ABasic - The Origional AmigaBasic

A discussion on a newsgroup brought up ABasic, the origional basic for the Amiga. I remembered that I had a PD disk that had it on it as part of a backgammon game. I couldn't get it working with my normal system, even after changing to KS1.3, useing TUDE and trying various other tricks. I eventually got it runnig under UAE and took a screen shot. BTW It runs on a seperate lo-res screen. What I found interesting was that it supports an init.bas file that is run at startup. In this case the ABasic executable was renamed Backgammon and init.bas contained the game code.

The colours may not be right as the ECS chipset limits UAE to 16 colours. I darkened the background colour manually since UAE picked a colour very close to the white used for he window borders. It looked ugly with dithering so I turned it off.

From looking at the backgammon code the syntax is very different from AmigaBasic, which makes sense since it is not a M$ product, but is from a company called MetaComo (According to the copyright notice)

BTW UAE is very slow on a 68030/25, especially when you have to use VMM to run it.

To run this I created a bootable disk with just ABasic and stack (It needs at least 50k of stack - and complains if it doesn't get it).

Although I don't have much more info about it if you have any questions just email me at sdalimon@home.com

Here is the screen shot:

Click for larger image (659x210 GIF, 4k)

This page created on an A3000/030/25/10MB using MicroEmacs, ADPro, Brilliance, UAE and Slurp