I am new here.

In this forum you can write about anything that does not fit in other forums.
This includes generic Oric talkings and things that are totaly unrelated but want to share with people here :)
Chris
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I am new here.

Post by Chris »

My name (as well as user name here) is Chris. If any of you are familiar with the AtariAge forums, my username there is atari2600land. Anyway, I'd like to learn BASIC programming for the Oric after seeing all the games on the mini-game compos. Are there any special programs I need to write codes, or is Notepad OK? I am familiar with Batari BASIC, so learning normal BASIC shouldn't be too much of a stretch for me.
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Dbug
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Post by Dbug »

This question would probably be more appropriate in the "BASIC programming" section of the forum, but I can still answer here :)

Basically (haha), you have two choices:
- program directly in BASIC on the Oric
- program on another machine, and convert the "source code" to the TAPE format that the Oric can load.

I would personally advise the second situation, because the text editor of the Oric BASIC is not very user friendly, and nowadays by using an emulator and a small text editor you can have a very comfortable setup.

Here are some resources for you:
- A list of all Oric BASIC keyword: http://www.defence-force.org/computing/ ... /index.htm
- Some downloadable Oric manuals: http://www.defence-force.org/computing/ ... /index.htm (the Atmos one is in french, the Oric 1 is in English)
- You can find Bas2Txt and Txt2Bas on either Fabrice Frances page ( http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html ) or directly usable in the OSDK with preconfigurated sample code ( http://osdk.defence-force.org )
- You can learn a lot by looking at the source code of small games like the ones in the Type In library ( http://freespace.virgin.net/james.groom/oric/typein.htm )

Don't hesitate to post questions, I got a lot of overtime these last month, so I'm not as fast as answering as I used to be, but I'm trying.

And thanks for reporting any bug or weirdness, or problems when experimenting.
Chris
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Post by Chris »

What do txt2bas and bas2txt do? I notice when I use Notepad (I have Windows, by the way), it saves the files in txt mode, so would it take the file and then convert it into a bas file? How would I make a .bas file into a playable .tap file on my Oric emulator (Euphoric)? Remember, I am very new with Oric machines/emulators, so you may have to explain more in detail to me. I've downloaded OSDK, but I can't make it work yet because I don't have an autoexec.bat file.
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Post by Pengwin »

Welcome to the forum Chris. I'm the same Pengwin in AA, so it's good to see you here.
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Dbug
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Post by Dbug »

Chris wrote:What do txt2bas and bas2txt do? I notice when I use Notepad (I have Windows, by the way), it saves the files in txt mode, so would it take the file and then convert it into a bas file? How would I make a .bas file into a playable .tap file on my Oric emulator (Euphoric)? Remember, I am very new with Oric machines/emulators, so you may have to explain more in detail to me.
Actually they should have been called "Txt2Tap_BASIC_CONVERTER", because lot's of people don't realise that euphoric actually can load any file as a "tape", it's just that .TAP is the default file extension :)

So you can type a BASIC program as "hello_world.txt"!

--------
10 CLS
20 PRINT"HELLO WORLD!"
30 END
--------

Then you just call "Txt2Bas hello_world.txt hello.tap" (or hello.bas), and then you just lost the program either by calling Euphoric with the name as a parameter "EUPHORIC HELLO.TAP", or by doing

CLOAD"HELLO"

or

CLOAD"HELLO.TAP"

or

CLOAD"HELLO.BAS"

I assume that the file is stored in the TAPES folder of Euphoric, else it will not find it.

Chris wrote:I've downloaded OSDK, but I can't make it work yet because I don't have an autoexec.bat file.
Which operating system do you use ? I guess I should reformulate the way it's written, but if you read the note after in the installation page, it says also that in Windows 2000/XP/later you can set the environment variable in some other way.
Chris
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Post by Chris »

Dbug wrote: Which operating system do you use ? I guess I should reformulate the way it's written, but if you read the note after in the installation page, it says also that in Windows 2000/XP/later you can set the environment variable in some other way.
I have Windows XP, but I tried to set the environment variable the way it explained but I couldn't find what I needed to change.
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