OMIKRON LESSON

OMIKRON LESSON BY MR.Ni!

Programming in Basic and in Omikron Basic in particular.



Why program in Basic?



Sometimes I'm asked why I program in Basic and not in Pascal, Mudula (Yes, I 
DID write MUDULA, ask University Twente why.) C or Assembly. Well, I program in 
all mentioned languages, but I like Basic best, and then comes C and assembly. 
I use Pascal and Mudula only when I'm forced to because a silly professor 
thinks those are good languages to teach students programming. (Maybe they are, 
but they are NOT good programming languages!)



I still have to answer why I like Basic best. About ten years ago I learned 
programming on a Sinclair ZX81 in (you guessed it!) Basic. After a year 
programming on the ZX81 I switched to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. On the ZX 
Spectrum I made some very huge Basic programs (the Spectrum had together with 
the Basic extension 'BETA Basic' a real powerful Basic and I programmed some 
administration programs with it).



After the ZX Spectrum came an Atari ST. The computer came with a real lousy 
Basic so I stopped with Basic programming and played games. In the mean time I 
learned Pascal at the University but I thought it was a lousy programming 
language. Also when I got a copy of Gfa Basic, I tried to write some programs 
with it, but I didn't like it, so I played more games.



Then came Omikron Basic. For only 25 Dutch Guilders you could purchase a copy 
including a manual (what a luxury!). I really liked Omikron Basic very much (we 
are still in love with each other, you know?). It was more similar to Spectrum 
Basic than Gfa ever was. Again I programmed some administration programs (to be 
honest with you, I programmed just one big program that could do all the things 
that the several Spectrum programs did and many more). I really liked Omikron 
Basic so I bought the compiler and I was really satisfied with the speed of my 
programs (Jeez, can you imagine?!). After that I learned assembly and many 
things about the hardware of the Atari ST. Then I wrote a bouncing proportional 
scroller for the high resolution of the ST in assembly. But my 
scroll-techniques weren't good enough to write a decent demo with it. At that 
time I saw a Basic demo by the Double Dutch Crew (DDC) and I thought: 'That's 
not bad at all for Basic, maybe I also can do things like that.'. So I tried to 
write a scroller in Omikron Basic. It was a real disaster: I could scroll a 
text, just ten lines high, in one bitplane and needed about 700kB of memory.



A few months later I learned about the Memory_Move command in Omikron Basic. 
That made things a lot easier and next I was writing a scroller, 64 lines high 
this time, fitted in less than 2kB sourcecode, which I intended as a 
contribution to a contest (no, I didn't win, a Whaaaaaamiga did... Still I did 
include the source with this article).

Some days later I wrote a 80 lines high sized scroller for high rez. On the 
first fair in Eindhoven I met the DDC and they gave me a copy of their last 
demo, 'the Tea Party demo', a very nice Omikron Basic demo. I showed them my 
programs and they were surprised that there was someone else programming demos 
in Omikron Basic and they asked me if I could make a monochrome guest screen 
for their next demo. They also told me that there was a demo, called the 
Ultimate Gfa Demo, that removed the lower border in Basic and they thought it 
couldn't be done in Omikron Basic. (They were so wrong, yes, they were!)



After the fair I sat down behind my computer and thought: if they can remove 
the border in Gfa Basic it's also possible in Omikron Basic. So with some help 
of Insh_Allah (who removed the border in assembly some years ago) I tried to 
remove the lower border. Guess what; after two evenings trying on and on the 
lower border was gone. And in the night of the third evening the upper border 
was gone too. Than I designed the Mowzes Creeble screen with some moving 
rasters and featuring low and medium resolution on the same scanline (Title and 
the colors of the beam by Insh_Allah, all else done by me). After this screen 
(which is still not ready) I decided to make a good screen with many scrollers 
and rasters, hence I started developing the QED screen.



During the coding of that screen I decided that I needed some music. I didn't 
know how to play chip music so it had to be digisound music. Insh_Allah (again) 
had some digisound tables and knew how to use them. (He had patched a MOD 
replay program to make it work on all three resolutions and play more modules 
(replay 1.2.10). Now there's one more year doing little gone, but still I 
(Insh_Allah) recently finished a totally redesigned replay-program that works 
on every ST, STe, MEGA Ste and TT and on every resolution (GEM-based). This 
tool can cope with every MOD and lots of types of chip music. It works as 
accesoire or program, it understands the commandline (xArg and ARGV 
commandline-passing protocol support), has a jukebox mode, can spool/play 
through MODs in fast forward and REVERSE! mode and above all it is crash 
resistant. It's called Insh_Allah's Replay++, version 3.10.01B...



Insh_Allah is backing away from the keyboard fetching some sleep; he deserves 
it! Now I (Mr Ni!) can finally continue my story... Where were we? Ah yeah, I 
remember: we were talking about digisound and my beloved Omikron Basic.) The 
first tests turned out to be really ugly; the timing of the digisound wasn't 
good and there were some problems with the calculations of the offsets in the 
digi-table. When Chainsaw heared this crappy shit-noise, he said (honestly!): 
"Well, not bad at all for Basic!!!"

If you were stunned by this opinion you should consider the fact that Chainsaw 
loves trash-metal, so we can be confident about it this aint no objective view 
of it all...

Anyway, Chainsaw kept on nagging so he made me so mad I sat down a next time to 
fix those bugs. At the end of the day I had perfect digisound in Omikron Basic 
without using any interrupt routine!

The next thing to do were some bouncing color-bars, but they had to be special. 
So I designed a 'pipe' in Degas Elite and tested a lot of color-combinations. 
Then I thought of enhancing the 'rotation'-effect by inserting some lines that 
should rotate around the color-bars. No big deal, but the color-selection was a 
pain-staking operation that took a lot of time. In the end I made a small 
utility just for the purose of calculating the colors of the last few bars, 
because I was totally out of inspiration.

Furthermore I made a tool that should do all the font-conversion for me. I took 
a nice monochrome font and converted it to a color-font (one color per pixel!) 
by using Newtons law on calculating the color-shades. It was a hell of a job 
but I wouldn't likely have done the job with some paint-program: I'm a coder, 
NOT a painter!

Then came summer and the holidays with it, so Lord Q got his parents leaving 
the house to him for a couple of weeks: we moved in. (Indeed, papa anda mama 
were really desperate when they came back: we had the whole place torn apart, 
but who cares anyway?! Lord Q himself had to clean the whole mess, marvellous! 
During that time the bouncing color-bars were tuned to their final state while 
I introduced the special effects to the scroller.

Now the thing was starting looking neat.

After a little coding-related depression and an in-depth discussion with my 
personal shrink I decided to finish 'em off: at a members-only party at MBH 
(Moir Brandts Honk BBS in The Hague, Ed.) the scrolltexts were written by 
Insh_Allah (me staring at his back trying to mentally force him to move on with 
it: he was much more busy gasping around than typing, although he had promised 
to write the whole scrolltext ("I can do it, no problem, I can do it, just 
easy!").

Then the QED Demo got released at MBH the same day. (End of summer 1991)



After I had finished the QED demo I decided it would be nice to make a MEGA 
demo in Omikron Basic. So here I am, just four demos are finished but the most 
terrible piece: the main-menu has been finished too.

In coding the main-menu I forced myself towards the painting program in order 
to draw the necessary sprites. (Aint it beautiful if you can afford yourself a 
'grafix-man', eh? Well, I'm not that 'rich'; the only one around able to achive 
little (grin) is Insh_Allah: capabality: TERRIBLE PAINTER, even worse than me, 
but he can really build-up someone. If you meet 'em, no trouble to recognize 
'em, he's the guy who always has some utterly 'nice' remark about someone when 
a mistake is made: 5 minutes Insh_Allah around when you are coding and you're 
eating wall-paper to get yourself cooling down!)

That main-menu took most of the time and lots of spirit (of the mental kind, 
yeah? (I understand, you've never heard about spirit, meaning 2, but it does 
exist, really! There's not only boose on this world! (Ed. I_A))), the other 
demo-screens took a lot less time but it's very troublesome to think about new 
effects, new 'looks' and so on if you're on your own.

Thus I asume the planned release-date end Mai 1992 will not be met at all due 
to the fact that I'm a little out of inspiration this time, so sorry.



So that is the story about my Basic programming until now and I hope that you 
understand now why I still like Basic most.



In general there are many reasons to program in Basic. I will mention some:

- Easy to learn; you can learn to program Basic just by trying out some 
statements and discover the working of them. In special the direct modus of 
Basic is very suitable for that purpose. You can immidiately see the results of 
the used command. You don't have to bother about the troubles you can get when 
compiling and linking programs, because (nearly) all the stuff runs in the 
interpreter very well.

- Many powerful commands; in Basic there are standard commands for almost 
anything you want to do. There are sophisticated commands for input and output, 
commands for drawing lines and circles, filled or unfilled shapes, but there 
are also low level commands like PEEK and POKE (very, very nice).

- Good debugging facilities; if a program doesn't work properly you can check 
out all the values of the variables in interpreter mode at any time. It's also 
possible to monitor a critical process closely by adding some PRINT and INPUT 
commands.

- High-speed development/programming; if you want to write a program in a very 
short time, i.e. table calculation or text conversion from ASCII to some 
sophisticated format for you demo, Basic will be the best solution, because of 
the above-mentioned advances.

- To show the world it's possible in Basic; there are some weird fellas who 
want to show the world what's possible in Basic. They want to show that it IS 
possible to write decent demos in Basic without using any assembly subroutines. 
(The real nacko-nackoos think that you shouldn't even use assembly routines for 
playing digisound or chipsound. (See Mr Ni! (the Great).) (If you ask my 
opinion (I_A) I must add Mr Ni! probably is the only nacko-nackoo around, 
because he's using his own chip-sound routines (written in Basic). All the 
other folks are using XBIOS 32 (How low can you go?! VERY low!) or are just 
calling the assembly-shit in MUS-files (OVR, DDC, etc.) (very bad habit!) 
(Ed.)))



Also, now you know why you should program in Basic. If you think it's all 
bullshit what I just told you then stop reading and go playing games or if you 
don't like games (in that case you are very probably a Feb Aludum (this is NOT 
possitive at all...)) go and suck your mamma's dick.



Still with us?



Good! In that case you should know that we included a very small source to show 
you how small things can be in Basic. (And how ugly it all looks!)

To be more precise: it's the source of one of the 2 K sourcecode entries for 
the contest I was talking about a while ago. It just goes like this:





########################## DEMO.BAS #############################



 CLEAR 400000,10240

 POKE $FF820A,2

 IPL 7

 A= MEMORY(339455)

 A=A+255

 A=A AND $FFFF00

 B=A

 A=A+32000

 PRINT "f"

 CLS

 PALETTE 7,$660,$700,$701,$702,$703,$704,$705,$706,$707,$710,

         $720,$730,$740,$750,0

 XBIOS (,5,L B,L -1,0)

 TEXT COLOR =2

 TEXT HEIGHT =4

 TEXT STYLE =O

 FOR D=1 TO 25

  FOR C=0 TO 19

    TEXT C*16+4,D*8-2,""

  NEXT C

 NEXT D

 MODE =2

 TEXT HEIGHT =31

 FOR D=1 TO 6

  FOR C=0 TO 19

    TEXT STYLE =1

    TEXT COLOR =1

    TEXT C*16,D*32-5, CHR$(C+20*D+12)

    TEXT STYLE =0

    TEXT COLOR = RND(13)+3

    TEXT C*16,D*32-5, CHR$(C+20*D+12)

  NEXT C

 NEXT D

 DIM E(16)

 DIM F(16)

 FOR C=0 TO 16

  F(C)=A+C*19200

  E(C)=F(C)+13758

 NEXT C

 A=F(15)+32000

 G=A+10240

 SWAP F(16),F(0)

 XBIOS (,5,L A,L -1,-1)

 TEXT COLOR =2

 TEXT HEIGHT =6

 TEXT 0,6,"TOS"

 BITBLT 0,0,24,8 TO G

 PRINT @(0,0);" ";

 H$="Hi everybody. This is a little fucky scroll-message, I don't want"

 H$=H$+" to type any more. CU, Mr Ni! says Bye. Now here's the font: "

 FOR C=32 TO 152

  H$=H$+ CHR$(C)

 NEXT C

 DIM I( LEN(H$)+1)

 FOR C=1 TO LEN(H$)

  I(C)= ASC( MID$(H$,C,1))-32

 NEXT C

 FOR C=1 TO LEN(H$)

  D=I(C)

  Z=D\20

  D=(D MOD 20)*8+Z*5120

  I(C)=D+B

 NEXT C

 J%=148

 K%=72

 L!=0

 M!=0

 REPEAT

  L%= LEN(H$)-1

  FOR X%=1 TO L%

    FOR O%=0 TO 4800 STEP 160

      MEMORY_MOVE I(X%)+O%+160,8 TO A+8+O%

    NEXT O%

    FOR P%=0 TO 15

      WVBL

      XBIOS (,5,L A,L F(P%+1),-1)

      MEMORY_MOVE E(P%)+8,4800 TO E(P%)

      FOR O%=160 TO 4800 STEP 160

        MEMORY_MOVE A+O%,8 TO E(P%)-6+O%

      NEXT O%

      BITBLT 1,1,31,32 TO 0,1,31,32

      XBIOS (,5,L F(P%),L -1,-1)

      L!=L!+.01

      M!=M!+.02212323

      BITBLT G TO 148+148* SIN(L!),36+36* COS(M!),24,8

      IF P%=1 THEN

        XBIOS (,5,L F(16),L -1,-1)

        BITBLT G TO 148+148* SIN(L!-.01),36+36* COS(M!-.02),24,8

      ENDIF

    NEXT P%

  NEXT X%

 UNTIL 0

 END



######################### END DEMO.BAS ##########################



I suppose the code is self-explaining. If not we'll call it reader-feedback if 
you ever get the courage to write back to me.



Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa $%&œ$&$% 
f*cking shit! ***verdommese klotuhbak, gloeiendegloeiende"œ$%&^œ$œ%!!!

(This is a softened version of the text just so fanatically exclaimed by Mr Ni! 
sitting by the keyboard getting a 19"-rack computer (lots of steel and 
alumimium, litlle computer) on his foot. It seems to hurt... I think... (I_A))



Insh_Allah will be taking over here: what's Mr Ni! chatting about next time? 
(If he's recovered from foot-ache and other major brain-problems (you'll 
understand...))

He'll discuss scrollers in-depth (wow, we love this!). It should be interesting 
for the starting assembly-freak too, because the scrolling-principles are 
appicable to every language, not just Basic. (Excluded from the category 
'programming language' are MUDULA and PASCAL)

Anyway, cocksucker numero uno is leaving you, hope you enjoyed reading this 
shit.



Credits:



This text originated from Mr Ni! but after he said he lost his feeling 
(ayayayaya!) and he couldn't reach his brains no more (thoughts seem to have 
huge problems jumping over/travelling through a 19" rack), the whole text was 
edited by Insh_Allah (that's me, the Ed. & I_A dirtbag!).



If you ever would consider taking a pen and paper to write (analphabetics can 
be cured, order our special discount prices on Special Cures You Will Like (you 
don't want to hear bout this!)) write to:



  Mr Ni!

  Rohofstraat 116

  7604 AK   Almelo

  The Netherlands

(You know? The tulips, the windmills and the hasheesh?! Yes!)



Comments, requests about Replay++ (yeah, advertisement time, folks!) and so on 
are gladly and quickly (???????????) answered by us (Oh no, Mr Ni! I cannot 
write and read very well, so you answer those letters; besides, they were all 
addressed to you (grin) so off you go, pal! Happy answering, yeah! Oh, and 
please do include a copy of my Replay++ otherwise we will never get that piece 
of shit outdoors. ... You wish I did what?!... Well, fucking myself was 
allready done by me before (no fun, strange... probably not the right 
pheripheral, maybe next time plugging in a DB9 connector???) so you'll have to 
think about something else...).



Hope you write us soon, until the next article, stand up for your programming 
rights: do it in Omikron!



                                    WAS signed by:



                                    Mr Ni! (the poor guy ;-) )

                                      &

                                    Insh_Allah (the DB9-thing)

                                      of 

                                    the TOS-Crew

                                   ("Fidulus Bittus et Fuckus Clockcyclus")