Beautiful presentation, Steven! The Plus/4 is such a wonderful machine, I'm so glad you're giving him some much needed screen time :-) PS: that dark datasette was my first tape drive back in the day. I used it with a C64 via an adapter (the lighter ones were sold out), so I guess I always had a soft spot for this little guy.
Kind words! Thanks so much and again for the inspiration. I'm loving the Plus/4. I had a C128 in the day and the BASIC versions are similar with enhanced commands. If I remove gameplay, I much prefer the Plus/4 as tinkerers retro-computer.
The screen window definition would be useful if you could define it within the program and you POKEd screen ram with stats like energy bar outside the window defined, keep the speed up of BASIC screen updates..
That's a sweet idea. In the last video of the series, I cover the use of POKE to place characters in screen locations. This would make an interesting BASIC programming experiment. Thanks for sharing this.
@@retroCombs I found it difficult to find the same sort of detailed technical info for the TED machines as I can with the C64/VIC-20 programmers ref guide. The C16/Plus4 programmers ref guide gives you less somehow. I know the POKEs to position the cursor before printing on C64 and also how to do the reverse scrolling in BASIC V2 but not for the later versions of Commodore BASIC but they must be there because the screen editor works in the same way on all Commodore micros. I did a simple reverse scroll driving game with static score/status at the top of the screen which for BASIC is quite impressive. Sadly PETSPEED64 didn't like something because the compiled version doesn't work....yet! It's a shame all these little tricks printed in many magazines back then are really hard to find outside what is in the user/programmers ref guides. Commodore machines get a bad reputation for BASIC but because of the super efficient character based screens there's quite a lot you can do. Working on a routine I can compile to do horizontal scrolling game engine.
@@retroCombs I downloaded one as a PDF....about 3 pages on graphics and 300 on BASIC commands for text based stuff lol. I think one of Commodore's receptionists wrote it :)
Beautiful presentation, Steven! The Plus/4 is such a wonderful machine, I'm so glad you're giving him some much needed screen time :-) PS: that dark datasette was my first tape drive back in the day. I used it with a C64 via an adapter (the lighter ones were sold out), so I guess I always had a soft spot for this little guy.
Kind words! Thanks so much and again for the inspiration. I'm loving the Plus/4. I had a C128 in the day and the BASIC versions are similar with enhanced commands. If I remove gameplay, I much prefer the Plus/4 as tinkerers retro-computer.
The screen window definition would be useful if you could define it within the program and you POKEd screen ram with stats like energy bar outside the window defined, keep the speed up of BASIC screen updates..
That's a sweet idea. In the last video of the series, I cover the use of POKE to place characters in screen locations. This would make an interesting BASIC programming experiment. Thanks for sharing this.
@@retroCombs I found it difficult to find the same sort of detailed technical info for the TED machines as I can with the C64/VIC-20 programmers ref guide. The C16/Plus4 programmers ref guide gives you less somehow. I know the POKEs to position the cursor before printing on C64 and also how to do the reverse scrolling in BASIC V2 but not for the later versions of Commodore BASIC but they must be there because the screen editor works in the same way on all Commodore micros. I did a simple reverse scroll driving game with static score/status at the top of the screen which for BASIC is quite impressive. Sadly PETSPEED64 didn't like something because the compiled version doesn't work....yet! It's a shame all these little tricks printed in many magazines back then are really hard to find outside what is in the user/programmers ref guides. Commodore machines get a bad reputation for BASIC but because of the super efficient character based screens there's quite a lot you can do. Working on a routine I can compile to do horizontal scrolling game engine.
Agreed. There was mention of a Programmers Reference Manual but I've not been able to locate one.
@@retroCombs I downloaded one as a PDF....about 3 pages on graphics and 300 on BASIC commands for text based stuff lol. I think one of Commodore's receptionists wrote it :)
@@madcommodore Ha! Too funny. Mind sending me a copy at retrocombs@icloud.com?