Back to the old BASIC days

I'm currently having a bit of fun revisiting my younger days

I'm sure many of us remember typing in listings out of magazines, and I recently stumbled across this - not quite sure how?.


Anyway, as I started on 6502 I thought I'd have a play (particularly as you can cut and paste rather than typing).

So I downloaded a 6502 emulator PC-BASIC 2.0.7, and gave it a try - bearing in mind I'm not running on actual 6502 hardware, so I've no 6502 machine code to disassemble, and I've no idea where the peek instructions are actually reading?. But I expected it to at least 'work'.

Anyway, needless to say, it didn't go well, if anyone cares to look at the code it's absolutely littered with glaring errors, and I'm still working on it

How about an emulator? Different than you have.

Inquisitive said:

How about an emulator? Different than you have.

http://www.6502.org/tools/emu/

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I don't think it would help, there are some horrible glaring mistakes in the listing - such as using '+' for multiply

It's now working fairly well - as far as I can tell - it's been a bit of a struggle, it's been decades since I've used an old style BASIC.

Well still playing, as I've no idea what 'peek' does in the BASIC interpreter I'm using, I thought I'd try VICE, running a C64 emulator - unfortunately I can't ctr & paste the code, as the C64 needs it to be in lower case, even though it appears as upper case. So I'm currently retyping it - slowly

Nigel Goodwin said:

as I started on 6502

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I have a 68HC11 with BASIC burned into it. In a homemade Al box. It has not seen power for 35 years.

PEEK gets the byte located at the specified memory address
POKE sets the memory byte at the specified address.

Inquisitive said:

PEEK gets the byte located at the specified memory address
POKE sets the memory byte at the specified address.

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I know what they do on the actual hardware, but I've no idea what they do running on a BASIC interpreter on a PC, as it's not emulating actual hardware. Hence I've downloaded a C64 emulator, Vice, and I'm typing the code in to that to see what happens, presumably (as it's an emulator) you can peek the C64 ROM's.

ronsimpson said:

I have a 68HC11 with BASIC burned into it. In a homemade Al box. It has not seen power for 35 years.

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I've still got my original Tangerine Microtan 65 machine (6502 based), that not seen power for decades either. Last time I tried, LONG!!!!! ago, the lower case chip for the screen display had seemed to have died, so it was upper case only.

I aslo started on 6809 and Z80, but there are decent 6502 emulators out there.. it was used in the original game boy.

I think Apple 1 was as well.

Ian Rogers said:

I aslo started on 6809 and Z80, but there are decent 6502 emulators out there.. it was used in the original game boy.

I think Apple 1 was as well.

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Yes, the 6502 was a VERY popular processor, Apple used it extensively, as did Commodore, the BBC, Acorn, Atari, the KIM-1 was a popular 6502 based board as well (many of the old 6502 books were based on the KIM-1). I suppose really the most famous user was Commodore, starting with the PET, then the C64, then Plus-4.

CDP1802 . started my bug .

I only used HPBasic in the late 70's. Very powerful for communicating between many HP/Tek instruments on HPIB channels. I made my1st SCADA design with that supervising almost 200 I/O channels both analog and digital using an HP smart terminal (HP 9845A) setup like an Excel (before its time) read-only spreadsheet with inverse video cells for out of tolerance or warning states. The computer was the SoS HP9825 which supported DMA I/O's from a limited distance data set to a remote system a mile away.

Truly amazing how techie times have changed .

The CDP1802 was very very similar to the 6502.. We used this originally in one of our systems.
I ported it to Pic.... I still have the disassembler...

Tony Stewart said:

I only used HPBasic in the late 70's. Very powerful for communicating between many HP/Tek instruments on HPIB channels.

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HPBasic was/is used by many companies. During the HP-Agilent-Key Sight shuffle, many of the servers that held the old files were scrapped. People did not understand that test equipment lasts for years and needs the files to work. I remember when they came for all the old manuals in the building. There must have been a semi-load of old repair and user manuals that went to the dump. They went back to the first meter. I wanted to save them, thousands in dump fees.

granddad said:

techie times have changed

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They also "dumped" the engineers (all the workers).

ronsimpson said:

People did not understand that test equipment lasts for years and needs the files to work. I remember when they came for all the old manuals in the building.

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I think some managers have less ability to plan ahead and consider the consequences than a typical two year old.

One of my engineering customers got a new works manager some years back - they decide the workshops needed tidying and effectively ordered all loose items other than tools and customer work scrapped.

They scrapped all the machine parts that happened to be pulled out of machines being repaired or upgraded! It cost the company some tens of thousands of pounds to get most machines working again. That manager did not last long.

I used PEEK and POKE to use and manipulate a large 2 dimensional memory array for 3-D graphics.

rjenkinsgb said:

I think some managers have less ability to plan ahead and consider the consequences than a typical two year old.

One of my engineering customers got a new works manager some years back - they decide the workshops needed tidying and effectively ordered all loose items other than tools and customer work scrapped.

They scrapped all the machine parts that happened to be pulled out of machines being repaired or upgraded! It cost the company some tens of thousands of pounds to get most machines working again. That manager did not last long.

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It makes you wonder how these people get the jobs, when they don't have the slightest idea what the job is, or how to do it?.

There was a guy who came out of the army (I've forgotten his name now?), and got a job in complete charge of service and spares for a major TV manufacturer - in under a year the company ceased trading, not least because service and spares all but vanished. So what happened?, he got another job in charge of service and spares at another major TV manufacturer, same result, went bust in under a year.

You'd think his CV would look really bad, but no, a third major TV manufacturer put him in charge as well, bang went a third one.

Never heard of him again, so companies must have eventually noticed the correlation

Well, all this messing about has rekindled my enthusiasm for 6502's, and with further searching I've found various modern SBC designs, so ordered a couple of different PCB's to play with

Microsoft long ago released the source code for Microsoft BASIC, and a guy called Ben Eater has a series of YouTube videos about making a 6502 system using the WOZMON monitor from the Apple 1, and then adding Microsoft BASIC to it. Rather helpfully, he documents his experience in doing so, and how to configure Microsoft BASIC for different systems (the source code comes with nine original options).

I've received one lot of boards, and while I'm waiting for the rest of the components (and the other boards), I've been looking at a website about my original Microtan 65 - and specifically, looking at the cassette saving/loading system. So I've been playing with a PIC, and written code to output a compatible file, next I'm going to write code to read such a file - for now I'm just going to use wires PIC to PIC, no point in actually going to a tape, and apparently the modern technique is to use Audacity on a PC anyway

Do I need a 6502 SBC (or two)? - NO.

Am I going to do anything useful with them? - NO.

Am I going to build them? - YES.

Considering a mid-priced PIC can absolutely wipe the floor with a 6502, and requires no extra parts other than the PIC, it's fairly pointless - but it will be fun to do - and it's a 70th Birthday present to myself, today

LOL... I have just ordered an ESP32 lilygo... £7.86 Why because someone has ported the Spectrum 48 / 128k successfully.. I cannot even start to make it for 10 times that.
Nostalgia is gonna kill me off...