VIC 20 Prg Gen 'Released'

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Thu Mar 25, 2010 3:45 pm

Eh?
After literally hours of work here's a demo of VIC20PrgGen, a cross development tool which runs under windows.

A few of you might recognise its big brother, C64PrgGen. Anyway, I'd like you guys to play around with it and let me know what you think, either in this forum or at ajordison@yahoo.co.uk

the link is:

http://www.mediafire.com/?tmgzzzmqdeo

Note until I get it sorted out you can't have VIC20prggen and C64Prggen installed at the same time. Sorry!

Please read the help file as it points out what it can (and can't) do yet!

Cheers.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:42 pm

I downloaded it and tried to import a vic-20 basic prg and got the message: "This prg is not Commodore 64 BASIC 2.0".

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:54 pm

Are you developing in Visual C# or Visual Basic?

Here is an idea for you: What I would like to see in an application like this is basic labels instead of line numbers. So that the line numbers would be generated only to the exported .prg file.

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 2:23 am

Boray wrote:I downloaded it and tried to import a vic-20 basic prg and got the message: "This prg is not Commodore 64 BASIC 2.0".

Hi,
I forgot to turn that feature off. There's no way round it at the moment. I need to think about importing programs as they can go to different addresses based in the memory config.

As for the labels it's something I looked at a while ago but forgot about. You can already use labels as constants though.

Cheers

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 3:50 am

Great! I've downloaded this but unfortunately I'm away this weekend so I won't be able to play with it for a few days. Glad to see a 'release' so soon though!

As far asimporting PRG's into the correct memory locations maybe if you asked Boray nicely you could use his PRG Starter as a basis or some kind of 'plug-in'?

Diddl · Post by **Diddl** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:29 am

Look very cool!

This would be a nice base to make a BASIC compiler for example.

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 7:08 am

Diddl wrote:Look very cool!

This would be a nice base to make a BASIC compiler for example.

Thanks for that. I had a go at a basic compiler a while ago for C64PrgGen but I wasn't superhuman enough to do it, so the chances of a VIC version are slim.

One of these days....

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 6:01 am

Here's another new version, this one has some more features enabled, such as importing programs. Enjoy!

http://www.mediafire.com/?zzi4zjdg2zz

Once again your feedback (good, bad, indifferent) is appreciated.

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 6:14 am

Groovy! I'll play with this later today.

nbla000 · Post by **nbla000** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 8:17 am

Wow I missed it

a very useful tool !!!

I will use it for my next papersoft "re-typing" work maybe this week-end btw after a first look I have some suggestion:

Generate and Launch use fixed code generation and Emulator control options, I think is better to add a subfolder:

Generate and Launch
->Vic unexpanded
->Vic +3K
->Vic +8K or plus

Just another thing, the screen code builder tool is very useful but how to write {cbm + c} or {shift + c} instead of the {188}{195} screen codes ?

btw a very good work !!!

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 2:52 pm

nbla000 wrote:Generate and Launch use fixed code generation and Emulator control options, I think is better to add a subfolder:

Generate and Launch
->Vic unexpanded
->Vic +3K
->Vic +8K or plus

Just another thing, the screen code builder tool is very useful but how to write {cbm + c} or {shift + c} instead of the {188}{195} screen codes ?

btw a very good work !!!

Thanks for the suggestions for the quicklaunch, that's a great idea. I'll look at how to do {cbm+c} etc too.

Cheers

nbla000 · Post by **nbla000** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 3:24 pm

ajordison wrote:I'll look at how to do {cbm+c} etc too.

Thank you,
This is important if you want retype compute! programs since they don't use cbm graphic symbols and you don't know on fly which symbol is CBM+C or SHIFT+C, take a look on pseudotokens.txt file on the bastext 1.04 archive (a [de]tokenizer for C64)
Another similar syntax is used by tok64 another detokenizer.

I've seen that you may customize Screen Codes strings but may be useful to use different key profiles customizable by users with external files, each file with a different syntax string for different magazines or user habit.
For example PaperSoft but I think same for Compute!, use [<C>] for CBM + C and C for SHIFT + C while BasText use {cm c} and just C upper case since contrariwise of Vic 20 Program Generator the code is written in lower case.
This is a comparison table between PaperSoft-BasText (page 7 of this PDF)

ajordison · Post by **ajordison** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 3:32 pm

I based the screen codes on the same syntax that tok64 uses. In the three years that C64prggen's been around nobody's commented on the screen code builder, which lead me to believe that nobody used it!

Thanks for the info, I'll have a better look at it when I get a chance.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 5:02 pm

ajordison wrote:I based the screen codes on the same syntax that tok64 uses. In the three years that C64prggen's been around nobody's commented on the screen code builder, which lead me to believe that nobody used it!

Thanks for the info, I'll have a better look at it when I get a chance.

The insertable character codes is one of the features that makes me consider using your program, because if you program in VICE for example, you can't see the graphical symbols on the keys like on a real vic-20.

Would it be possible for you to show the actual symbols in the text instead or {123} etc?

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 5:04 pm

nbla000 wrote:Generate and Launch
->Vic unexpanded
->Vic +3K
->Vic +8K or plus

Great idea!