Old School BASIC Blog

OK, so I've been putting more work into getting emulators installed on my computer again, and I decided to take a quick little dip into OS-9 for the Tandy Color Computer 3. Or to be more precise, NitrOS-9 . There are some pre-made VHD files out there, but those are years old, and the installation files from Robert Gault are even older. (UPDATE: There are pre-built images with lots of extra stuff included available from NitrOS-9 Ease of Use .) So, I played around with the NitrOS-9 build files, and compiled some installation disks based on the latest sources. I've put a video guide on how to set up your own VHD up on my YouTube page available  here . The actual installation disks, with written instructions and a source code patch are up on my Dropbox  here .

As the title says, I'm trying to get productive again. First, I still can't find where I wrote down what I needed to work on next for BASIC Wrangler. Secondly, I managed to delete all my emulator installs. So, I'm working on getting them up and running again. The first fruit of my labor is an updated build of Epple II, available here. I'm also thinking of making a few set-up videos for some of the emulators, as some of them (especially the ones that require OS installs) can be a bit of a pain to get working properly.

 It's been a long time since I last updated this. I got side-tracked with other stuff, and at this point, have completely forgotten where I last left off. Luckily, I wrote down what I was going to do next. Unluckily, I lost the piece of paper it was written on. Hopefully, I'll find it sooner rather than later, and can get back to working on this project.

I've just released a new version of BASIC Wrangler here. I added tokenizer rules for Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Coleco ADAM, MSX, and Oric BASIC, and updated the renumbering routine with a tokenizer. The big news is that labels no longer have to start with an underscore! I also improved the Sinclair BASIC laziness features with automatic LET and GOTO after THEN insertion, so you don't need to worry about your programs failing because you forgot to add them. Conversely, it no longer outputs LET or GOTO after THEN for other BASIC dialects in order to save space. For the next version, I'm planning on adding support for long variable names, with automatic renaming down to a name that the BASIC dialect can use.

I've just released a new version of BASIC Wrangler here. This version was focused on making it available through pip from PyPI. If you have Python installed on your system, you can install it by typing pip install basic-wrangler . None of the external functionality should have changed. I've also changed the Windows installer to use a 32-bit version of Python, as 64-bit was kinda overkill.

I've just released a new version of BASIC Wrangler here. It took longer than I thought to get a stand-alone Windows version working with pyinstaller, but I managed to do it somehow. This version adds a few new conversion targets, and revamps the convert command's interface to be more like the renumber command. It'll also handle the whole annoying Commodore uppercase/lowercase thing correctly.

I've finished the next version of BASIC Wrangler. It now has support for converting from numbered BASIC listings without needing an external program. It should be able to handle most programs, but there's probably still going to be a few glitches if it encounters keywords that it doesn't know about. I'm going to add keywords for more BASIC dialects before the next release. You can grab a zip file of it here.