TheAncientOne Posted July 29, 2009 Report Share Posted July 29, 2009 I was away this weekend, and missed the 'Console Combat' event in Manchester, (local to me, too). One guy was showing a BBC Master with a SID hooked up to the 1MHz bus, so he could get seme real chiptune goodness. I wish this had been around 'back in the day', the BBC's operating system and structured BASIC, (and other language options), made it by far the best programmers machine, but the little Texas soundchip was just sad. There was the Music 500/5000 option but that cost a fortune, (I know, I bought one - still got it for that matter). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nebula Posted July 29, 2009 Report Share Posted July 29, 2009 Did you ever try "Waterloo BASIC" for the C64? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheAncientOne Posted July 29, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 29, 2009 Did you ever try "Waterloo BASIC" for the C64?No, but if it was by the same team that later did Watcom 'C', it must have been pretty good. It seems to have been done for a few machines from the Vic 20 to the IBM 370, which is quite a range! I don't think it was available outside Canada though - I never saw it in the UK. The original Commodore BASIC was like most of the other BASICs of the time:- pretty horrible, not helped by their operating system which seemed to require 'sys' calls to do anything interesting. C64 was probably the best gaming machine of that generation - all that RAM, and the SID on top of that. THe only game I really played on the BBC was 'Elite', which showed how far the machine could be pushed. BBC BASIC was quite on the leading edge at the time, developed by people who'd learned on things like BCPL, it had really good control structures, built in multi-pass assembler, procedures and functions, multi-dimensional arrays, and was very fast. Pretty good graphics commands too, though that could get complicated. I went to a demo of the then 'New' ARM based Archimedes, versus the 'New' Compaq 20MHz 386: the Archimedes was way faster running BBC BASIC (interpreted), against the same program written in MS Basic on the Compaq. The Compaq rep. said that the 20MHz machine was only a stop gap, and they would soon have a 33MHz machine, which would be faster. The man from Acorn started laughing, then explained that the Archimedes' processor was running at 8MHz. Acorn had a bit of a posthumous last laugh: There have been far more ARM chips made than Pentiums, (the last big number they passed was 10 billion). Soon appearing in a MIDIbox sequencer near you.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madox Posted July 29, 2009 Report Share Posted July 29, 2009 ...Acorn had a bit of a posthumous last laugh...Funny how things go in technology, isn't it.At my work, we have a number of unused Cerfboard embedded modules, with Intel XScale processors. My next project will be trying to put these to good use. I'm rather looking forward to it, and hoping to learn something about developing for ARM processors. I think ARM processors/cores offer great value for money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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