RetroRetrospective

RetroRetrospective – Fun today with yesterday’s gear……..
Posts Tagged ‘Programming’

  Yes, you read that correctly – AppleWin for the Mac.  Well, not quite.  It is the same current release of AppleWin for Windows users, what I’ve done is use WineBottler to package up the download into a self contained app that uses Wine to provide the Windows API support. If you don’t want to compile Wine yourself, there are pre-compiled Wine installers on the WineBottler download page. So, why would I want to do this on my MacPro? That’s a very good question.  Most of the time I use Virtual ][ to emulate an Apple][, but when rebuilding my development environment to the MacPro I could find my license key, and as I was doing clean installs of my software that became a bit of a problem, so I’ve emailed and asked if it would be possible to retrieve my license keys (fingers crossed that comes through), but back to this story.

Thought I’d get a jump on the rewriting of S-Basic in S-Basic by dumping the S-Basic Applesoft code to a text file, then reformatting it as S-Basic, then running it through S-Basic5.3 on my disk image. Great idea, but . . . . . The code is just too unstructured.  Too many unexpected terminations within a routine using a GOTO that drops you part way into another routine.  Arrrrrrrrgh! I love structure, indenting, flow control, so looks like I’ve got to do it myself then. So back to my original plan of writing from scratch using the Applesoft listing as a guide only.

August 23rd, 2013

The AppleII Monitor Peeled

4 Comments, Apple2, Manuals, PDFs, by Michael.

You never quite know what you will find when you go browsing on eBay.  A couple of weeks ago I came across “The Apple II Monitor Peeled” and the old style presentation of it intrigued me, so I put a bid on it, and won it for pretty much the hand written price in the corner of the front cover.  Its ye olde charm, and printed on 3-hole paper with a two staples binding, it was too much to resist and just had to add it to my bookshelf. A typewriter composed book written in 1979 (2nd printing) by William E. Dougherty, and perhaps his forward to the book would be the best description.  

There is a new podcast coming from the Retrobits family by Earl Evans for all us  ‘ancient’ programmers.  Called “?NEXT WITHOUT FOR” it aims to discuss retro programming languages and systems, as well as new tools for current systems for creating programs to run on the old iron. This got me thinking and remembering, that back in the 80’s and 90’s I used a mainframe document generation system called DCF (Document Composition Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup)) and as well as a GML (Generalised Markup Language) extension it had quite a powerful scripting language itself. One inadequacy that I encountered early on using DCF, was that there was very little loop control/processing available, so I created my own FOR/NEXT command, and to celebrate Earl’s new  “?NEXT WITHOUT FOR” podcast, I’ve decided to post the code for my FOR and NEXT commands.

I was tidying up my desk and found my copy of “Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer” by Tim Hartnell, I’d recently purchased off AbeBooks, and the little voice in the back of my head said, “This is it.  This is the Macrosoft project you’ve been looking for.”

October 26th, 2012

My First Macrosoft Program

8 Comments, Apple2, Programming, by Michael.

The time had come. Time to use the Macrosoft programming language for my MindCraft Assembler. Time to realise I’d forgotten more about ProDOS than I’d thought! Tried booting the Macrosoft disk image on my Virtual][ emulator, only to find that it is not a bootable disk. What’s going on here? Tried the Assembler disk, and that booted up fine. Surely I couldn’t have been supplied a faulty disk image. Surely not? Desperate times call for desperate means . Yes, time to read the manual. (Technical types are permitted to cringe)

October 2nd, 2012

Programming my Apple //c

10 Comments, Apple2, Programming, by Michael.

I’ve been wanting to get back into programming on my Apple //c for quite a while now, but didn’t want to go back to AppleSoft.  Back in the 80s I was an avid reader of the Nibble Magazine, and remember a series of advertisements for an assembler macro extension programming language.