Making an "80 column agnostic" utility

[nebpehtira]

Hi All,

 

I'm putting together ideas for a utility in Atari Basic that will need an 80 column display, but would like it to be hardware agnostic (i.e. not fussy about either XEP-80 or VBXE board etc.). Is this even a possibility? If anyone could point me towards documentation / examples for Atari Basic code that deals with hardware driven 80 col displays, would be super grateful

 

Thanks!

 

 

[danwinslow]

Typically this is achievable if the devices in question use (or at least respond to) the E: and S: handlers in a standard way. If they do not, then it becomes much more difficult.

[Kaj de Vos]

I just published such a utility:

 

As Dan says, the main thing is that the user has the right handler loaded. Then your program can just PEEK RMARGN to find out how wide the screen is.

 

I did find that this doesn't work with the enhanced screen mode in Altirra, so there may be other drivers that don't set RMARGN properly.

[nebpehtira]

1 hour ago, Kaj de Vos said:

I just published such a utility:

 

As Dan says, the main thing is that the user has the right handler loaded. Then your program can just PEEK RMARGN to find out how wide the screen is.

 

I did find that this doesn't work with the enhanced screen mode in Altirra, so there may be other drivers that don't set RMARGN properly.

fantastic work, and good advice! Thank you

[dmsc]

i!

11 hours ago, nebpehtira said:

Hi All,

 

I'm putting together ideas for a utility in Atari Basic that will need an 80 column display, but would like it to be hardware agnostic (i.e. not fussy about either XEP-80 or VBXE board etc.). Is this even a possibility? If anyone could point me towards documentation / examples for Atari Basic code that deals with hardware driven 80 col displays, would be super grateful

 

Thanks!

 

As others have said, if you don't access the video memory directly and only use standard I/O to the "E:" driver, your program just work in 80 column mode.

 

The FastBasic editor is written in BASIC, and adapts to any number of columns: https://github.com/dmsc/fastbasic/blob/master/src/editor.bas

 

Have Fun!