Monday, March 17, 2014

Running Microsoft Basic 5 on CP/M

I recently posted a series of YouTube videos on the Briel Altair 800 kit, the most recent instalment being The Briel Altair 8800 Kit, Part 5: Advanced Topics  which I posted yesterday.

To supplement what I demonstrated there, I'm going to post more details and the files I used, to make it easier for others who want to try out the relevant software.

First, Microsoft BASIC.

Version 5.21 of Microsoft BASIC-80 dated 28-Jul-81 is included on the Briel Altair CD in the CP/M 3 disk image (CPM302GN.DSK) as the file MBASIC.COM. It will also run on CP/M version 2.2.

The Microsoft BASIC-80 ver 5.0 Reference Manual can be found on the Internet here.

Many of the programs from the David Ahl Creative Computing books on computer games can be found on the Briel Altair CD in the directory BASIC Software/creative computing.

Here is the source listing for the memory dump program I demonstrated. I wrote it quickly to demonstrate some of the BASIC-80 features like displaying numbers in hexadecimal.

100 REM Dump memory in hex and ASCII.
110 A = &H100 : REM Start address
120 A$ = "000" + HEX$(A)
130 A$ = RIGHT$(A$,4) 
140 PRINT A$;": ";
150 FOR I = 0 TO 15
160 S$ = "0" +HEX$(PEEK(A+I))
170 S$ = RIGHT$(S$,2)
180 PRINT S$;" ";
190 NEXT I
200 FOR I = 0 TO 15
210 IF PEEK(A+I) >= 32 AND PEEK(A+I) <= 126 THEN PRINT CHR$(PEEK(A+I)); ELSE PRINT".";
220 NEXT I
230 PRINT
240 A = A +16
250 GOTO 120

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