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July BASIC Challenge

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Atari Orbit

So, over in /r/RetroBattlestations they have a series of interesting challenges that last for a month. These usually involve doing something interesting with your old battlestation, then posting proof that you achieved the challenge. Then there is voting and the most voted entry wins. So the July Challenge is running a BASIC program on a micro that does a graphic on the Mandelbaum set. Like a fractal. The Atari can certainly run BASIC.

IN fact, someone had converted the code over to Atari in TurboBASIC XL format, it was listed on a webpage for the challenge. You can see it here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroBattlestations/MandelbaumSet/main/Atari-TurboXL.txt

The ‘challenge’ part is to get your old micro to actually load and run the program, no mean feat for almost all these systems… except they still don’t fully realize the power of FUJINET….

I was noodling around and thought it would interesting to run that on my 576NUC+ and show it off on Reddit, but I’m very, very lazy and didn’t want to even imagine typing in all that code… I realized that with some tools you can make an ATR disk and move programs to it via UNIX (in my case, OSX). AtariDude wrote a nice little piece on this here: https://www.ataridude.net/posts/2021/Jul/19/creating-and-using-disk-images/ I could make a ATR disk image with the BASIC listing, copy it up to my TNFS server, then mount it via FujiNet and then somehow convert it over to ATASCII, load it in TurboBASIC XL and run it! Still, that is pretty complicated…

I was starting to do this when conversations with @tschak909 revealed that, of course, the FujiNet could do this much more easily and quickly. He then spent a considerable amount of time last night helping me, showing me how exactly to do this with my NUC. He already has a wonderful ATR image on his TNFS server with the N: Device loading and a re-relocatable version of TurboBASIC XL… exactly what I needed. My challenge was just an XIO call and ENTER command away…

So, with his help it became apparent that I could actually load that webpage’s content (the BASIC listing) directly into TBXL with just the N: device. And so we did. And it ran.

I then made a quick video and submitted a post explaining this for the contest. The challenge ends on the 31st. You can also enjoy the video and watch the Atari load a BASIC listing byte by byte via the FujiNet, from GitHub.

https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/oohzer/atari_fujinet_load_basic_direct_from_githubwith/

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