Short: Patch Metacomco's ABasiC to work on OS2+ Author: markk@clara.co.uk Uploader: markk clara co uk Type: dev/basic Version: 0.4 Architecture: m68k-amigaos This .readme file is a shortened version of Readme.txt in the archive. ABasiC patches for Kickstart 2.0 (V36) and PAL/NTSC =================================================== Version history --------------- 2012-03-17 0.4 Fixed issue on machines with more than 512KB chip RAM; arrays already in chip RAM could unnecessarily be moved. Added section about the VARPTR problem. Added experimental patch to enable detection of right mouse button state. 2012-03-06 0.3 Increased size of the sound task stack. Mention where the ABasiC user manual can be downloaded from. Updated Tips section. 2012-02-05 0.2 Added reverse patch, so you can revert a patched executable back to the original. Added NTSC-to-PAL/ PAL-to-NTSC patch files and information. 2003-05-05 0.1 First public release. This can be considered preliminary; please report any problems! Introduction ------------ Back in 1985, the first Amiga 1000 computers came with Metacomco's ABasiC language. With version 1.1 of the Amiga OS, ABasiC was replaced by Microsoft's AmigaBASIC. ABasiC and AmigaBASIC are very different. ABasiC is a more "traditional" environment than AmigaBASIC, and seems faster and less buggy. Unfortunately ABasiC does not work under Kickstart 2.0 (V36) and later, but this patch fixes the problem. ABasiC is hard-coded to use the default NTSC screen height (200 lines). While ABasiC works fine on both NTSC and PAL Amigas, you can also patch it to use 256-line screens, so filling the whole PAL screen area. Apart from historical interest, David Addison wrote some excellent games in ABasiC which are available on early Fred Fish disks and Aminet. Now you can take a virtual trip back to 1986 and play his versions of Klondike, Othello and others! They are surprisingly good, considering they are written in BASIC and run on a 256K machine. Where to get ABasiC ------------------- If you don't have ABasiC but would like to try it, it can be obtained from Rainer Benda's web site at http://www.rbenda.de/commodore/software.html Several archives which include ABasiC and various programs are available from ftp.back2roots.org. See the corresponding .txt files for file listings: http://ftp.back2roots.org/back2roots/disks/17bit/dms/00xx/17bit-0071.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/back2roots/disks/apdc/dms/00xx/apdc-0003.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/back2roots/disks/apdc/dms/00xx/apdc-0004.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/disks/bavarian/dms/00xx/bavarian-0031.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/disks/cam/lha/00xx/cam-0006.lha http://ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/disks/slipdisk/dms/00xx/slipdisk-0001.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/disks/slipdisk/dms/00xx/slipdisk-0002.dms http://ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/disks/slipdisk/dms/00xx/slipdisk-0026.dms Where to get the ABasiC user manual ----------------------------------- I recently took pictures of each page of my ABasiC user manual. The quality isn't wonderful, but it should all be legible and is better than no manual at all. At the time of writing that can be downloaded from http://www.fileserve.com/file/j98VfEW/ABasiC_manual_mark_k.zip Someone converted the JPEG images to PDF. The URL is shown at http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=801303