Apple lle and BASIC
Bettablue
invaluable. I can't wait for my best friend to move back to Vegas so we can
sit and play with my vintage computers like we did as teenagers. It was a
great bonding experience for us wannabe nerds.
I have the computer in my den right now. It's a thing of beauty! Over
engineering was art form back then and the ability to add a specific card to
these computers makes add-ons so simple. As far as installed cards, all it
contains now is the memory module, floppy and video controller cards. I
heard something to the effect that Apple lle's had a color adapter already
built in, but the monitor that shipped is only a monochrome. If this is
true, I would love to get an original color display for it. I know all I
have to to find out, is connect it to a TV set , but that isn't the easiest
thing for me to do. I only have one good arm and the other I need to
control my power wheelchair. It's funny that the display went out the
moment we started writing some small test code. There was no smoke, or any
indication that there was anything going wrong. It was working fine one
second, and the next, it went blank. The display had no power at all. I
suspect an internal fuse.
I'm going to try to open the monitor to check the fuse. If that's not the
cause of the problem I will be in the market for someone to either repair or
replace my current one. If the lle does have a color video controller, I'll
definitely want a color display.
I have another question though. Is Apple BASIC compatible with programs
written with another version of BASIC? IE, can I write a program on a PC of
the same era and use on my lle? There are a lot of programs I have in Apple
BASIC that I want to run on my IBM 5150 too.
Osgeld
most generic monitors at the time are about as good as a TV today,and
yea apple II's support color, all the monochrome monitor does is
ignore the color burst signal so its already there and in use you just
dont see it.
on that note though color is sometimes crap, it kind of depends on
what your hooking it in to, some do color text and graphics fine ok
enough, some make text unreadable, none do as well on text as the mono
screens (IMO but I have not seen every possible screen out there) I
have the best luck with a TV tuner card in a PC, but my //c is also
sitting on the same desk, old "computer monitors" from other computers
do pretty decent too but they are old and might not get you far before
another repair
as far as your other question, sometimes sorta... a lot of the basic's
on 8 bit computers were done by microsoft, so if your program just
stayed inside the bare minimum functions of basic you could get them
to run, but these were very basic text only type programs, anything
that acted on the hardware would have to be re-written, for example a
apple // does not have a SID music chip from a C64 in it nor a 16 bit
cpu and EGA from a 286
Steve Nickolas
> I have another question though. Is Apple BASIC compatible with programs
> written with another version of BASIC? IE, can I write a program on a PC of
> the same era and use on my lle? There are a lot of programs I have in Apple
> BASIC that I want to run on my IBM 5150 too.
Kindasorta. If it doesn't use Apple-specific stuff, it usually isn't that
difficult to translate. The IBM dialect is fairly closely related to
Apple's (both were written by Microsoft) so if you know both dialects
(fpbasic and gwbasic) you can usually translate basic stuff from the Apple
to the PC. If it uses PEEK, POKE or CALL though...
-uso.
winston19842005
alpine.DEB.2.00.1...@midnightmarauder.localdomain, "Steve
Nickolas" <lyrica...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org> wrote:
Hmm... of the old systems, I'd say Applesoft BASIC isn't "fairly close" to
either IBM BASIC(A) or other Microsoft BASIC's.
Good examples of Microsoft BASIC would be IBM BASIC (ROM version or disk
version), Commodore PET/VIC/64/128 BASICs, TRS-80 BASICs.
Further away from the Microsoft standard than Applesoft would be Sinclair
BASIC.
Others would fall in the middle somewhere, like Atari BASIC. It is close,
but the strings are a little weird.
Steve Nickolas
> On 3/26/11 2:30 PM, in article
> alpine.DEB.2.00.1...@midnightmarauder.localdomain, "Steve
> Nickolas" <lyrica...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org> wrote:
>
>> Kindasorta. If it doesn't use Apple-specific stuff, it usually isn't that
>> difficult to translate. The IBM dialect is fairly closely related to
>> Apple's (both were written by Microsoft) so if you know both dialects
>> (fpbasic and gwbasic) you can usually translate basic stuff from the Apple
>> to the PC. If it uses PEEK, POKE or CALL though...
>>
> Hmm... of the old systems, I'd say Applesoft BASIC isn't "fairly close" to
> either IBM BASIC(A) or other Microsoft BASIC's.
It was close enough that I picked it up pretty quick. Applesoft *is* a
Microsoft dialect and apart from it being hacked to support some isms from
Integer BASIC it's still compatible with straight MS BASICs.
> Others would fall in the middle somewhere, like Atari BASIC. It is close,
> but the strings are a little weird.
I'm led to understand that Atari BASIC is essentially a rewrite of
Wozniak's BASIC. (Shares an author with DOS 3.3, as I recall!) It does
have microsoftisms though.
Another interesting dialect is HuBASIC 3 for the Famicom.
-uso.
Jonno Downes
> I'm led to understand that Atari BASIC is essentially a rewrite of
> Wozniak's BASIC. (Shares an author with DOS 3.3, as I recall!) It does
> have microsoftisms though.
Atari BASIC was written by Bill Wilkinson, who doesn't show up in any of the Apple DOS references I can find.
I am not familiar with the internals of Integer BASIC, but I find Atari BASIC quite different from Microsoft flavours. Atari BASIC does syntax checking as lines are entered (what it called 'compilation'), not at run-time. It does this by using something called the "Atari BASIC meta language" (very similar to BNF).
So a large part of the Atari BASIC source code (which I have in the form of a Compute! book called "The Atari BASIC Sourcebook") is something called the Syntax tables; the recursive definitions of the way BASIC tokens can be combined into legal statements. I have not seen any equivalent to this in any of the 8080 or 6502 MS BASICs I have poked around with.
Michael J. Mahon
> I'm led to understand that Atari BASIC is essentially a rewrite of
> Wozniak's BASIC. (Shares an author with DOS 3.3, as I recall!) It does
> have microsoftisms though.
That's interesting... Could this be the "Floating point BASIC"
commisioned by Apple and then cancelled in favor of a Microsoft
port--perhaps then completed for Atari?
-michael
NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."
Steve Nickolas
> Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
>> I'm led to understand that Atari BASIC is essentially a rewrite of
>> Wozniak's BASIC. (Shares an author with DOS 3.3, as I recall!) It does
>> have microsoftisms though.
>
> That's interesting... Could this be the "Floating point BASIC"
> commisioned by Apple and then cancelled in favor of a Microsoft
> port--perhaps then completed for Atari?
That's what I was led to believe, at any rate.
-uso.
Steve Nickolas
http://www.laughton.com/Apple/Apple.html
"The Basic problem was fixed a short time later, when Apple canceled the
Apple Annie project and the Basic contract. We at Shepardson did not mind.
Atari wanted us to write a Basic for their new Atari 800 computer. That is
another story....."
links to http://www.laughton.com/paul/abps/oss/oss.html
-uso.
winston...@yahoo.com
That was interesting reading!
KP
of AppleSoft BASIC (including all of the graphics commands, but not
including the PEEK/POKE/CALL commands, as the ADAM used a Z80
processor). Even the OS commands in the SmartBASIC interpreter were
identical, and SmartBASIC also used the bracket "]" prompt.
Like Atari BASIC, SmartBASIC did line-entry syntax checking.
Coleco intentionally designed SmartBASIC to mimic AppleSoft. The
intent was to make it extremely easy for Apple II users to copy their
BASIC programs verbatim.
winston...@yahoo.com
I must admit, I'd hoped the links earlier would shed more light on TI
BASIC.
I only know it was written by Microsoft, using the proposed ANSI-
minimal standard.
It did some limited line-entry syntax checking, and had a pre-scan
that ran between RUN and program start. It pre-allocated space for
variables, checked FOR/NEXT nesting, etc.
In many ways it was similar to other Microsoft BASICs, inasmuch as the
standard was...