SE Basic support

[LCD]

Hi Andy

SE Basic is quite close to SAM BASIC in many respects (and actually includes some SAM BASIC code). A general purpose PALETTE command would be useful. I'd base it on the MSX2 spec (which is what SE Basic uses) and adapt it to support other machines.

I have a MSX2 now too, but still no instruction. Maybe I will get one from the seller with next time (I already got two full car loads of computers from this guy, and there will be the third soon). I hope, the palette definition on MSX is more like on SAM as I love it. On the other hand I hate the way how it was done in Amiga BASIC. This was the most stupid way to define palettes.

Well you can't use $ in SE Basic because that implies a string and would screw up the parser. BBC Basic and SAM Basic also use & for hex.

No idea why this would be changed in ZXBC as a compiled program does not interact with the interpreter. It is inly a different way to enter the numbers. I would prefer too in ZXBC to have ENDIF instead of END IF for example. I think, the $ prefix is better as it is standartized, and it follows FreeBASIC compatibility rules. & is usualy used for binary AND, so changing this will break the rules of FreeBASIC compatibility.

Well you could make it a separate target, but since all the BASIC functionality of the original ROM is present in SE Basic it would make more sense to have a single target and just make sure the generated code is clean enough to run on both. All well written Spectrum programs run on SE Basic already, so if a compiled program doesn't run that tells me it's doing something quick and dirty somewhere.

I think you misunderstood me. I don't think the problem is the compatibility of ZXBC programs on Spectrum with SE BASIC ROM. They will run normally, I think. If ZXBC will use the optimised code of SE BASIC RROM, it can break the compatibility with the Spectrum which still has a standard Sinclair ROM. This is why I think, a special case compiling target will be better, to not make the output incompatible with normal Spectrum.

Cheers!

-Andrew

Cheers too
LCD