Posted January 27, 2024 by spotlessmind1975
#ugbasic #basic #programming #retrocomputer
Version 1.15.3 of ugBASIC and UGBASIC-IDE has just been released.
To do this we find the first implementation of the DLOAD and DSAVE commands to, respectively, load and save data to mass storage. At the moment this is an experimental function available for the following targets: atari, atarixl, c64, c128, cpc, msx1 and vic20. Support is also eventually available for the coco and coco3 targets, but it is very experimental.
Other instructions have been added: DEFDGR, which allows you to redefine graphic fonts at run time, POKEW and PEEKW, which allow you to write and read one integer (2 bytes) at a time; POKED and PEEKD, which allow you to write and read a long integer (4 bytes) at a time; STRPTR, which allows you to get the address where a string begins.
A better hard coded palette has been selected for the various graphics cards, and the compiler has been made more consistent with the BASIC specification. In particular, FOR...NEXT instructions now allow you to indicate dynamic extremes, as well as being able to interact with the counter variable and with the step, and jump inside or outside the FOR...NEXT loop freely.