Anybody remember their BASIC?

[tevion5]

So I've been messing with my new Commodore 64 and Apple II, trying to learn a bit of BASIC for fun. I already do C so BASIC is much simpler by comparison. My uncle gave me his C64 with a bunch of peripherals recently including great manuals, documentation and a great BASIC book. I even got a free 1701 from my college they were throwing out!

I have been making some basic programs and saving them to Cassette. However, I tried to follow one tutorial where they ask you to make a ball bounce around the screen and I can't see where I've gone wrong, but I know I have because I get flying text instead of a ball.

Don't suppose anybody here has an eagle eye for BASIC bugs?


Code:




Result:

 

[David Schmidt]

Don't suppose anybody here has an eagle eye for BASIC bugs?

I see the bug... but it's particular to the C64, not an Apple. You typed in all their little hints as to how to get cursor movement characters within quotes, but you didn't actually follow their instructions.

You have to hit the quote character, hit the requested cursor movement key (i.e. see a goofy character appear instead of actually producing cursor movement), then close the quote. It takes some getting used to...

 

[tevion5]

I see the bug... but it's particular to the C64, not an Apple. You typed in all their little hints as to how to get cursor movement characters within quotes, but you didn't actually follow their instructions.

You have to hit the quote character, hit the requested cursor movement character (i.e. see a goofy character appear instead of actually producing cursor movement), then close the quote. It takes some getting used to...

Oh, so you mean inserting the arrow symbol in place of all the CRSR LEFT and such?

So would it be like:

40 PRINT" *(<-)...

or

40 PRINT" *<-...

?

 

[David Schmidt]

Cursor manipulation characters

No good way to represent PETSCII with an ASCII character set. Which is why you have all those typing conventions... you have to learn to parse them in your head not as literals but as commands to do something on the keyboard when in quote mode.

 

[tevion5]

No good way to represent PETSCII with an ASCII character set. Which is why you have all those typing conventions... you have to learn to parse them in your head not as literals but as commands to do something on the keyboard when in quote mode.

That's a great response! Thanks very much. I'll have to get back and try again with this in mind tomorrow.

 

[gkarris]

This thread is like a time warp for me....

10 PRINT "HELLO ";
20 GOTO 10

 

[MacTech68]

I remember the days of typing in pages and pages of a program out of magazines. Inevitably, you'd make an error (or six).

Happy days!

 

[HereBeMonsters]

10 PRINT "Hello, what is your name?"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT A$ "IS GAY"
40 GOTO 30


Good times.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

10 PRINT "Hello, what is your name?"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT A$ "IS GAY"
40 GOTO 30


Good times.

Ah, juvinilism at its worst...

 

[ftaok]

Ah, juvinilism at its worst...

To be fair, he was probably a juvenile when he was doing BASIC programming.

 

[HereBeMonsters]

To be fair, he was probably a juvenile when he was doing BASIC programming.

I was 7 when I first started on a BBC Micro. They replaced them with Windows 95 PCs when I was 13, and I was livid!

 

[Anonymous Freak]

To be fair, he was probably a juvenile when he was doing BASIC programming.

Very true. I managed to avoid that particular strain of juvinilism, but can't say I didn't have my own share of bad habits.

 

[HereBeMonsters]

You sound like a laugh riot.

 

[QuickDraw]

poke 53280,1

 

[MacTech68]

Call-151

 

[ApplemanY]

I remember trying to write an AppleSoft Basic programme to write data to disks.

We lived in Berkshire, England in thoise days and I tried without success to store town names.... the two largest were Reading and Newbury.

Unfortunately when we stored Reading it only saw the first four letters and the drive started to run and had to be halted.

Even worse when we stiored Newbury it wiped the disk and memory!

We sorted it eventually but it was a pain not knowing basicstuff like that and from then on I left programming to the programmers!

ApplemanY

 

[firewood]

Basic on a Mac

I looks like you can still program in Basic on a Mac.

Chipmunk Basic
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
KBasic
http://www.kbasic.org/
NSBasic
https://www.nsbasic.com/
Objective Basic
http://www.objective-basic.com/
Pure Basic
http://www.purebasic.com/introduction_macos.php
Run Basic
http://www.runbasic.com/

There's a bunch for iOS as well.

Basic!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/basic!/id362411238?mt=8
Hand BASIC
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hand-basic-basic-v-flavor/id528987397?mt=8
HotPaw Basic
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hotpaw-basic/id295464266?mt=8
Nano Basic
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nano-basic-programming-language/id846599804?mt=8
Smart BASIC
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smart-basic-basic-programming/id541447413?mt=8
techBASIC
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/techbasic/id470781862?mt=8

Anyone tried any of these?