I received an Email that got me thinking. The sender had written a program in Mallard Basic for the PCW. It had served him well for several years but he was asking how he could use it on his PC.
Norman Hancock sent me the following Email :
'I saw your note on the above on your website. There is no need to change to another version of Basic. I have had the Mallard Basic on the PC for some time now. According to the website www.locoscript.com it is still available for £39.95 or £19.95 for the disc only. Since the book is identical to the original, which has references to MS-DOS where required e.g in REN, it may not be necessary to buy another copy. With Mallard Basic installed, all that is required is to make a copy of the CP/M disc with Basic programs on and use msodbala.com to make it readable by the PC. There is even no need to convert the programs to ASCII.'
I had forgotten that Mallard Basic is available for the PC. From Norman's information one may only need to buy the disc if the original Amstrad Basic manual is available. To find out more about transferring CP/M discs to PC go to the OTHERSTUFF section and select "Transferring files between PCW and PC" msodbala.com may not work for you but there are other programs available.
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My reply, before I learned the above, was as follows and it is still of interest.
1) Rewrite your program in
a Basic suitable for the PC. Some of the early PC Basics aren't so much
different from Mallard Basic. One that comes to mind is GW-Basic and a later
language is QBasic. These programs run in DOS, which may be a problem if
you're running Windows XP. These languages and others are widely documented
and can be downloaded from the web. Web-based tutorials are also available.Try
the search engine Google.
2) Download and run one of the versions of JOYCE, the PCW simulator by John
Elliott. You will then be able to run your program directly without modification.
Check it out on my site.
3) If you want to contact like spirits post a message on the newsgroup comp.sys.amstrad.8bit
or there are probably other newsgroups dealing with Basic programming.
Best wishes
Ron King
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After I sent the Email I started thinking about this problem and particularly about the older PC Basics. I entered GW-Basic into the Google search engine and was amazed at the number of sites that were turned up. I downloaded GW-BASIC from one plus a few programs and tried it out.
I am currently running Windows ME but I'm sure that 95 and 98 at least are similar. I'm not sure about XP. When I clicked on the icon, GW-Basic opened in a DOS window as shown below.
Along the bottom of the screen are various useful commands which are accessed
by the Function keys eg. F1=List etc. I haven't used it much but have found
that GW-Basic is an interpreted Basic and has many of the same commands
as Mallard Basic. For example, AUTO brings up line numbers 10,20,30,etc.
as needed. LIST -100 lists lines numbered up to 100, LIST 300-400 lists
lines from 300 to 400 and so on. I wrote in a simple program using Mallard
methods and it worked OK
10 FOR a=1 TO 10
20 PRINT " Hello world"
30 NEXT
40 END
and it worked. I've put Key words in upper case for clarity. Other commands such as LIST 30 also worked. In Mallard you have to use "escape codes" to make a function CLS to clear the screen. In GW-Basic this is already done for you - just type CLS then [Enter]
When it came to leaving a program I first tried QUIT. No joy, but when I used SYSTEM as in Mallard it worked. I believe that GW-Basic is probably derived from Mallard Basic, but it can handle colour, which Mallard can't.
A problem arose when I tried to type quotation marks " and I found that my keyboard, in the DOS window had reverted to a USA standard. I got over this by typing [Shift]@ which served nicely. I expect there's a better way but I haven't found it yet.
Bye for now
Ron