SmartBASIC - A Coleco Adam Forum

Great reference, although I have a deep dislike for Basics that rely on them to access most of the computer's functions, such as the C64 Basic because they make the code practically unreadable without constantly having to refer to POKE and PEEK tables. I guess I was spoiled by the TI Extended Basic ...

Is it odd that these extensions don't work under T-DOS? The demo programs compile fine but when you run the resulting .com file the system just freezes up. I thought T-DOS it was 99% CP/M compatible but maybe this falls into that 1%? If these could work in T-DOS it'd be awesome mainly because its s...

Here's a complete bitmap package for the Turbo Pascal 3 compiler under CP/M which will allow you to take advantage of the Adam's graphic capabilities using the power of a compiled Pascal environment. I’d like to play around with this on my Adam. Wmaalouli could you please post the source code for t...

So I tried to use the Windows version and I'm getting nowhere with it.
Sargon was the only disk image that worked, otherwise I get the typewriter screen or more commonly just a black screen in NTSC mode...
Not sure what I'm missing here.

joltguy wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 01, 2020 2:09 pm

Does this mean that more than 4 sprites can't appear at the same y-coordinate regardless of what their x-coordinate is?

Exactly. You can easily test this out. Some games actually make use of this limitation as a "feature"

One limitation of the 9918 VDP is that you can only have 4 sprites on a single row. Additional ones will not be displayed. So when you are programming with sprites, you need to make sure that situation does not occur.

If you use assembly then you have very little constraints under CP/M. Also you have the option of using Turbo Pascal with the graphics, sound and controller extensions I developed for it, thus giving you a powerful development tool which is very easy to work with. Finally CP/M is a full OS with matu...

Interesting. I don't recall this issue occuring under emulation, only on real hardware. I used Virtual Adam for development and testing.

Yup, this happens sometimes and is related to timing issues with VDP port communication. It's very random and solved by resetting the computer. I have not found a solution to that because it seems to be a hardware issue....

Would you be interested in converting this to use an 80 column card? I'm not sure it would be worth the effort given that 80 column cards are not prevalent. Also since this is CP/M based, it would require a patched CP/M version for 80 column as well. As far as I can tell, there is very little devel...