[BBC-Micro] Of potential interest to BASIC programmers: ElectrEm 0.6

[Thomas Harte]

Sorry, I know this isn't an advertising list, but I thought I'd say that I've just released the proper theoretically-stable new version of my Electron emulator with a feature I've not seen in any others: the ability to import and export BBC BASIC from ASCII text directly to/from the emulated machine — no virtual media or any other tool inbetween. You can also do things like set up file associations for your BBC BASIC text files (extensions .txt, .bas and .bbc are supported, though I think I'm misuing whichever of those is meant to be tokenised) so that when you double click them the emulator automatically opens, imports the BASIC file and issues a RUN command. So you could theoretically edit your BBC BASIC in Notepad or your favourite editor, then just double click it in an Explorer window to see how it runs. An oversight means that the emulator doesn't automatically associate BASIC filetypes with itself yet, but it optionally will in future versions as it already does for SSD/etc, ADF/etc and UEF.

Slogger 64 kB Electron execution mode is supported, so you can use most of the full 32 kB for BASIC code even though there is no emulated Mode 7 peripheral in the modern version of the emulator yet.

Web site is http://electrem.acornelectron.co.uk, the emulator is available for Windows and Mac OS X, and I intend to sever the BASIC import/export code for the use of others if they want it. You could already just grab BASIC.h and BASIC.cpp from the source distribution because they're already written as a discrete module, but it'd be trivial to turn into pure C so I intend to do that.

Sorry again if the nature of this post offends anyone.

-Thomas

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