Altirra xtra BASIC functions

[ac.tomo]

I was tinkering about with Altirra the other day altering the ROM BASIC to a RAM one and when I was listing all of its BASIC commands and functions I discovered some more that I've never seen before (even in TURBO-BASIC). I checked out the HELP section but did not see these extra commands explained anywhere, please if anyone can help I'm looking for the correct syntax as to how to use these newly discovered statements:

 

There's disk functions that I'm fine with such as: STATUS, BPUT, BGET, ERASE, PROTECT, UNPROTECT, DIR, RENAME

Others that I'm fine with are: MOVE, IF/ELSE/ENDIF, DPOKE, DPEEK, CP, HEX$, ERR, COM

The ones I'm not sure how to use are: LOMEM, PMGRAPHICS, PMMOVE, VSTICK, HSTICK, PMADR

 

I imagine LOMEM acts just like a normal variable and sets the lower end of the DL and DM, but I'm not sure of the syntax of the other PMG ones.

[phaeron]

The additional keywords are all adapted from BASIC XL -- here's the manual for Altirra BASIC:

https://www.virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra BASIC Reference Manual.pdf (linked from https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html)

[ac.tomo]

Many thanx for that phaeron.

[rsh]

Altirra basic needs the move, bget, bput, poke, peek, dpeek, dpoke to support bank switching like Basic XE.    Basic XE added an extra parameter the specifies the extended memory bank.   This would eliminate the need for special extra bank routines required taking up your program space.   Looks like Altirra has captured almost all of Basic XE style commands except for these... which I think is really important... 

 

Basic XE has a mode called "extend" that allowed those functions to work with the extra 64K in 130XE... but Altirra could be smart enough to not need command and be able to access all compy/rambo memory for the emulator or real hardware like the NUC+ or other hardware mods.   I think Altirra should still support the "extend" command as an option because the extend in basic XE moved all of the program into the extended ram freeing the other main 32K up for whatever.  This allowed you to wright a huge basic program filling up the extended banks bottom up, anything you didn't use could be used for data.   It was quite brilliant by OSS an elegant.       

 

*** I REPOSTED IN the ALTIRRA 4.0 Released THREAD to be in a better place ***

Edited July 26, 2022 by rsh