Is Amiga BASIC any good?

[Amiga1200PPC]

It crashes, if you have more than 8 MB of RAM, because M$ is too damn stupid and is misusing the address bits.

[HopperJF]

Is Amiga BASIC any good?

It's made by Micro$oft, so what do you think?

[melott]

@Wishmaster

AmigaBasic 'WILL NOT' run in fast ram.
You have to run 'NoFastMem' to run it then its
quite stable.

I used to run it on my A3k with 80 megs ram with
no problems.

I agree AmiBlitz or Amos is a much better language
but for him to start on a minimum system like an
unexpanded A500, I say go with AmigaBasic.

ACE basic (AmigaBasic w/Compiler & Extras) has a compiler
and many extra libs.
The main problem I found with AmigaBasic is the
basic editor/interpreter, its real crap.

[bloodline]

that_punk_guy wrote:

evil_nerd wrote:
IF ITS MICRO$OFT, I REFUSE TO USE IT

Yeeouch, no need to shout. ;-)

AmigaBASIC would have been a great learning language if the example programs were commented and documented properly. There's a ton of interesting stuff dealing with ILBMs and things, but as soon as you get to the meat of the program there's no explanation at all as to what it's doing. Shame.
 

AmigaBASIC breaks every Amiga Programming rule... the worst thing is that it has no WaitEvent function, and the AmigaBASIC manual actually details Busy Loops!!! Basicly, if you write an AmigaBASIC program you fcuk with the amiga's multitasking and you have no access to the Amiga Hardware.

In a word: Pointless

[melott]

@Bloodline

I don't think he intends to rewrite AROS with it :-D

Just a place to start, and that is the point.

[bloodline]

melott wrote:
@Bloodline

I don't think he intends to rewrite AROS with it :-D

Just a place to start, and that is the point.

:lol:

Well the best place to start is Blitz Basic IMHO. It allows system friendly code, and allows AGA hardware bashing. If he just wants to hit the OCS hardware then AMOS it is.

[Kronos]

@melott

Actually it just won't run when RAM is installed beyond the 1st 16MB of address-space. Had no problem running it on an A2000 with 3MB.

It will get nasty if you got anything better than 68EC20, cos of it's stupid 24bit-addressing.

[evil_nerd]

I think I'm going to use Blitz Basic 2 then :-)

By the way, my Amiga 500 has 9Mb ram (so that will be 512Kb Chip, 512Kb Slow and 8Mb Fast) but I have not yet encountered problems running AmigaBASIC ;-)

[melott]

@Kronos

I have a couple of books that I've had for (many) years
and it states that AmigaBasic won't run in fast ram.

It was said that the people at Commodore were a little
peaved because AppleBasic, which is the same basic ported
to Apple ran in fast ram. It was rummored there was a
patch wrote for AmigaBasic to make it run in fast ram.
I couldn't find a copy of it or even confirm that the
patch actually exists.

Anyway I tried to run it in fast ram on my A3k but
always crashed. As long as I ran NoFastMem first it
ran fine.
I have run it on my A3k with A WarpEngine 040 @40 mhz.
It will also run in an 800 x 600 screen but the book
examples don't work correctly.
After all is said and done AmigaBasic is 'Crap' but a
good place to start IMHO.

[Kronos]

@melott

Amiga-trivia-question No. 51224:
Where does the onboard fast-ram of an A3000/4000 sit in in it's address-space ?

Hint, the 1st byte of that address is != 0  :-P

[Doobrey]

Im>bE wrote:

I HIGHLY reccomend amiblitz2.

It might be troublesome to get it working
on an a500 without hd or extra ram tho,

Yup, the latest updates of AmiBlitz needs an FPU to run.
But I`d choose Blitz/AmiBlitz over MS Basic anyday.

[melott]

@Kronos

You got me there :-)  I really don't know.
You're probably right ( I wouldn't know even if you were
wrong)
I was able to get AmigaBasic to run on my A3k and I
enjoyed playing around with for awhile.
I never tried to write anything useful with it, that
wasn't my goal. I had no real programing experience
and it was the easiest to start with.
At the time I had Blitz 2.1, AMOS and SAS C.
The learning curve is much higher on any of those as
compared to AmigaBasic, the choice was easy to make.

[Markus_Bieler]

It crashes, if you have more than 8 MB of RAM, because M$ is too damn stupid and is misusing the address bits.

Well at that time someone said 640KB should be enough :laugh:

But I recommend ace-basic to start with. Its Amiga-Basic compatible and it runs up to OS3.9 and CPU68060

(I'll still have to try it on the pegII)

Markus

[Waccoon]

I keep confusing AmigaBasic with ABasic.  They both sucked.  MS Basic is just too damn slow and crashes like crazy.  The only good thing about ABasic is that someone made a really good Monopoly game with it, but you still need ReloKick1.3 to run it.

If you want to learn programming, you're better off with Java for coding and PHP for scripting on the PC.  If you really want to work on the Amiga, AMOS is great for graphics, but lousy for data, and the IDE will drive you nuts sometimes, especially when it corrupts your code for no reason.  It's easy to use and a lot of fun, though.  I never gave BlitzBasic a shot on the Amiga, but I own the PC version, and I think it's pretty good.  The IDE is reasonable, and it empasizes time-based programming, which is a must if you want to evolve to a true system-level language later on, like C++ or Java.

Most Basic languages get you into really nasty habits, so you'll have to un-learn everything, anyway.  I went from AMOS to C, and boy did I learn a lot in the transition.  C makes so much more sense than AMOS if you want to do more than move sprites around.  If only there was an IDE and interpreter for C that granted you a bit more slack.  AMOS is still pretty good, though, because unlike many other Basics, it enforces variable scope, doesn't require line numbers (UGH!), and the IDE allows you to collapse procedures, which is a great substitute for having to #include everything.  I wish more IDEs did that!  Blitz doesn't support procedure collapsing, but it does make a shortcut list of all your functions, which makes browsing the code a breeze.

Me, I like PHP and HTML.  Well, I don't REALLY like them, but they're still better than most.  Perl is a nightmare.  Stay well clear of it if you know what's good for you!   :-)

By the way, my Amiga 500 has 9Mb ram (so that will be 512Kb Chip, 512Kb Slow and 8Mb Fast) but I have not yet encountered problems running AmigaBASIC

Maybe it only crashes if it USES fast RAM.  Best not try to mustitask with it, then.  ;-)