Hi, just for fun I have compiled the "brandy" BBC BASIC interpreter for the OSD. Those of you who are British and grew up with the BBC micro (or, better, the Archimedes) will probably be familiar with the sort of BASIC that left everything else standing (yup, even the AppleII pales in comparison to the mighty Beeb).
Anyway, it is too large to attach (some 280KiB raw, 95KiB Zip) so you can download it and some example programs from:
Unzip it, copy it to an SD card or such to get it over to your OSD. When you have done so, enter:
chmod 755 brandyto make it executable.
Then, to run it, enter:
./brandy <program name>For example:
neuros login: root
Password:
BusyBox v1.6.1 (2009-05-21 23:20:05 PDT) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
~ $ ./brandy hanoi
Number of discs? 3
Move disc 1 from left to right
Move disc 2 from left to middle
Move disc 1 from right to middle
Move disc 3 from left to right
Move disc 1 from middle to left
Move disc 2 from middle to right
Move disc 1 from left to right
7 steps in 0.02 seconds
>Some points:
- A la RISC OS, you can use "brandy -quit <prog>" or "brandy -load <prog>", etc.
- Entering "help" does not list commands, duh. For this, I'd refer you to http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html
- Can't get out? Try QUIT.
- As it was intended for OSD console use, the features available are VERY simple. Most display-related things (CLS, MODE, VDU, GCOL, etc) do not work.
- You can get Brandy for Windows, Linux, RISC OS, Amiga, and it's open source if you want it elsewhere.
- The examples aren't terribly exciting.
- There is no integration with the OSD. You can't use it to manage scheduled entries, etc. Try using Lua for this.
- The platform identification, via INKEY(-256), is &F9
BBC BASIC uses an ampersand (
&) prefix to hex numbers, and a percent (
%) prefix to binary numbers. Printing a number prefixed with a tilde (
~) will convert it to hex.
Examples:
>P. ~&DEAD
DEAD
>P. &BEEF
48879
>P. ~48879
BEEF
>P. %01111011
123
>The first example converts hex to hex. Not so useful. Then we convert hex to denary, and back again, and finally binary to denary (there is no simple way to convert back, it's just there to make it easy to set bitfield flags).
You can call OS functions by prefixing them with a star (
*) or programmatically using the
OSCLI call.
Example:
>*ls
brandy deupk sqlite
dosfsck hanoi videoinfo
>OSCLI("ls -l")
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 287376 Jun 12 22:07 brandy
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12592 Jun 12 00:23 deupk
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 46620 Jun 12 00:23 dosfsck
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 461 Jun 12 00:24 hanoi
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Jun 12 00:24 sqlite
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8740 Mar 2 02:10 videoinfo
>For those who wish to try out brandy, here's a little program that might be of more use!
REM >bhex
REM
REM Dead simple hex viewer
REM Rick Murray, 2011/06/12
REM Released under EUPL v1.1
REM
DIM buf% 16
OSCLI("ls")
INPUT "Filename";fn$
fp% = OPENIN(fn$)
ln% = EXT#fp%
ln% = (((ln% / 16) + 1) * 16)
here% = 0
head% = 0
WHILE (here% < ln%)
REM Heading? (every 16 lines)
IF (head% = 0) THEN
PRINT '"Address : 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F : ASCII data"'
ENDIF
head% += 1
IF (head% > 15) THEN head% = 0
REM Read data
FOR p% = 0 TO 15
IF (NOT EOF#fp%) THEN
buf%?p% = BGET#fp%
ELSE
buf%?p% = 0
ENDIF
NEXT
REM Print offset
PRINT RIGHT$("00000000" + STR$~(here%), 8) + " : ";
REM Print hex values
FOR l% = 0 TO 15
PRINT RIGHT$("00" + STR$~(buf%?l%), 2) + " ";
NEXT
REM Print (filtered) ASCII
PRINT ": ";
FOR l% = 0 TO 15
IF ((buf%?l% < 32) OR (buf%?l% > 126)) THEN buf%?l% = ASC(".")
PRINT CHR$(buf%?l%);
NEXT
PRINT
here% += 16
ENDWHILE
CLOSE#fp%
ENDYou can run this with a command like
./brandy -quit bhex and then entering the filename.
Best wishes,
Rick.
