#AC Basic /True Basic
7 messages in this thread
In my spare time, I have volunteered to develop some software for sale by my
employer. Involves interface with fairly slow lab equipment and later
reduction & display of data. Language must be BASIC for maintainability by
users; target hardware is MS-DOS compatibles. I know from experience that I
can develop in AmigaBasic and port easily to QuickBasic on the PC as long as I
stay away from Amy's special features.
(Can also work on short segments directly, running QBasic under Transformer!)
BUT…the AmigaBasic editor is SO miserable and execution speed with large
string arrays is SO poor, that, long term, I MUST have something better. I
COULD buy a cheap PC-clone for home use; however, getting a better
editor/compiler for Amy instead would ultimately give me applications which
would run on both Amiga and MS-DOS. My question(s): which is easier,
friendlier, faster, etc AC-Basic or True-Basic? Does either have an editor
approaching TxEd's responsiveness? If I got ACBasic for the Amiga, I would
probably continue to port to QuickBasic for MS-DOS; is this impractical for any
reason? If I got TrueBasic, I would expect to use the same language on both
machines; is TrueBasic truly compatible between Amiga and MS-DOS? What about
serial and parallel port access, graphics, special libraries, use of extended
RAM, etc for either or both? What about bugginess? Many thanks for any advice
on this. Dick Darling
Dick:
I am not very experianced with any Basic but I/O calls on the Amy
should be quite different than I/O calls on an MSDOS machine though if the
program logic works on the Amy then it should work on MSDOS (after the code
changes). The big hangup that I see is the IEEE 488 bus. Where are you going
to obtain that? Sorry that I can't answer any of the questions about the other
two Basic's editors though I agree with you on AmigaBasic's editor (one of the
reasons that I have not tried to familiarize myself with the language)!
73,
bill
Bill The IO work I recognize I will probably have to do directly on the MSDOS
machine, which means "at the office", but I hope to do 90% of the user
interface (menus, plots, etc) at my leisure, at home, on the Amy. And this is
S-l-o-w instrumentation I'm hooking up to so it will be RS232 not IEEE. Boy, I
wish there was an IEEE card for the Amy though. Anyway, thanks for your
comments. I was almost embarrassed to put a Basic question on the Programming
board, and I'm glad to get ANY response.
Dick-
Say, listen guy… If you do come up with some Ami_Parallel to IEEE-488
stuff, would you please let us know? I have some OLD cbm hardware here that I
could use with my Amy (w3like a 10 hard drive, an 8050 dual and some printers.
I am sure that a LOT of instrumentation could also use this bus, but where can
we get a connection going? Disk and printer drivers might be tricky, but not
impossible!
Dick,
I can't find my copy of tha last "Product Roundup" issue of Info magazine,
but in it, they listed an IEEE-488 adapter. It connected via the serial port
and the price was rather high ($400-500, not sure), but it is available.
Regards, Larry.
Larry,
That IEEE interface you mentioned is made by TecTrans, and lists for $479.
The problem with it, though (other than the price!), is that it will not
support Amiga graphics.
Michael
Michael,
Thanks for jumping in with the IEEE-488 adapter info. I did see that
statement about not supporting Amiga graphics, but wondered at the time what
they meant by it. All I ever used an IEEE-488 interface for was sending and
receiving data.
Regards, Larry.