Why is the homebrew scene on the Amiga not as impressive...

[Mrs Beanbag]

wow... it's like actual, honest-to-goodness Sinclair Spectrum BASIC!

but this only leaves me more confused than before

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

wow... it's like actual, honest-to-goodness Sinclair Spectrum BASIC!

It is, yes!

but this only leaves me more confused than before

Don't ask me! I just work there

D.

[Daedalus]

Impressive!

[copse]

Honestly, I think basic is as good as any language and better than most, with a decent IDE and syntax highlighting. It's good you weren't forced to jump on what's hot for this project, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

I'm looking forward to your AmigaBasic IDE which you'll likely get onto ;-) once you're done with this project.. :-D

[Hungry Horace]

All this stuff about "basic is for beginners" and "higher level concepts" makes me laugh.

I make a very good living out of a job where i spend 50% of my time in basic. visualBasic (VBA and VBScript) to be precise., making bits and pieces that make the other 50% of my job (and my peers) less onerous.

No one is checking my code for "better programming Methods" because the clients are only interested in the UI and what the programs do to aid productivity.

[Lonewolf10]

Dunny,

Spectrum BASIC - nice choice! I started programming with Spectrum BASIC around 25 years ago


Hungry Horace,

I agree VBA is very useful. We have in-house software at work that is used daily that was written in VBA with associated data stored in an access database.
Personally I love using VBA to write useful scripts for speading up my work and making my life easier.


Mrs Beanbag,

Yes, line numbers were a PITA! I believe I read it in the Spectrum 128K manual to use line numbers in increments of 10... but on several occasions that wasn't enough so I had to painstakingly renumber a whole bunch of lines...

[spud]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Yes, a BASIC orientated IDE to be specific - this one:



Which will be rolled out across the UK over the coming months.

D.

Dunny, Why BASin and not SpecBAS?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by spud

Dunny, Why BASin and not SpecBAS?

Well... I'm not ruling out SpecBAS at the moment, but the company that wants this wants BASin. Part of the reasoning behind this is that anything saved by the new BASin (which incidentally doesn't really look like that piccy any more!) must be able to run on a real Spectrum with the minimum of fuss...

But maybe SpecBAS will come along on real Speccies in the future - time will tell.

D.

[beezle]

@Dunny

Is SpecBas your handiwork?
Shame its written in pascal, I was going to port it to Amiga, but the only pascal compilers I'm aware of for amiga-oid systems are the AROS/mos versions of FPC.

Instead my nostalgia lead me to port cbmbasic to os3.x (already did AROS port).
Kinda pointless, but I have too much free time currently

[Dunny]

Yeah, SpecBAS is mine. It was originally a prototype intended to just get some practice in writing an interpreter, but it got kinda out of hand...

I did install AROS on an old dual-core laptop with the intention of porting SpecBAS but AROS is so amazingly slow (we're talking a frame every four seconds) that I gave up on it.

I'm not sure that an Amiga would be able to handle SpecBAS - it would need a minimum of an AGA machine, and from my experience of porting it to ARMs, it needs at least a 400MHz CPU to be any real fun. Mind you, you could drop the requirements down to an 030 if you only run in 32 colours/320x256 resolution I suspect... And it loves to use a shitload of RAM too

Might rewrite it in the future but as it stands it's just too bloody big - it's got everything I could possibly think of in it, with the exception of 3D (which is on the way).

D.

[beezle]

Your AROS experience is unusual.
Never encountered that, and I've been using it daily for about 10 years.
Problem must lay elsewhere. Its definitely not AROS itself.
If I can run dark places (massively enhanced quake port requiring pixel shaders and gl2+) at 1920x1200x32bit at over 400fps I suspect it could handle SpecBas

As for os3.x, along with my Amiga I also have an Amithlon box which I use fairly often. Running on a 4ghz c2d it gives me raw 68k speed somewhere around the ballpark of a 2ghz g4 running native code.
As such I tend to use it for things not really suited to a real Amiga, but it is fun using software that's normally not an option on OS3.x.

[Dunny]

AROS is slow in everything

Takes about an hour to boot to the desktop. I suspect I have one of those laptops that can't run AROS.

D.

[Daedalus]

Might be worth setting up a VirtualBox drive for AROS instead, should boot in a couple of seconds.

Interesting idea though, I did toy with the idea a while ago of writing some sort of Atari BASIC emulator/interpreter with extensions enabling the use of Amiga-specific features, but it doesn't really seem to make much sense when you compare it to a full-on emulator or AmiBlitz. I can imagine that your SpecBAS must have a huge amount more to it than just an emulator to require such specs...

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

I can imagine that your SpecBAS must have a huge amount more to it than just an emulator to require such specs...

SpecBAS has a few features, yes -

Graphics - 8 or 32bit colours, with support for rotation/scaling/stretching while blitting, changing the scale of any surface which makes math plots simpler, colour cycling, textured/plain fills, various primitives and full turtle graphics support. Amongst other things

Sprites - can be any size, any (reasonable) number of them, can be set to move and rotate/scale over time and run independent of the interpreter.

Windows - again any size, 256 colours or 32bit with alpha transparencies or palette index transparency, any window or graphic bank can be a drawing surface.

Sound - plays pretty much any music or sample format you want (s3m/mod/xm/it/wav/mp3/ogg et al) and sounds can be created on the fly and modified while playing - the BEEP command has full ADSR/noise control too.

Memory banks like AMOS, can be loaded/saved/manipulated with POKE/PEEK (the screen itself is a bank, so you can POKE directly to screen memory if you like)

Extensive math and bases support, with matrix manipulation as part of the array handling, full associative and dynamic arrays and various ways to manipulate them. Strings are similarly well served and I even wrote a regex handler for searching strings and arrays of strings.

Fonts can be mono or colour, with UDG support.

Finally there's a full command line for shell work - stuff like CD, DIR etc.

It's pretty fun to use - I've a few demos up on my youtube page:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ZXSpin/videos

Getting it to run on an Amiga would be a challenge

D.

[saimon69]

Hey Dunny, are you talking about native x86 AROS or the 68k version? I would advise to report in aors-exec so they could help you, else the Virtual Box route seems good to me

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Hey Dunny, are you talking about native x86 AROS or the 68k version? I would advise to report in aors-exec so they could help you, else the Virtual Box route seems good to me

Native x86. I've posted and they have replied but I've been too busy to get back to it lately.

D.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

generally, BASIC syntax uses far more keywords than it really needs (essentially arbitrary symbols divorced from their everyday meanings), that is just more things to learn for no reason, and it's completely ad hoc and inconsistent.

If you want ad-hoc use of arbitrary symbols, look no further than C*.

* Oh, tell me again, is that a pointer declaration, a multiplication symbol or a pointer dereferenced?

[ReadOnlyCat]

What was this thread about already?
I can't recall if it was about genetically engineered mushrooms or the Amiga homebrew scene anymore.

Seriously though, I wonder if the existence of the RKMs has not had a negative effect on the Amiga scene. It certainly allowed young tinkerers and enthusiasts to dig into the entrails of the beast but it also kept non-experts coders adults at bay: if you do not know what programming is about and how memory mapped hardware works then these piles of expert knowledge are pretty intimidating.

Compare with the Amstrad scene where you have this very nice wiki with lots of code samples, or even what exists for the Oric with the Oric SDK from debug@DefenceForce.

A complete off-the-shelf turn-key solution for Amiga development did not exist until a few months ago when Hannibal released his (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625) so it is no wonder that many attempts start with AMOS and BlitzBasic and do not go much further. (I am not saying these are useless, far from it, just a far cry from what is needed.).
Also his toolchain is Windows only for now so that also limits the pool of candidate users (I'm working on a similar one for OS X).

Remember the saying: "be the change you want to see in the world".
Unless we all start contributing something (like Hannibal did) things are not going to change. Recruiting non-Amiga natives is also crucial for long term survival but that can only happen if the tools match what they know on modern systems. Newcomers are fine with constraints on what you can do on the _target_ machine, but they will not accept constraints on the tools.

The problem of the Amiga community is too many consumers, not enough software producers. . There are very good producers, StingRay, Galhahad, Phx, etc. but we need more and new tools.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by idrougge

If you want ad-hoc use of arbitrary symbols, look no further than C*.

* Oh, tell me again, is that a pointer declaration, a multiplication symbol or a pointer dereferenced?

ok, this isn't a Language vs Language, i could write a short book called "What's Wrong With C", but BASIC is being touted as a simple language that's easy to learn and it really isn't imho

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

BASIC is being touted as a simple language that's easy to learn and it really isn't imho

I'm so glad you're not my boss

D.