Discovered Great-Cow-Basic yesterday, and by this afternoon I'm as happy as a dog with two tails. Two popular families of microcontroller with a common programming language for both - inspired thinking - full kudos to 'The Team'. There's only been one slight wrinkle so far, which I'll mention here just in case anyone else is running an old computer with dated software.
I like to use an old Dell (Pentium 3) for programming microcontrollers, as it has serial ports and even the old ISA bus (easy to interface to), and with Win98SE there's direct access to I/O ports. But - when I came to view your 8Mb help file 'gcbasic.pdf', the listings within boxes were absent, both with Acrobat 5 and an early (Win98) version of Foxit Reader. So - I 'converted' this .pdf to .pdf (yeah, I know ...) using online2pdf.com . This returned a 2Mb .pdf copy which now displays the listings ok when using either Foxit Reader or Acrobat 5. I'm sure with a modern computer there's no problem - but that's one cure which works if anyone else has this problem when using ancient kit.
I also found great difficulty sourcing a copy of .Net Framework 1.1 (and 2) - even from Microsoft (!) - but downloaded both from http://www.oldversion.com/ without any problems.
That's it for a first post - look forward to chatting with you guys when I've got some experience with GCB under my belt.
BTW - I agree with the opinions expressed in the previous post - Arduino Nano's from China are superb value. A fully functional micro-controller module for the cost of a cup of coffee. The only downside I can see with these is the Arduino's use of C++ for programming. But that no longer applies, thanks to you guys ...
Last edit: Colin Powell 2017-12-04
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Help is available as Windows Help, PDF, HTML (web), HTML5 and XML. The Help is updated daily as the development team improve the software and libraries.
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When I wrote that I was "as happy as a dog with two tails", this was in anticipation that the GC software would run on '98. This assumption was based on a Google entry - if the search terms "great cow basic avr win98" are entered, the 4th in the list that Google returns reads:
Great Cow Graphical Basic Software - Free Download Great Cow ...
www.winsite.com/great/great+cow+graphical+basic/?
Great Cow Graphical Basic, free great cow graphical basic software downloads. ... Great Cow BASIC is an open-source BASIC compiler for 8 bit Microchip PIC and Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Also included in the project ... Runs on: Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT 3.x, WinNT 4.x, Windows2000, WinXP, Windows2003. Basic ...
But when I came to actually read the FAQs today ("when all else fails, read the manual") it seems that XP is considered here to be the base-line system:
FAQ-Windows-specific
What version of Windows is supported?
All versions from Windows XP have been proven to operate as expected. Issues have been seen with industrial Windows XP.
What version of .NET is required for Great Cow Graphical BASIC?
Windows versions have the pre-requisite of .NET 3.5.
I'm a tad confused (nothing new there, then) by an earlier reference I'd come across which stated that .NET 1.1 was required - which had further supported my assumption about the acceptability of Win98.
Ok, moving on ...
Neither the GCGB nor the GCB(full) installer programs wanted to load, but I was able to fool these by invoking KernelEx to disguise the operating system as XP.
Although the machine I normally use for programming microcontrollers is a DELL GX1 (with the ISA bus), today I used a Dell GX110, 1.0Ghz Pentium 3, 133Mhz FSB, 512Mb ram, with a freshly defrag-ed 4Gb Seagate - probably 5400. All Stone-Age stuff.
Nothing IDE-wise would run - which is hardly surprising - and by now I'd pretty-much given-up with any serious intentions - but just for fun I ran gcbasic.exe - which, being a command line program seemed quite at home with Win98. It took 1 min 35 secs to produce the required .HEX file and various listings.
So - yes, the base program can be made to run under an early Windows (if the install.exe is over-ruled by KernelEx) - but I'm not sure it's such a good move. A pity, as PicBasic Pro happily runs under Win98 - but those guys don't (won't ?) support AVR - so I'll just have to gracefully accept the GC limitations and install onto an XP machine, as the pro's of GC appear to far outweigh any small con's.
Apologises for this being such a long post.
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Yes, a lot of info! The Website winsite is listing very very old Versions of Great Cow BASIC, it's nice, nevertheless there come people via their links to GCB.
As far as I know there is now actual Description what hardware is recommended. And btw. it depends heavily on what a user you are. Some using the provided Package with GCB@Syn as IDE, some do only Commandline, others using their own Editor. So that are still very raw considerations. I ask in the FAQ thread for other user experience let's see if the FAQ can be enhanced.
... And 1.35 minutes is not to bad.
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Thanks for the kind words. I decided - just out of curiosity - to see how this machine (a GX110 as mentioned before) would handle XP, as I've heard that XP can even be run on a 486, that is - if you don't mind hanging around all day listening to your hard drive grinding back and forth ...
So I duly installed a copy of XP SP3 on a 7200 rpm Hitachi Deskstar 80Gb - and ran the full GCB install.exe , without a single hitch. With .NET 2 installed, the Graphical Basic runs just fine, although that's not really my thing as I'm very much a text person.
Your IDE is something else ! Looks like it can do everything except make the tea. So - guess I'll be working my way around that program for a good few days. Excellent - we're firing on all cylinders now.
Oh - forget to say that with the 7200 drive running, your GLCD test program now compiles to a .HEX file (etc) in 1 min 15 secs. Very pleased indeed.
So it would appear that seriously old hardware will be fine for compiling less demanding programs - that is, providing it can support XP.
Many thanks, guys.
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@Colin. This is an offer you will not get every day! Would you be willing to write up your experience so we can put on the website? I am not asking for a glowing report but a factual experience of the operating system journey.
Please do...
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Sure - I'll script something out this evening and post it to you.
One final thing (which I'll include in the write-up) is that as the base compiler itself runs inside a DOS box under Windows (XP or '98) - I was curious whether it would therefore run under stand-alone MS-DOS ? So - I created a 2Gb FAT16 bootable partition (playing safe - just in case) and with a stand-alone MS-DOS 7.1 (from the '98 OS) on-board - but sadly, gcbasic.exe flatly refused to run under DOS. Inside a DOS-Box under Windows yes - but DOS alone, no chance.
So - it looks like the minimal requirement scenario is: Win98 for running just the base compiler, with the source code written on your favourite text editor; WinXP if you want to run the IDE; and XP with .NET 2 if you want the full graphical experience ...
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@Colin Powell, I was wondering what ever became of you after you served as US Secretary of State. I'm glad you've decided to have a spin with GCB. Something I would do in my retirement also...
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Just as long as he is not designing Missile guidance systems.
We may have to get clearance from the US State Department to distribute GCB
if that is the case.
But at 80 years old, that would be a worthwhile achievement.
Boy am I pi$$ed about my real-world name appearing here ...
When I signed-up with Sourceforge, they asked for my (real) name, and a User Name, from which request I'd assumed that it would be my User Name which would be displayed. On every other forum I belong to, this is the case. Otherwise - what's the point of having a User Name ?
I rant about this because - way back in the days of the first Gulf War, when the name of the guy you refer to became a household name (even over here - in the UK) - I became inundated with hate mail, death threats - the works - from irate Muslims who were so high on emotion that they were failing to spot that I had a UK email address.
Oh well - 'tis done now.
Is he 80 ? Strewth - I thought I was older than him ...
Last edit: Colin Powell 2017-12-06
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I feel your pain Colin, I try to remain anonymous on most sites, mainly to
thwart Identity theft and targeted advertising.
For serious things like GCBASIC I am happy to be known, named and if my
code is bad Shamed, but then I am not associated with a world leader.
Welcome to GCBASIC and although we have already taken pot shots at your
name I promise we are nice guys, not suicide bombers (though I do have a
tendency to let the smoke out of things often)
So relax,
you are amongst friends here,
even if we have a sick sense of humour at times :)
Boy am I pi$$ed about my real-world name appearing here ...
When I signed-up with Sourceforge, they asked for my (real) name, and a
User Name, from which request I'd assumed that it would be my User Name
which would be displayed. On every other forum I belong to, this is the
case. Otherwise - what's the point of having a User Name ?
I rant about this because - way back in the days of the first Gulf War,
when the name of the guy you refer to became a household name (even over
here - in the UK) - I became inundated with hate mail, death threats - the
works - from irate Muslims who were so high on emotion that they were
failing to spot that I had a UK email address.
I feel your pain @Colin, same thing happened to me here. You could imagine how pissed I was at my parents (Mr. & Mrs. Geek) for naming me Moto, short for Quasimoto, which is the American spelling for Quasimodo. I thought my real name was hidden also... not getting too much hate mail though, just people feeling bad about my hunched back.... and big head with a propeller sticking out of it.
Last edit: Moto Geek 2017-12-07
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@Colin: Yes Real Names in sf.net are very common and not unusual.
But you are lucky!
In Germany everybody who owns a Website must publish his Name, Address and Phone Number for legal notice! :-(
And even worse anybody owns a Website worldwide can disclosed very easily with a oneliner or two clicks.
Btw: The reason why my Realname isn't here because it's ambiguity ;-)
So, Yeah, sf.net should work at their Registry and Description to that.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Colin's user experience is now online as the first dedicated Article here:User-Experiences, well done Colin.
It is linked in the FAQ as well so new users can find this for answer those minimum Hardware questions... Hopefully we can fill this Section with some more User stories
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Discovered Great-Cow-Basic yesterday, and by this afternoon I'm as happy as a dog with two tails. Two popular families of microcontroller with a common programming language for both - inspired thinking - full kudos to 'The Team'. There's only been one slight wrinkle so far, which I'll mention here just in case anyone else is running an old computer with dated software.
I like to use an old Dell (Pentium 3) for programming microcontrollers, as it has serial ports and even the old ISA bus (easy to interface to), and with Win98SE there's direct access to I/O ports. But - when I came to view your 8Mb help file 'gcbasic.pdf', the listings within boxes were absent, both with Acrobat 5 and an early (Win98) version of Foxit Reader. So - I 'converted' this .pdf to .pdf (yeah, I know ...) using online2pdf.com . This returned a 2Mb .pdf copy which now displays the listings ok when using either Foxit Reader or Acrobat 5. I'm sure with a modern computer there's no problem - but that's one cure which works if anyone else has this problem when using ancient kit.
I also found great difficulty sourcing a copy of .Net Framework 1.1 (and 2) - even from Microsoft (!) - but downloaded both from http://www.oldversion.com/ without any problems.
That's it for a first post - look forward to chatting with you guys when I've got some experience with GCB under my belt.
BTW - I agree with the opinions expressed in the previous post - Arduino Nano's from China are superb value. A fully functional micro-controller module for the cost of a cup of coffee. The only downside I can see with these is the Arduino's use of C++ for programming. But that no longer applies, thanks to you guys ...
Last edit: Colin Powell 2017-12-04
Welcome!
I wonder if I should take your Hardware as absolutly minimum expected to work in the General FAQ.
How much Memory do you have on Board? How long takes an Compile?
https://sourceforge.net/p/gcbasic/discussion/579126/thread/614b8880/#0e51
In my opinion I would run such an old Hardware with Linux, but your mileage will vary, as it demands a minimum of Linux knowledge
Last edit: bed 2017-12-05
Addendum.
@ http://gcbasic.sourceforge.net/Typesetter/index.php/Help you will find this:
Thanks for the welcome.
When I wrote that I was "as happy as a dog with two tails", this was in anticipation that the GC software would run on '98. This assumption was based on a Google entry - if the search terms "great cow basic avr win98" are entered, the 4th in the list that Google returns reads:
But when I came to actually read the FAQs today ("when all else fails, read the manual") it seems that XP is considered here to be the base-line system:
I'm a tad confused (nothing new there, then) by an earlier reference I'd come across which stated that .NET 1.1 was required - which had further supported my assumption about the acceptability of Win98.
Ok, moving on ...
Neither the GCGB nor the GCB(full) installer programs wanted to load, but I was able to fool these by invoking KernelEx to disguise the operating system as XP.
Although the machine I normally use for programming microcontrollers is a DELL GX1 (with the ISA bus), today I used a Dell GX110, 1.0Ghz Pentium 3, 133Mhz FSB, 512Mb ram, with a freshly defrag-ed 4Gb Seagate - probably 5400. All Stone-Age stuff.
Nothing IDE-wise would run - which is hardly surprising - and by now I'd pretty-much given-up with any serious intentions - but just for fun I ran gcbasic.exe - which, being a command line program seemed quite at home with Win98. It took 1 min 35 secs to produce the required .HEX file and various listings.
So - yes, the base program can be made to run under an early Windows (if the install.exe is over-ruled by KernelEx) - but I'm not sure it's such a good move. A pity, as PicBasic Pro happily runs under Win98 - but those guys don't (won't ?) support AVR - so I'll just have to gracefully accept the GC limitations and install onto an XP machine, as the pro's of GC appear to far outweigh any small con's.
Apologises for this being such a long post.
This is a very insightful posting. 10 out of 10. When the next person reads this they will say "thank you' also.
Yes, a lot of info! The Website winsite is listing very very old Versions of Great Cow BASIC, it's nice, nevertheless there come people via their links to GCB.
As far as I know there is now actual Description what hardware is recommended. And btw. it depends heavily on what a user you are. Some using the provided Package with GCB@Syn as IDE, some do only Commandline, others using their own Editor. So that are still very raw considerations. I ask in the FAQ thread for other user experience let's see if the FAQ can be enhanced.
... And 1.35 minutes is not to bad.
Bit of an update ...
Thanks for the kind words. I decided - just out of curiosity - to see how this machine (a GX110 as mentioned before) would handle XP, as I've heard that XP can even be run on a 486, that is - if you don't mind hanging around all day listening to your hard drive grinding back and forth ...
So I duly installed a copy of XP SP3 on a 7200 rpm Hitachi Deskstar 80Gb - and ran the full GCB install.exe , without a single hitch. With .NET 2 installed, the Graphical Basic runs just fine, although that's not really my thing as I'm very much a text person.
Your IDE is something else ! Looks like it can do everything except make the tea. So - guess I'll be working my way around that program for a good few days. Excellent - we're firing on all cylinders now.
Oh - forget to say that with the 7200 drive running, your GLCD test program now compiles to a .HEX file (etc) in 1 min 15 secs. Very pleased indeed.
So it would appear that seriously old hardware will be fine for compiling less demanding programs - that is, providing it can support XP.
Many thanks, guys.
@Colin. This is an offer you will not get every day! Would you be willing to write up your experience so we can put on the website? I am not asking for a glowing report but a factual experience of the operating system journey.
Please do...
Sure - I'll script something out this evening and post it to you.
One final thing (which I'll include in the write-up) is that as the base compiler itself runs inside a DOS box under Windows (XP or '98) - I was curious whether it would therefore run under stand-alone MS-DOS ? So - I created a 2Gb FAT16 bootable partition (playing safe - just in case) and with a stand-alone MS-DOS 7.1 (from the '98 OS) on-board - but sadly, gcbasic.exe flatly refused to run under DOS. Inside a DOS-Box under Windows yes - but DOS alone, no chance.
So - it looks like the minimal requirement scenario is: Win98 for running just the base compiler, with the source code written on your favourite text editor; WinXP if you want to run the IDE; and XP with .NET 2 if you want the full graphical experience ...
MS-DOS 7.1... no. there are calls to the OS for file handling.
Look forward the piece - do not spend hours formatting as this will go into the web and the formatting may change.
:-)
@Colin Powell, I was wondering what ever became of you after you served as US Secretary of State. I'm glad you've decided to have a spin with GCB. Something I would do in my retirement also...
Just as long as he is not designing Missile guidance systems.
We may have to get clearance from the US State Department to distribute GCB
if that is the case.
But at 80 years old, that would be a worthwhile achievement.
Boy am I pi$$ed about my real-world name appearing here ...
When I signed-up with Sourceforge, they asked for my (real) name, and a User Name, from which request I'd assumed that it would be my User Name which would be displayed. On every other forum I belong to, this is the case. Otherwise - what's the point of having a User Name ?
I rant about this because - way back in the days of the first Gulf War, when the name of the guy you refer to became a household name (even over here - in the UK) - I became inundated with hate mail, death threats - the works - from irate Muslims who were so high on emotion that they were failing to spot that I had a UK email address.
Oh well - 'tis done now.
Is he 80 ? Strewth - I thought I was older than him ...
Last edit: Colin Powell 2017-12-06
I feel your pain Colin, I try to remain anonymous on most sites, mainly to
thwart Identity theft and targeted advertising.
For serious things like GCBASIC I am happy to be known, named and if my
code is bad Shamed, but then I am not associated with a world leader.
Welcome to GCBASIC and although we have already taken pot shots at your
name I promise we are nice guys, not suicide bombers (though I do have a
tendency to let the smoke out of things often)
So relax,
you are amongst friends here,
even if we have a sick sense of humour at times :)
Cheers
Chris Roper (verifiable email)
On 7 December 2017 at 00:07, Colin Powell electrosys@users.sf.net wrote:
I feel your pain @Colin, same thing happened to me here. You could imagine how pissed I was at my parents (Mr. & Mrs. Geek) for naming me Moto, short for Quasimoto, which is the American spelling for Quasimodo. I thought my real name was hidden also... not getting too much hate mail though, just people feeling bad about my hunched back.... and big head with a propeller sticking out of it.
Last edit: Moto Geek 2017-12-07
@Colin: Yes Real Names in sf.net are very common and not unusual.
But you are lucky!
In Germany everybody who owns a Website must publish his Name, Address and Phone Number for legal notice! :-(
And even worse anybody owns a Website worldwide can disclosed very easily with a oneliner or two clicks.
Btw: The reason why my Realname isn't here because it's ambiguity ;-)
So, Yeah, sf.net should work at their Registry and Description to that.
Colin's user experience is now online as the first dedicated Article here:User-Experiences, well done Colin.
It is linked in the FAQ as well so new users can find this for answer those minimum Hardware questions... Hopefully we can fill this Section with some more User stories