[Coco] Sock Master Demos

[Roger Taylor]

At 09:25 PM 12/18/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>Folks,
>
>Anyone used Sockmaster's demos on MESS?  I have had problems running DEMO2,
>HICOLOR, COCOTRACKER, and TWILIGHTTERM -- nearly all the stuff that is 
>supposed
>to be awesome.  DEMO1 and BOINK seem to work fine, though.  I would love to
>know what I am doing wrong.  I'm using MESS 0.77 on WinXP, and I've tried both
>the 6809 and 6309 variants, to no avail.
|Some please explain to me why BASIC comes in 'BASIC binary" and 'BASIC 
ascii'.
|Are not BASIC sources supposed to be .TXT files? Also, when placed onto
|virtual diskettes via IMGTOOL in MESS, often times I am unable to access said
|files (neither ASCII nor binary). I keep getting "FM? ERROR ..." or some
|variants. Have they become corrupt?


David, Sock's demos were definately created for a real CoCo.  I've seen a 
few run okay in M.E.S.S.  Make sure you use DirectX mode and fiddle with 
the sync modes, set the frame skip to 0 since Sock exploits the video sync 
in almost every demo he has made.  M.E.S.S. needs to be able to keep up, so 
I suggest at least a 500mhz PC.

One reason of having an ASCII BASIC format and a tokenized/binary format is 
to allow BASIC programs to be portable between different computers.  BASIC 
is a common language, so it's not uncommon for people to want to attempt to 
run programs on machines the code was not written for/on.

The CoCo and most other computers do not run these programs in their ASCII 
form, but instead use a compression format called tokenizing that enables 
the interpreter to recognize commands very quickly, since they are stored 
as a single byte, or sometimes 2 bytes for functions.

So, a BASIC program is always tokenized while it's inside the CoCo being 
edited or ran.  You can choose to save it out in their format.  When you 
save out a BASIC program, it defaults to the binary save unless you use the 
"FILENAME",A  modifier.
You're probably saving in ASCII so you can move this BASIC program over to 
another computer, or even edit it in any text editor, etc.

Loading and saving in ASCII is much slower and you'll definately know why 
it's not the preferred method.

Speaking of ASCII BASIC programs that will run on the CoCo, but were not 
really made *for* the CoCo...  the Sky and Telescope web site has tons of 
space programs written in portable BASIC that your CoCo will enjoy.

In order for BASIC to know what format a BASIC program is stored in on a 
disk, the filetype and ASCII flag has to be set correctly.  This is done 
automatically by the SAVE command depending on what option you choose to 
save as, but if you're wanting to take a .TXT file or any ASCII listing and 
allow BASIC to LOAD it, you'll need to edit those parameters.  I don't lnow 
any easy way to explain how to do that or where to find a tool.  Robert 
Gault might have one?

If you're doing all this on a PC from M.E.S.S., the imgtool.exe utility is 
great.  Please see imgtool.txt if it still exists for a list of options for 
doing all of this.


----------
Roger Taylor


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/attachments/20031218/37481f39/attachment-0001.html>