Short: Patch Metacomco's ABasiC to work on OS 2.0+ Author: Mark Knibbs Uploader: mark_k totalise co uk Type: dev/basic Version: 0.1 Architecture: m68k-amigaos This .readme file is a shortened version of Readme.txt in the archive. See also the collection of ABasiC programs in dev/basic/ABasiC_progs.lha on Aminet. ABasiC patch for Kickstart 2.0 (V36) and later ============================================== Patch release 0.1, 2003-05-05. This document and additional code in the patched ABasiC executable copyright © 2002-2003 by Mark Knibbs. Please read the "HELP WANTED!" section below, and send comments or suggestions to me at mark_k@totalise.co.uk Version history --------------- 2003-05-05 0.1 First public release. This can be considered preliminary; please report any problems! Introduction ------------ Back in 1985, the first Amiga 1000 computers came with the ABasiC programming language by Metacomco. Unfortunately ABasiC does not work under Kickstart 2.0 (V36) and later; this patch fixes the problem. Later, with version 1.1 of the Amiga OS, ABasiC was replaced by Microsoft's AmigaBASIC. ABasiC and AmigaBASIC are very different. ABasiC is a more "traditional" environment than AmigaBASIC, and seems faster and less buggy. Apart from historical interest, David Addison wrote some excellent games in ABasiC which are available on early Fred Fish disks. I have uploaded an archive containing the Addison games (and various other programs) to Aminet. Now you can take a virtual trip back to 1986 and play his versions of Klondike, Othello and others! They are surprisingly good, considering they are written in BASIC and run on a 256K machine. Where to get ABasiC ------------------- If you don't have ABasiC but would like to try it, it can be obtained from several places: - On the 17-Bit Continuation CD-ROM published by Almathera (17-Bit disk 71) - From Rainer Benda's web page at http://home.t-online.de/home/r.benda/software.html - In various "ADF" disk images on web sites; use a search engine such as Google to search for "David Addison" Amiga. For example, one page that returns is http://amiga.emucamp.com/monopoly.htm HELP WANTED! ------------ Is there a way to tell console.device to scroll all bitplanes, to fix the scrolling problem mentioned above? Can I simply call SetWriteMask() for the window's RastPort? ABasiC runs much faster on modern accelerated Amigas. Games which use timing which depends on the CPU speed will thus play too quickly. I have not tested the patched version of ABasiC extensively. If you are able to do so, please let me know of any problems. Jim Cooper, formerly at jamie@sas.com, apparently developed a similar patch for ABasiC a few years ago but never released it. Does anyone know his current email address?