[Coco] Re: Coco Digest, Vol 12, Issue 25

[Andrew]

> I was just thinking about those "fills" Anybody around remember how to 
> do that?
> Right now, I'm (slowly) working in 2 games.
> What I love about CoCo's Basic is that I can kind of easily export the 
> program to Q-BASIC and even to VBASIC.
> Anybody knows a compatible BASIC that will run on LINUX? The ones I 
> found are way too modern for me :-)
> 
> Diego

One of the best "old time" BASIC interpreters I have found for Linux has 
been a little one called BLASSIC:

http://www.arrakis.es/~ninsesabe/blassic/index.html

This is a great piece of work, with full source code in C (IIRC - and 
the code is actually very readable!), GPL license, etc. On the site, the 
"contributed reference guide" was created by me, because I loved this 
interpreter so much.

I had hoped that by contributing it, the author or someone else would 
have kept updating it (I documented the heck out of every command as 
best as I could, with help from the author and reviewing the source code).

It looks like it has been changed/updated quite a bit since I last 
played with it. It worked well enough for me to port an old BASIC 
program (text adventure) from a kids book I have (something they would 
never write today - "BASIC Fun with Adventure Games" by Susan Drake 
Lipscomb and Margaret Ann Zuanich, published by Avon Books - likely sold 
via K-6 school book sale flyer back in the 1980's).

The nice thing is that it can do pretty good and fast graphics inside a 
window under X and detect the mouse - but it doesn't go beyond that, it 
stays simple. However, looking at the code it looked like it would be 
fairly easy to expand upon it (like I said, the code is VERY easy to read).

Mmaybe BLASSIC could be the start of Linux-based CoCo box? Use Linux as 
the underlying operating system - bare bones - boot into an "interpreter 
interface", like Python has, but in a fakie X-mode console - and when 
graphics are displayed, switch to a full-screen X window... I bet a boot 
CD could be fairly easily built. I know there was some recent discussion 
over what a new "CoCo" would look like, hardware, special stuff, etc - 
but the world has moved on. I don't want to start a flamewar, but I 
don't think the future of the CoCo is in hardware, but in software. I am 
not talking emulation here (unless we can somehow get all of the ROMs 
for emulators to be released to the community), but something new 
running in software. This could be the "base" of a new CoCo (with extra 
CoCo-like BASIC commands). Done right, it could be made very portable 
(via gcc) to a TON of hardware, both now and in the future...

Andrew