Does anyone have a syntax highlighter to use with Notepad++ ?? What do you guys use for writing Boriel ZX Basic ?

This one's a bit long, sorry in advance!

As mentioned in the support forum, I've been having problems with my program growing unstable and crashing after a while. With your help (thanks!) I've narrowed the issue down to a single routine (and possibly a single line, but we'll get to that in a minute) which seems to be causing something bad to happen to the heap and/or memory.

I've extracted the offending routine out into the following program:

Splitting this out from the other thread, sorry.

In 1.6.2 there seems to be something weird going on when I perform calculations on memory pointers. My program switches between various banks of UDGs by POKEing 23675/23676 to point to different addresses. When I compiled with the 1.6.2 I noticed that none of my UDGs were working properly. After some experimentation I discovered that the maths I was using to calculate the high and low byte values was giving the wrong values for some reason.

Take a look at this program, which I adapted from my main program (hence it looking a bit weird, sorry):

Hi boriel,

I wondered if you could help me understand the heap a little better? Reading the forum I've determined that the heap is mainly used for string handling and by default is just over 4k in length (but may take up the rest of memory - is that right?)

My program is fairly large (just over 30K when compiled with -O2, I am compiling from address 24576 to give me extra space). When running it does quite a lot of string manipulation and I've noticed that it becomes steadily more unstable over time until it finally crashes, either with an 'out of memory' (I'm using --debug-memory) or screen corruption appears and the Spectrum crashes. I'm thinking that either I don't have enough heap or something is quietly writing over areas of memory that it shouldn't and after a while that brings the whole thing crashing down. I've tried increasing (and decreasing!) the heap space with the -H command, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

How can I tell where the heap is located in memory, and how big it is? Is there any way to get the running program to output how much heap space it thinks is left? The heap should always be located after the compiled code in memory, right? And all string data should be in the heap? I tried compiling with the -d option but this generates tons of output, most of which I don't really understand.

Does anyone have any advice on things to look for that might be causing problems like this? The program I'm working with was originally a Sinclair BASIC listing so it relies quite heavily on GO SUB/RETURN, too, so I guess it's possible that it might be nothing to do with the heap and maybe something stack-related? Grasping at straws really, I'm really just looking for a bit of advice on what I could investigate next.

Thanks!

I have a scenario in a program I'm converting from Spectrum BASIC to ZX Basic where I need to replace a READ/DATA setup. The code prints messages something like this:

10 restore x: read a, b
20 for n = 1 to b: read i, m$: print ink i; at a+n, 0; m$: next n: return
30 data 10, 3, 6, "test", 7, "test 2", 5, "test 3"

So the code sets 'x' to the DATA row containing the message you want to print (in this case x=30), then you call the subroutine at line 10 which reads the position and number of rows, then loops through 'b' rows reading the ink colour and the message and printing them to the screen.

I need to replace this in ZX Basic with something different. At the minute I've just shoved everything into arrays, but this is very inefficient because I'm effectively storing the data twice so the message bank takes up a lot more memory than it needs to.

What's the 'best' way to do this? I was thinking of maybe having a bunch of DEFB statements to directly replace the DATA lines, terminating each string with a 0 marker. That way I can read the bytes for 'a', 'b' and 'i' easily with PEEKs, and build the messages up by reading until I reach the '0'. I'm not sure how performant that would be, though - is there a faster way to copy a chunk of memory into a string?

Interested to hear any ideas!

I'm struggling a bit with the behaviour of the < and > operators compared to Spectrum BASIC and I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is a bug or expected behaviour.

Check out this program:

Hi guys,

It's been a while but I recently started trying to convert a program written in 'standard' Sinclair BASIC so that it would compile with ZX Basic. It's going fairly well, but I've come across a problem with the --base-string option in release 1.5.3.

Take a look at this short program, which is supposed to replace 'character 1' in a string:

Hi!

This is a very simple (and with some bugs) breakout clone game my friend Pooky and I did just to try out the Radastan Mode with Boriel Basic. Thank you LCD and Boriel for your help. It's quite odd to display graphics on the Spectrum without taking care of the color clash... :wink:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/txi22502tryidv...2.tap?dl=0

I am new to this

1. I have made a file Hello.bas
2. In the folder where the ZXB files are I have but the file hello.bas
3. I open cmd connad file and enter zxb.py hello.bas

Now vb. net is opening the py file, and it does noting.

How can I stop VB to open this files.

Music is 6 channel dual AY music, a cover of Madonna's Hung Up by Factor6.

It uses Putchars by Britlion, then everything else is written in ZXB (the vumeters are done with inline ASM)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oVgRtlZ4Cc&