Aura/MoomWhat? They programmed it by doing what???
Donald HobernWhat did they implement in these 1760 bytes? It reads like they implemented the _interpreter_ in that. Or was this a window into which they loaded the BASIC program they wanted to run?
The description seems incomplete.
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru@dhobern @MOOMANiBE My understanding is that it was the BASIC program, while the interpreter was in the ROM cartridge. Same as the TI 99/4A which also has the interpreter in ROM and stores the BASIC program in video RAM, but can use free bytes in VRAM and doesn't need to interleave bits.
That makes sense. And were the BASIC keywords themselves just 1 byte each (part of the character set)?
@dhobern @MOOMANiBE (Edit: this is about the TI) I found a page that says that it was tokenized. Now, I don't know if it was typed as tokens directly (like on the original ZX Spectrum) or tokenized from text (like on the Amstrad CPC).
Other info finds interesting memory structures, with more indirection than many BASIC interpreters would have (e.g. line numbers are stored separately from tokenized code, so that GOTO is probably much faster).
PheebeUK@jbqueru @dhobern @MOOMANiBE based on the wiki page saying you have to use key combinations to enter the program via the calculator keypad, it sounds like it was entered tokenised like the ZX Spectrum.
@Pheebe @dhobern @MOOMANiBE oh, slight misunderstanding, I should have clarified: what I was saying about BASIC being tokenized was about TI BASIC, not Astrocade, sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough.
(I only have minimal experience about the Astrocade, mostly about its graphics accelerator derived from that in the arcade Space Invaders).