31
votes
Do any FAT8 filesystem images survive?
I think I've actually found a FAT8 disk image: Toshiba T100 Personal Computer T-DISK BASIC (Version 1.0) (1982)
Why I think it is FAT8:
Starting near offset 0xc530, there are repeated occurrences of ...
- 2,031
18
votes
Do any FAT8 filesystem images survive?
There were several pretty common 8 bit machines with MS-BASIC 5.x including for example the TA Alphatronic PC which featured a Microsoft Extended BASIC 5.11 in ROM. Disk Routines were to be loaded ...
- 223k
12
votes
Accepted
What does it mean to "publish machine code"?
What does it mean to publish the machine code?
Machine Code in the sense used is what otherwise would be called a HEX-Listing or HEX-Dump. The most compact form a program could be published and ...
- 223k
6
votes
Examples of floating-point numbers that don’t round-trip losslessly through text conversion in Microsoft BASIC
Once you know the underlying implementation, it’s not too hard to come up with numbers that neither correctly parse, nor losslessly print back. All examples below use Commodore 64 BASIC V2, which is ...
- 23.1k
4
votes
What does it mean to "publish machine code"?
In 1976, there was a lot more software, especially for microcomputers, written directly in assembly language. The BASIC interpreter certainly was written in assembly language. At the time, the term &...
- 6,999
2
votes
Accepted
How is the Commodore BASIC RND function seeded, depending on the argument?
I looked at the source code, and this is what I can say about random number generation in Microsoft 6502 BASIC:
If the argument to RND is negative, its significand bits are directly used as the seed.
...
- 23.1k
2
votes
BASIC-PLUS inline operators, do they actually make sense?
One reason for the unusual syntax was to save memory (as dirkt mentions), the same reason you see the source code of the commonly-used system programs with the combination of backslash statement ...
- 21
1
vote
Examples of floating-point numbers that don’t round-trip losslessly through text conversion in Microsoft BASIC
I'd like to address this bit:
Why not parse the number once, when the user enters the line, and
store the number in binary?
As you noted, such conversions can result in "oddities" (there's ...
- 20k
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