Tag: BINSIC
-
Still pondering over BASIC
Last month I put a bit of effort into fixing BINSIC – the collection of Groovy scripts that allows the execution of Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC programs – and I have been thinking about the thing that they offer that modern computers don’t: the ability to switch on and just write a simple program to solve…
-
BINSIC – Sinclair BASIC emulator – is back
BINSIC was my 2012 project to emulate Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC on a modern computer. It is a series of Groovy classes that provide a mixture of interpretation and ‘domain specific language’ (i.e. executing BASIC as native Groovy). Over the years bitrot seems to have set in and the code in the GitHub repo wouldn’t work…
-
Updated: A day (wasted?) with Groovy
Update: After staying up late (after 2am after the clocks went forward), I found various bugs – I don’t know if these reflect underlying changes in the language or the JVM in the interim but it seems to work now (see GIF of the Game of Life below). Working on getting the jar done too…
-
If only I had the time…
I would reimplement BINSIC using a JIT compiler as outlined in this rather good blog from Josh Haberman. (And, at least now I have bumped Chomsky from the top of my blog.)
-
Learnt this week… 24 January
My friend and former colleague Adam Higgitt every Friday posts a list of “five things I have learned this week”. It’s popular and good fun – especially as Adam is not afraid of an argument if you challenge some of his claims. For a while I tried to do the same thing myself, but failed…
-
A little plug for BINSIC
Thirty-three years ago my brother and I got a new cassette player for Christmas. That allowed us to write and save games for our ZX80 computer (like many ZX80 owners we found that an older cassette player just didn’t work) and in 1981 I wrote a Z80 machine code version of Conway’s Game of Life…
-
Tiny BASIC for the Raspberry Pi
A complete Tiny BASIC environment has been ported to the Raspberry Pi. Only slightly miffed that no one seems to have noticed that I was running BASIC on this platform more than three months ago 🙂
-
Getting booted from Wikipedia
A short article on “Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code” (BINSIC), my BASIC-like interpreter/DSL for Groovy faces getting deleted from Wikipedia on the grounds of lack-of-notability. It would not be right or proper for me to intervene to stop this, but if you have been a BINSIC user then a proper third-party reference to it…
-
More than a game: the Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life has long fascinated me. Thirty years ago I wrote some Z80 machine code to run it on a Sinclair ZX80 and when I wrote BINSIC, my reimplentation of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC, Life was the obvious choice for a demonstration piece of BASIC (and I had to rewrite it from scratch when…
-
BINSIC plotting working
At the risk of being attacked as an enemy of all that is good, I have to confess to being less than riveted by the Olympics, so far. So I have made far more productive use of my time in seeking to recreate the computing experience of 30 years ago – by working some more…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 