can be CALLed to return a result.

I kept line numbers in because I think they really force you to think differently about your code, and can be abused in all sorts of ways. There's no CASE structure, but when you can calculate a GOTO or GOSUB using an expression:

10 GO SUB var*10

Then you can simulate them quite easily.

Because line numbers are used, you can easily abuse procedures too - they use the subroutine stack like other handlers, so you could in theory jump in and out of them at will, without having to even call them. Not that I'd advocate that sort of code, but still...

Aside from all this, I'm frankly amazed at the response - a hell of a lot of people are downloading both the binaries and the source code from the websvn... Not sure I made the right choice about opening up my messy code like that, but it did enable the Pi and linux versions to be made :)

D.