{"id":288,"date":"2009-08-24T19:28:09","date_gmt":"2009-08-25T03:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pagetable.com\/?p=288"},"modified":"2009-08-24T19:28:09","modified_gmt":"2009-08-25T03:28:09","slug":"ti-994a-basic-as-a-scripting-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pagetable.com\/?p=288","title":{"rendered":"TI-99\/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a good time for statically recompiled versions of BASIC from old computers.\u00c2\u00a0 First there was Apple I BASIC<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Then came Commodore BASIC<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, due to overwhelming demand, we’re proud to release TI-99\/4A BASIC<\/a>. For those unfamiliar the TI-99\/4A<\/a> was a home computer by Texas Instruments released in 1981. Unusually for the time it had a 16-bit CPU: the TMS9900<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Download the program from the project page on SourceForge<\/a>. Binaries for Windows and Mac OS X are available and the source should compile on most POSIX-like systems. If you port it to a new platform please drop us a line; we’d love hear about it.<\/p>\n

It supports the same interfaces as the previous projects.\u00c2\u00a0 You can use it interactively in direct mode:<\/p>\n

$ tibasic\nTI BASIC READY\n>print 4*atn(1)\n 3.141592654\n\n>bye<\/pre>\n
Or you can write a line-numbered program:<\/p>\n
$ tibasic\n>10 FOR I=1 TO 10\n>20 PRINT TAB(I);\"Hello, world!\"\n>30 NEXT I\n>RUN\nHello, world!\n Hello, world!\n  Hello, world!\n   Hello, world!\n    Hello, world!\n     Hello, world!\n      Hello, world!\n       Hello, world!\n        Hello, world!\n         Hello, world!\n\n** DONE **\n\n>BYE<\/pre>\n
You can also run programs from a file:<\/p>\n
$ cat name.bas\n10 INPUT \"What is your name? \":N$\n20 PRINT \"Hello, \";N$;\"!\"\n\n$ tibasic.exe name.bas\nWhat is your name? James\nHello, James!<\/pre>\n
There are a few sample programs available on the homepage<\/a> that you can run in this manner.<\/p>\n
How it works<\/h3>\n
This program works much like the already mentioned Commodore BASIC project.  The original program is statically recompiled to produce a new native binary.  The recompiler is the work of Michael Steil and the\u00c2\u00a0 support for the TI-99\/4A is by James Abbatiello.<\/p>\n
The output of the recompiler is tibasic.c which is platform independent.  The support functions are in runtime_functions.c and it is this file that you would edit to port to a new system or to add new features.<\/p>\n
There are a couple quirks of the TI-99\/4A which made this a bit trickier to support than the C64 version:<\/p>\n