Loadstar 236/236.d81/t.dbsaga

Text File | 2022-08-26 | 8KB | 271 lines

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          THE DOTBASIC SAGA
           by Dave Moorman


    DotBASIC began long ago in a small
town on the eastern prairie of
Colorado -- far, far away from
[everything]!


    In 1993 I became a LOADSTAR
programmer, and discovered a treasure
trove of useful and exciting "modules"
that add pazzazz to our modest
machine. Jeff Jones (with Rick Nash)
first published a "Toolbox" in issue
84. Jeff's own "Mini-Toolbox" appeared
in 91.

    A Toolbox is a collection of
useful SYS commands that can be called
from BASIC with very little hassle.
Two of these commands -- present in
one form or another on every Toolbox
-- was the SCREEN STASH and SCREEN
RESTORE. Screen and Color information
is copied into some safe place in
memory with STASH, and returned to the
screen with RESTORE. This command
makes pop-up menus pop-off quick and
clean!

    Then, in issue 106, C.E.'Spock'
Prince (an employee of Softdisk in
their disk copying department and not
to be confused with any artist
formerly known as the artist formerly
known as Prince) published IMAGE
MAKER. This is a powerful ML module
that allows easy scrolling and other
pyrotechnics for the text screen.

    I put together the ability to
design a screen with IMAGE MAKER, then
use Toolbox to STASH it in open memory
and BSAVE it. In my program, I could
BLOAD the screen and bring it up with
a snappy SCREEN RESTORE.

    The only problem was that the
design screen and the working screen
were not the same and had to be
converted after every change. This was
not a big deal, but hardly what you
would call "elegant."

    However, in 1996, Lee Novak
published his first Mr.Mouse module.
It added a real, working mouse driver
to the Toolbox commands Jeff had
already made famous. One of my first
projects was to write Mr.MICK
(Mr.Mouse Image Construction Kit) that
combined screen design, font editing,
and mouse convenience.

    You see, one of the biggest time
wasters for me is to use PRINT
statements or even BLOCK commands from
a Toolbox to create a screen. It was
"write and run and look and fix and
run and look..." on and on into the
night. Designing a screen visually
makes a lot of sense, helping produce
better appearing screens and saving
time.

    During 1997-1999, I strayed away
from the C-64. The church I was
working at had a Windows PC, and my
job included lots of productive stuff,
like putting out the newsletter and
keeping the database updated. I just
didn't have time to program or play
much with my favorite computer.

    But in mid-1999, I discovered
emulators. Suddenly I was interested
again. I found my favorite emulator at
the time, FRODO, could not handle the
LOADSTAR Presenter Menu program. So I
wrote my own, complete with Mr.MICK
screen -- of course. This became the
basis of eLOADSTAR, a PC-ready
publication of the best of LOADSTAR
software.

    That fall, we went through a big
church fight that caused several
tithing families to leave. Suddenly,
my job was done. I was not worried. In
the United Methodist Church, pastors
are appointed to churches. On the
downside, this means we have to go
where we are sent. But in situations
like this, I knew I would have a place
to preach in a month or so.

    So Sheri and I took a long
neglected trip to Virginia to see my
parents. Dad was on chemo, and I was
shocked at his condition. Mom's
condition wasn't so hot either. So we
decided to take Family Health Leave to
help them out for awhile. Before we
left, we found out that Dad's chemo
wasn't working. Hospice was the next
step.

    We rushed back to Colorado, packed
our stuff away in a storage building,
put the cat up with friends, and raced
back. Things finally settled down
after Thanksgiving, so we took a
little trip to Shreveport, LA, to see
Fender and Judi at the marvelous
LOADSTAR Tower. They graciously
permitted us to publish eLOADSTAR, and
gave us a nice list of former LOADSTAR
subscribers to contact.

    During the next year, while we
cared for Dad, I worked on eLOADSTAR.
It was a project that kept me busy and
sane through a long journey. I also
had to do some Windows programming to
make eLOADSTAR easy to load and use.
That's where I encountered Visual
Basic. Some of the things posed a
great mystery; I spent a month trying
to find out how to remove a file from
the disk. I finally discovered the
command: KILL. I was ready to KILL
Bill Gates!

    But I learned a new, and perhaps
better, way to approach programming --
Visual Design, Event Driven, Object
Oriented. The process is not as
straight forward as good ol' BASIC
2.0. But it detours some of the
niggling details that often drive us
to distraction.

    Dad died on August 31, 2000. Mom
moved to a retirement community in
Albuquerque, where my sister lives,
and Sheri and I cleaned out the house.
The denomination official called with
a church for me. On our way to visit
them, we stopped by Shreveport again
and worked out the deal that allows us
to continue the publication of
LOADSTAR. eLOADSTAR had a few more
issues, but two publications were just
too much as I got busy with a new
appointment.

    In 2003 I was casting around for a
semi-major project, wanting to do
something unique with the C-64. And I
hit on the idea of Event Driven
programming. I vaguely remembered
something in a book about doing
"behind the scenes" GOSUBs, which
sounded like the key to Event Driving.
Mr.Mouse was as powerful as it would
get, and had Regions, which were
defined in a one-page block of memory.

    And I had Mr.MICK. It was old and
clunky, still using the first version
of Mr.Mouse. But as I looked through
its code I discovered that I could
move things around just a bit and have
room the the Region Data right up
against the back of the font/ screen/
color data. I modified Mr.MICK to
define Event Regions and save the
whole thing as a .MED file. (MED stood
for either "Mouse Event Driven" or
"Moorman's Event Driven")

    At first I thought this would be
just a few extra SYS commands appended
to Mr.Mouse. But tricking out the
BASIC 2.0 interpreter is more complex
than that. I borrowed code from Lothar
Englisch's 1984 book, [Advanced]
[Machine Language Programming for the]
[C-64]. Included in that book was how
to create new commands for BASIC.

    We decided to attend the
Louisville Expo over Memorial Day
weekend, 2004 -- and I needed a demo.
DotBASIC became it. I hurried to get
it working, stable, and clean in time
for the show. The demonstration was
well received.

    But after our trip -- and meeting
so many of you -- we returned home and
DotBASIC had to take a back seat to
reality: Vacation Bible School, Back
to School, Christmas. But as I
worked on a couple of simple
amusements for 235 and this issue, I
realized that now was the time to do
DotBASIC up right. Full documentation.
Polish up some small bugs. And
describe ways to do more complex
things with it.

    And here it is! I would like to
think DotBASIC will make programming
accessable to those who might have an
idea, but need some powerful commands
to make it go. It could happen!

    But mostly, DotBASIC is proof that
the C-64 was a tremendous computer in
1982! And still is today. The IBM came
out the summer of 1981, with tons of
memory and all that. But in 1982, the
IBM had a two-color screen (green and
black) and one sound (beep). The C-64
had color, real sound, expansion
ports, mouse capabilities -- literally
everything a computer needs.

    I am excited by what Maurice
Randall has done with WHEELS and what
the WINGS guys and gals have
accomplished. These take advantage of
the SuperCPU and SuperRAM, which make
the C-64 a truly productive computer.
[And] I like the challenge of seeing
how far old "Brown Betty" can be
pushed with no new hardware. (OK,
JiffyDOS. But you know what I mean.)

    And now we have a NEW C-64 popping
up like mushrooms: the C64DTV. With a
little hacking, we can now have
something like a Pocket C-64! And this
new machine cannot use the SuperCPU.
So, here is DotBASIC, ready to make a
plain C-64 really do its stuff!

 DMM

(I just read that the demo-group Style
has created an assembler program that
takes advantage of the full 128K of
RAM on the C64DTV. I want to know
more! And