Forwarded from Richard Russell's post from from The Distillery: (Apologies if I've put this in the wrong section, I had it running on the Z80 Second Processor)
Since, for various reasons, I have had to abandon 'BBC BASIC for Windows' and 'BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0' (and, believe me, it is extremely disconcerting not to be able to develop or support one's own software products) I have been trying to keep my brain exercised by extending 'BBC BASIC (Z80)' to something close to the version 5 specification!
This might seem an odd choice of project, but I reasoned that working on code I wrote more than 40 years ago might be less compromised by my extremely poor short-term memory and cognitive decline, compared with code which I have written more recently. That was indeed my experience, I found I could remember the Z80 instruction set quite easily.
I have made a self-contained package for testing this new version of BBC BASIC (Z80), in Windows, available for download from here. If you'd rather not use Windows you can extract the BBCBASIC.COM file from the archive and run it either on a genuine Z80 CP/M system or in a CP/M emulator on your preferred platform. The file WHATSNEW.TXT in subdirectory B/0/ lists the new features.
I would greatly appreciate this new version being tested as thoroughly as possible; please report any bugs discovered or crashes experienced at The Distillery (or send them to me by private email if you prefer). It would also be helpful if you could forward this announcement to anywhere that you think some interest in an updated BBC BASIC (Z80) might be found.
Since, for various reasons, I have had to abandon 'BBC BASIC for Windows' and 'BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0' (and, believe me, it is extremely disconcerting not to be able to develop or support one's own software products) I have been trying to keep my brain exercised by extending 'BBC BASIC (Z80)' to something close to the version 5 specification!
This might seem an odd choice of project, but I reasoned that working on code I wrote more than 40 years ago might be less compromised by my extremely poor short-term memory and cognitive decline, compared with code which I have written more recently. That was indeed my experience, I found I could remember the Z80 instruction set quite easily.
I have made a self-contained package for testing this new version of BBC BASIC (Z80), in Windows, available for download from here. If you'd rather not use Windows you can extract the BBCBASIC.COM file from the archive and run it either on a genuine Z80 CP/M system or in a CP/M emulator on your preferred platform. The file WHATSNEW.TXT in subdirectory B/0/ lists the new features.
I would greatly appreciate this new version being tested as thoroughly as possible; please report any bugs discovered or crashes experienced at The Distillery (or send them to me by private email if you prefer). It would also be helpful if you could forward this announcement to anywhere that you think some interest in an updated BBC BASIC (Z80) might be found.
Statistics: Posted by Soruk — Fri May 24, 2024 2:00 am
