What in the hell is a .BAS file?

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TMD2003
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by TMD2003 »

My immediate thought was "have you tried BASin"? but I was unaware that a .bas file existed for the ZX81. Presumably it's just the same FreeBASIC file that could open on an advanced text editor (Notepad++, BBEdit, or... some Linux equivalent) and highlight the keywords, but translating it into something readable by (say) EightyOne isn't something I've come across yet...

This might be a mystery for Sinclair ZX World to solve. (And I've put in the request there.)
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Kweepa
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by Kweepa »

I opened one with a text editor. Seems to be pure ascii?
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

[mention]Rev_Stuart_Campbell[/mention],

Rename the file from .BAS to .B81 then open with EightyOne. It seems to work.

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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

Odd [mention]Rev_Stuart_Campbell[/mention]

Worked OK when I tried:

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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by TMD2003 »

We have a response from Sinclair ZX World. Try this: http://rullf2.xs4all.nl/jszeddy/jszeddy.html

If it opens the .bas file, save it as .p and you're sorted.
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PeterJ
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

You could also use this [mention]TMD2003[/mention] and [mention]Rev_Stuart_Campbell[/mention]:

http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/zxtext2p/index.html

Referenced here:

https://oboletech.wordpress.com/2017/07 ... -emulator/

As mentioned above, renaming the file and loading into EightyOne worked for me also.
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

[mention]Rev_Stuart_Campbell[/mention],

I will check today and save the resulting .p for you if it plays.
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

Hi [mention]Rev_Stuart_Campbell[/mention],

The program runs. However its not as expected because parts of the listing are missing. This is the page from CVG:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/page.ph ... 70&page=42

Image

The BASIC listing just has the following for those print statements that print the track, so it would need a little work to get it running.

Code: Select all

11 PRINT " "
20 PRINT " "
30 PRINT " "
40 PRINT " "
50 PRINT " "
60 PRINT " "
70 PRINT " "
80 PRINT " "
90 PRINT " "
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by PeterJ »

Rev_Stuart_Campbell wrote: Sat Nov 21, 2020 11:23 am Yeah, that's what I got. So the file on TTF is completely worthless :(
About 50% useless :D

We have learnt that you can load BAS files into EightyOne though, which is a positive.
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by 1024MAK »

To be fair, plain text / ASCII text files can’t include ZX80 or ZX81 graphics characters directly, because these machines don’t use ASCII. They each use their own unique character set.

There are methods of including graphic characters, but this is done by having a special sequence of characters. Obviously this does not help though if the original file does not include all the listing.

I’m sure someone will take on the challenge and help you out in due course.

Link to the topic on Sinclair ZX World

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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by TMD2003 »

Do you know what I'm even more baffled about?

How The Type Fantastic has existed for 19 years and is still only one-third complete - despite the number of Spectrum enthusiasts that have been active over that time. Of course, now the chances are it'll never get any further. If you think of how much has been achieved in scanning, TZXing, indexing and the like, was it just that the majority of Spectrum users with the time to contribute thought "oh, well, if we've got the magazines scanned, that'll be fine for preservation purposes"?

Maybe if it had been an official WOS project from its inception, rather than JimG's hobby, it might have been finished long before the DRAMA kicked in.
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Re: What in the hell is a .BAS file?

Post by arjun »

TMD2003 wrote: Mon Nov 23, 2020 11:12 pm Maybe if it had been an official WOS project from its inception, rather than JimG's hobby, it might have been finished long before the DRAMA kicked in.
There is an official Type-In Project on WoS (managed by me for the first few years). It never received as many type-ins as I thought it would, although I'm equally grateful that it received for all the type-ins that it did! Jim of Type Fantastic had actually taken over the project, so in some sense there is some unification of the process. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, perhaps this should have been the way from the get go but for whatever reason Type Fantastic and WoS have operated at odds rather than together.

I'm unsure if all programs from TF have made their way to WoS but it may not be a bad idea to incorporate SC as part of Jim's upload process so that type-ins appear on both WoS and SC (and obviously TF) when Jim uploads them? Presuming he isn't opposed to it and that SC wants type-ins ...
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