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Post by wsoft on Nov 16, 2020 5:04:22 GMT
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Post by robertb on Nov 17, 2020 0:29:07 GMT
Oooo, WSBasic. It looks very interesting!
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Post by robertb on Nov 17, 2020 21:52:14 GMT
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Post by wsoft on Nov 21, 2020 2:45:55 GMT
Yeah that's the one. IT has speech by the way. It stashes Sam Speaker into the last bank of the ram expander and every time it said anything it would swap itself with an umpteen amount of memory, say what you wanted it to say then it did another swap to restore again. It's a bug nest, although there is an 80-column bitmapped screen. I never really got done with it
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Post by wsoft on Dec 8, 2020 2:40:29 GMT
One thing good about having made this software was that I was able to help the VICE emulator by finding a bug in its REU emulation, and by that I refer to x128. This was about the same time I had my website up, it was about February of 2005 and the version of VICE available back then was 1.15.
I remember that I used to run WsBasic on x64 and it worked, but when I tried it with x128 in 64-mode, it would crash. For years, I thought the problem was the PC I was using (you can see on my old website where I was still blaming Windows NT).
After closer examination I realized that the problem was the x128 program itself, and the reason was that $FF00 wasn't being used as a register- and that was something that x64 was doing correctly. $FF00 is used with a Commodore REU as a way to delay DMA transfers until a user's code has a chance to change memory location 1 (the processor port I/O register) to how you want it in order to address a specific area of memory within the computer. You can blend out the normal C64 chips and address only RAM for example, and it's all about what the processor can see before DMA it does its thing. POKEing ANY value into $FFOO using this special mode of the Ram Expander made it possible to STASH, FETCH, or SWAP within any area of C64 memory that you wished, but you had to block interrupts first with a SEI opcode.
Long story short I shot off an email to the WinVice team, and Spiro Trikaliotus replied to my email. That email included WsBasic as an attachment in "d64" format. I explained the problem I was having with x128, as well as my (then theoretical) observation that the $FFOO option that worked on x64 wasn't supported on x128 (in 64-mode), and he promptly replied that he would look into it. That guy was very bright- he verified my observations and as of version 1.16 of WinVice, that bug was squashed from then on, and I stopped blaming Bill Gates.
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alf
Windows User
Posts: 5
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Post by alf on Apr 16, 2021 8:16:48 GMT
WSBasic = Wohnzimmersoft Basic? Is it really "Wohnzimmersoft"?
You aren't from Germany, are you?
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Post by wsoft on May 2, 2021 19:35:08 GMT
No, I'm American. I served two tours of duty in what was then West Germany. These two tours were separated by a two year tour at Fort Carson, Colorado. I ended my service in April of 1984 and went back to Germany, where I lived in Mannheim for 8 years.
"Wohnzimmer" means like, your living room. Living-Room Software. Where I got to learn the Chinese of machine-language from reading German magazines like the "64'er" 😉
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Post by hydrophilic on May 29, 2021 4:56:36 GMT
Thanks wsoft for reporting the problems to the VICE team. They're really good with C64 emulation, but have lots of bugs w/C128. Even though I never owned an REU, even I knew that writing the $FF00 register was designed to trigger the REU. So thank you for improving VICE128! And also thanks for serving the military; my sister was stationed in Ramstein, Germany too, but a generation later!
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Post by wsoft on Jun 5, 2021 14:53:54 GMT
Spiro was cool. Too cool. He was a lot like Spock... no emotion, but very efficient at his job. No need to thank me for the bug fix, that was just me in an effort to save my sanity. In those days I wanted to rely on x128 but back then it was still a bug nest. Eventually they fixed it. I don't use the newer versions, in fact now I use v2.2 it seems to do everything I need it to, and does not have the same bugs v2.3 does. Kudos to your sister and thank her for serving our country for me. We got to stick together.
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