[Coco] Coco BASIC files

[Rogelio Perea]

<arikboke at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Gene,
>
> Tried LOADing and LOADMing with a ",A" at the end, but it's a no go.  The files
> may actually be corrupt, or as someone else said, the flags have not been set
> correctly, and this may be an issue with my current emulator.  Thanks!

As it has been pointed out by other in this list, the A option only applies to the CSAVE or SAVE command and then only for Basic programs not data files.

When saving a Basic program to tape with the A option (CSAVE"DOOM",A) it would direct the computer to make a cassette file with ascii encoding rather than a compressed Basic (tokenized - when all the Basic keywords are stored with their single byte representation rather than one by one character fashion); also, when CSAVEing with the A option the computer writes a "gapped" file to tape, if you have the option at looking at the recording indicator of the tape machine you would see that the signal stops and goes as the tape rolls until the whole file is stored. Disk files are ahndled ina totally different fashion, but in the end if you SAVE with the A option the disk system will write an ASCII encoded file, which in turn can be opened up using any CoCo disk word processing system or file browser. Basic programs can be written using a disk based word processor and the read back into the CoCo with a LOAD command... but this is another story :-)

Upon loading a file (from tape by CLOAD or disk by LOAD) the computer knows what to do with it... to certain extent: you can't load an ASCII file representing a Basic progarm if the file violates rules like all lines must be numbered, allowed line length (until the carriage return), etc. If you try anything sneaky the computer will return with an error.

The lack of the option to CSAVE to tape a Basic program with the A option was - in my humble opinion - a big oversight in the MC-10 Micro Color Computer. If its Basic had provided so, then Basic programs written in the CoCo would have been more conveniently ported over to the MC-10...


-=[ Rogelio ]=-
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