Does anyones Amiga still run BBasic 2.1....?

I was rooting around in the loft... and I thought - I wonder if Blitz Basic will still run my old applications.... would you believe it, they both worked! I had a bit of trouble locating the screen configuration (boots in low rez, needed super-hi 1200 by 512 ) One was an application to read in velocity information from a magnetic tape, you had the facility to load up to 3 training rides in glorious 1200 by 512 pixels:-

(Excuse the quality of the images, I do have a null modem link that I never got around to sussing how to operate. Might give it a whirl and see if I can access my Miggy via a terminal window on my Windows box in the loft)

Programs configuration GUI:



Loading in the data:



Debug on the loading screen:



Plotting the velocity on the screen: (similar app here: http://perg.phys.ksu.edu/papers/bike/usingaudiotape.pdf )



I modified the program to produce a graphical representation of laps done by radio controlled cars that I used to race. The lap counting was managed by a manual 8 switch box that was connected to the parallel port of a Miggy the car club picked for a song at the time, the software was reliable if I say so myself!:-



And finally the hardware specification to run my applications (in the top left
of the image is the hardware that was strapped to the back of my bike to record the
speed of the bike on a magnetic tape, the two fat batteries provided the 3 volts to power the sound production chip when the magnetic reed switch closed on each rotation of the wheel):



Yep, my miggy has got to be about 16 years old and still does the trick with BBasic 2.1




Do you think:

1. I could get them on the Blitz Showcase (well I didn't have internet access when I developed it in Blitz on the Amiga)

2. I could upload the executables to a Miggy site somewhere ?

I had completely forgotten about super hires pal, nice looking app!

I also am proud owner of 1084 that is still going strong although mine unfortunately is an ugly shade of cigarette stained brown.

cheers skidracer, much appreciated. I had to dig my miggy out from under a load of boxes before running the extension lead up to it in the photo. Get this though, I nicked the stereo leads of the miggy in order to hook my wifes laptop up[ to the telly for the first time - amazingly I can use the telly as a second monitor. I'm off for a glass of wine {;-), medicinal red variety of course.

My Amiga 1200 ended up like some sort of beast, had a 030 accelerator in the slot under it. It got so hot and crashed the computer so much, that in the end I had to have a hole in the table with a fan there to blow air onto the processor of the accelerator. Then came the atapi-ide cd rom that could be hacked into the case, the ribon cable hanging out the left side to a 4 speed cd rom. Inside I was able to squeaze 40 odd mb of memory and a 500mb hard disk too.

Ahh the good old memorys.

BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga was ace.

Mine worked last time I looked quite a few years back. I have an A1200 with a hard drive and BBasic 2 and I made tons of little arcade games.

Memory lane...
I wish i still had mine. The things that machine could do with a few Mhz & 512K

I am (genuinely) happy for you and a bit jealous. All my Acorn, BBC, Acorn, spectrum, amiga and early 8086 to 2/3/486 days stuff (all stored as ram snapshots etc..) since i was like 8-9 years old was wiped out by a computer virus in the late 90s (my 'backup' too). They were all run-able too with the emulators. I missed out on the early pentiums (development wise), i was too miserable to do programming (at all) or graphics stuff (except professionally) so at home it was all about playing games only. Only really started getting into it again about 5 years ago.

I would PAY to see my old stuff again. It equaled a few hundred meg which back then was a fair bit.

@Shagwana: 40mbytes of memory, thats heee-yow jj amount of memory for a Miggy, I thought I was doing well with a whole 10MBytes... I do wonder if my graphs would plot faster with more memory...., nah probobaly woulda needed something like your 68030. The bike graph you see would take maybe 3-4 seconds to plot such a graph. Still bloody impressive in my book when you consider the specification of the hardware. All due credit to BRL in the Miggy days for producing such capable home brew software.

Having a whole in the table for a fan to blow air on the processor brought a smile to my chops....

@Grey, go on, fire up your machine and post a snapshot of your fave arcade production.

@D4NM4N, youch, you have my sympathy. I'm sure I've still got 3 1/4" disks with my Miggy software on, but I think I should consider backing up my Miggy Stuff. I wonder if I could back up stuff over a terminal session to a windows box to back stuff up.

You'll notice these guys ( http://perg.phys.ksu.edu/papers/bike/usingaudiotape.pdf ) had their hands tied by using bespoke software that had pre determined sample rates of 50, 100 and 200 Hz. I had the joy of messing with my sample rates, drop out algorithim compensation routines to the nth degree. I found that finding the right volume on the tape player had a bearing on how my home made schmitt trigger switched the joystick port on/off. Bit like getting the right volume on a tape player for a Spectrum 48K.....

Do it, burn DVDs whatever as you will be gutted if you loose it.. trust me.

@D4NM4N You've got me thinking now, I wrote a battleships game on the speccky ooohh, 23-24 years ago that I've got on a magnetic tape. Whats the odds on retrieving that now....? And how easy might it be to try with the mic in slot on normal PCs and myriad of speccy emulators out there? I feel a google coming on.

There is/was a utility that allow you to record with the mono mic channel of a soundblaster (original, single wave channel is what i used) and convert tapes to .tap files, loadable by the emulator. I really have no idea what it was called it was so long ago... try googling for it.

thanks D4NM4N, who knows, screenshots of my battleships app might be inbound... It always helps to narrow down the google entries. S'pose y'all know where my sig comes from now.....

Actually i believe now it was .tap not .sna (a ram snapshot) i edited the above..

Try "spectrum tape2tap" (or something like that)

Cheers D4NM4N, searching.....

can we put miggy basic creations in the gallery?

Lol, dunno, its blitz isnt it? Go 4 it see what happens :D

Im sure many of us (oldskool-ers:) would be very interested

Here goes, my first post to the Gallery, don't think the Gallery existed when I created my bike thing.....

I recon you should post it here too, save us the wait :)

I don't have an analogue TV, oh wait, maybe my plasma can accept it through the TV tuner!

PS, screen shots of my old Amiga game Last Lap located on my website was coded in Blitz Basic 2

errmm, all I was gonna do was post the graph image above on the Gallery, so its already posted on this thread.

@Grey, you can just snapshot it on your Amiga monitor, presuming you've still got one... heres hoping your tv modulator will squirt it into your high def telly.

@Shagwana... off to check your website soon.

Failed to upload to Gallery. Confounded with why it won't upload, image is a jpeg, does not exceed the required pixels but it is of the wrong type. Another day then.

Speccy loading blah now....

@Stephen, I can see how last lap is progrssing. Looking good!

Cool, reminds me of supersprint & Offroad :D

I would be happy to test drive/feedback this for you.

Speccy tapes dont' do better after 20 plus years of getting older, funny old thing.

No I never had a monitor, always a TV.

Wow, the Amiga. I eventually got my A1200 installed in one of those mostly-airspace towerds, with an 040 accelerator and a pretty basic graphics card (could barely do 32-bit color at 1024x768. Was on a TV for a long time which I actually liked cus you got those little black lines inbetween each raster line on the low resolution displays. I had that too on my multisync monitor but then later I had to get a new monitor and was stuck with the solid blocky pixels.

i preferred dune 2 on the monitor coz i could send units to precise locations on the mini map

Amiga! yes i used to have an A1200 with cdrom,phillips monitor,030 upgrade tons of games and magazines and sold the lot for a miserly amount of money to buy a PC.Wish i had kept it now.

dune 2, there was a game - can't remember if it was something like 7 or 8 disks......

My monitor was second, with the miggy1200 and a load of disks and a (wow) dot matrix printer for about 130 quid. bargain, a while back though.

I ran a BBS from my A1200 with Blizzard '030. a 16Meg SIMM and a 50MHz FPU. It was a really nice setup. I had a rare machine that could actually use 115200bps data rate on the serial port reliably (but only after I upgraded to Kickstart 3.1, oddly).

I bought some sort of monitor for it. Can't remember what it was but it was a multisync. Can't remember what happened to the monitor but the Amiga is in a loft somewhere.

I remember I got some red spray-vinyl or acrylic or something and went over the entire case and then the keyboard. I was the only one that could type on the thing because the keycaps were covered.

I thought it looked cool at the time but it was probably really bad.

I want a new A1200 with '060 to play with.

a good way to polish your touch typing!! Impressive you got a BBS running from your Miggy, always kinda fancied surfin on my Miggy but never quite got around to getting the whole modem hardware stuff.

Harddrive died a couple of years back. Need to see if I can find an IDE compatible flash disc with less than 4GB of disk space. Right.

No longer have my A1200 -- although it does have the dubious distinction of being the only computer I've ever owned that I sold for more money when I got rid of it than I paid for it when I purchased it new... Almost a year after Commodore went bankrupt, and production of new ones had stopped.

I still got my Amiga 1200 but I wish I shouldnt sell my Amiga 600. Blitzbasic 2.1 is great

@Flame, I presume the Amiga will only reference up to 4 gigs ?

@Xlsior, sold it for more money than you paid, if only commodore had marketed better, maybe ?

@Hotshot2005 - whats the last app you ran on it then ? And what d'you reckon was your crowning glory in BBasic 2.1 ? My two are above....... I did start doing a port of the bicycle speed logger in VB6, discovered Blitz3d on a cover disk, led me to buy the full ish. Animating stuff in 3d was much more gratifying than graph plotty stuff, thus my Bike speed plotter development halted. Got BMax next to progress an app which resulted in this:-

http://www.wishingwellsoftware.co.uk/downloads_well.htm

I really need to get my bike thing back on track, but I'm so easily sidetracked. Anyhow, thanks to BRL for providing me with the software to realise my projects on both the Miggy and the PC. {;-)

There's still loads of old Amiga crap on Aminet if your looking for programs.

Darkheart

@Darkheart, beauty is in the eye of the behold/.././. no I can't do it. Anyways I'm sure you meant crap = creative resourceful aminet products.

But seriously, thanks for the link. A lot of folks spent no small amount of time creating the GOLD (good old lurid designs) that is on aminet.

3.1 Amigas can only do 4G (as standard), 3.5 and up can theoretically go up to 4 exabytes. You wouldn't want more than 4G using FastFileSystem anyway, if you want to have a really big partition on an Amiga you should be using something like SmartFilesystem.

Bear in mind even 4G of storage is insanely huge for an Amiga anyway, unless you have loads of WHDLoad games.

Of course, if you just want to play games, you could always get a Minimig.

what !

running Blitz basic on amiga ? !!

nooooo !

Use Amos Proffessional with amos 3d extension. !!!

:D

I liked Amos Pro (+compiler) but Amos3D was really really really slow and crap. I bought it but never made anything with it.

Blitz is better.

I had STOS

oh for a text editor
I couldnt belive that a disk based system was still using

10 print "this that tother"
20 print "whatever"

no scrolling up or down the code to see what you were doing ... did you want to goto 300 or 310?

safe to say i didnt get very far with it I found at that age games were meant to be played not badly written ;)

Never had the pleasure of Amos, I however did have the BBasic 2.1 pleasure!

I still have my Blitz 2.1 All boxed and looking good.

Before that, I remember coding (a little) assembler using DevST from HiSoft and SToS (François Lionet), which were on the Atari ST. On the Amiga I use to code with DevAM (again only a little), Amos (François Lionet), GFABasic and then to Blitz (Acid Software). If my memory serves me correctly, Blitz was distributed by Guildhall Leisure. Aw, the memories!

I think there were four developers. Mark Sibly and Simon Armstrong were two of the originals, I cannot remember the other two. Acid Software rocked.

I think I still have my original DevST and DevAM aswell.

My copy isn't quite boxed anymore, however I still do have the manuals (with various notes scribbled on when I ran out of note paper in my Rapid Application Development..... isn't everything?).

Yep, Acid Software rocked awright.

BUMs remember them.Could not wait for mine to drop through the letter box,to see what goodies they held.

Ahh, yes the Blitz User Magazines... is that right ?

Yep thats right,new deflibs file and Blitz ide,then trying to suss out how to use the new commands.Geez i still remember some of the old syntax.

NEWTYPE .star
starspeed.q : q was called quick i believe.
x
y
starimage
End NEWTYPE

Dim List stars.star(30)

Mark Sibly and Acid software got me started in programming so thank you to them.
Great times indeed.
:)

I've still got reams of code that I printed of developing the Bike speed logger above, I confess I hacked it together - probably caused me lots of grief in the long run - but it got there. Unfortunately the Miggy had its demise as I was finishing the software of. I Still remeber the issue of CUAmiga with the big foot on the front.



http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/cuamiga5.html

The article in the link states ironically the magazine was the largest Amiga magazine in circulation at it's demise, C'est La Vie.

It is a sad state of affairs but,everything dies in the end.
Be well all.

Yep, just like this thread (;-). Off to watch a movie....

On a positive note, My miggy still lives and breathes , he he. AND i think someone mentioned GP2X might run BBasic 2.1 stuff - correct me if i'm wrong.

@Wings, much respect for your TCP Server / Client code! BBasic still kixx AMOS bony backside though.

People still do programming Blitz 2.1 or Amos pro(yep I still got that ) on Amiga today

strange but true.

Cool...

Bought my Amiga 1200 back to life recently. Still works, with a better powerpack and a good condition mouse

another resurrected miggy woo hoo! This other thread has me thinking as I already have the null modem lead....

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77060

hey Billamu,

what you like to do on amiga?