The porting of Palo-Alto Tiny Basic to RV32I has begun! My target is bare RV32I, no M extension, and no misaligned memory access either.
At this point, numbered lines can be entered, deleted and updated;
LIST and NEW are working. STOP supposedly works as well but is pointless as RUN is not implemented yet.
Now I want to port Palo-Alto Tiny Basic to Risc-V.
In assembly on bare-metal (well, qemu for now) RV32I, with input/output through the emulated UART...
👀
now this is some arcane magicks...
Tiny BASIC for the RCA 1802!
https://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/mship_tbasic.html
http://www.cosmacelf.com/software/tbsourcep.txt
may have some joy structuring the eternal meandering for a 2K Tiny BASIC around this processor's implementation.
with 16 general purpose registers, the 1802 seems to better resemble the AVR microcontroller architecture than other examples we have dug up.
so far we know of:
6502, 8080, Z80, x86, and now the RCA 1802 assembly implementations of Tiny BASIC.
#tinybasic #basic #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #permacomputing
Let's stick a ~20kB TTS dictionary in this thing.
This required adding two TBIL opcodes (TALK, followed by a sequence of phonemes; and JX, 16-bit jump)
Amand Tihon
People's Permacomputer Project
Stylus1 REM SIMULATED 6800 + TINYBASIC + VOTRAX SC-01A + TTS DICTIONARY
10 SAYE "HELLO"
15 SAY "K UH1 M P Y1 IU U T E R"
20 SAYE "I LIKE CHEESE. IT IS GREAT."
30 SAYE "SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW"
999 END
Thinking about string arrays in BASIC in connection with this display text editor.
Ordinarily, a string array would be defined as, e.g. L$(25).
This would take the place of the text buffer of the editor. Every line n is represented by L$(n).
A FOR loop could be used to print the buffer.
There should be variables to track the cursor, and it would point within a substring of L$(n).
This looks a lot like EDIT.BAS. I think one improvement could be a kind of 'word editor', where the cursor over some string bounded by spaces could select that string and allow editing of it without having to reproduce the whole line.
work has been proceeding on an original text editor written in Tiny BASIC.
the idea is to produce a type in text editor, printed on paper.
--
one small wrinkle--GET is non-blocking on the microcontroller setup, but not within the POSIX development environment version.
here is a small code snippet:
--
https://paste.sr.ht/~vidak/54699878e10b891569c7e4b2c3ad953a811f9167
The famous TinyBASIC interpreter is actually a nested interpreter: the bulk of the logic is implemented in a bytecode called TBIL.
There's a TBIL assembler implemented in TinyBASIC, but I wanted a modern one. So, I added a dialect to the fine assembler often called asl.
It doesn't quite match the syntax of what Tom Pittman's assembler took, and I haven't checked the output for correctness, but I did reach the milestone of getting a complete compiler run with no errors.
My code is on codeberg as is the listing file of my built version of the TinyBASIC interpreter
https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Productivity%20%26%20Education/Visicalc
Visicalc... in BASIC??
there is also _another_ text editor here:
The Oasis BBS
J. Alan Henning