PC-BASIC to a diffrent platform like iOS for iPads.
A free, cross-platform emulator for GW-BASIC, PCjr & Tandy BASIC
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PC-BASIC as a GWBASIC simulator is an excellent piece of software for PC's. I wonder if there's a possibility to adapting a compiled version for iOS like IPads or IPhone, thru App-Store. Some have tried some versions, but some of their works are not even close to the work efforts spend in this product. I know is a long shot, but maybe it could be a motivation since there's some of a demand for this kind of work in a App
There is an example of Hand-BASIC app that simulates CMP Commodore BASIC v2 in an App, which is really good, but PC-BASIC using a fixed graphics simulation for that platform could be overwhelming, but very powerful on its kind. I'm just daydreaming, but maybe it could be possible. :-)
Ronald.
Pd. Why people will be bothering themselves using obsolete and very old structure of odd programming in a language that is not productive against other languages like Python? Well, because is fun!!! to handle a simple language... (yes, BASIC maybe an awful language to be professional or educational, but it is simple an easy way to construct a simple basic program without elaborated structure-syntax code) ...that can be nostalgically also. In other words, in PC people will prefer other things to spend time. But when it's in a platform like iPads or iPhones, and the really silly things that they can do, may produce a prospect-user to get more demanding for just showing off. I don't know what you guys may think, but when I'm waiting for my turn in a doctor office and I’m bothering myself in, like fun programs, while people get bored reading or looking their watches, makes my heart warm doing some stuff at my own. :-)
OK now I'm gone. See ya!
Hi Ronald,
There was an old version of PC-BASIC for Android. I discontinued it for a number of reasons: mostly because it was a bit of a hack that was difficult to maintain, but it was also difficult to use (e.g. keyboard input works quite differently on mobile). It also depended on RAPT which was itself discontinued. Because keeping it working stopped me from making necessary changes to other parts of PC-BASIC I decided to stop supporting it at the time.
Python is (unfortunately) not a great platform for mobile - libraries like Kivy do enable app development, but using Kivy would require a substantial rewrite. More promising is probably to borrow from Tom Rothamel's work (renpy and pygame-sdl2) which supports SDL2 through Android on mobile platforms.
There are some more fundamental issues: importantly, mobile apps need to be able to store themselves and resume from storage, as mobile OSes may kill the app at any point and expect it to come back to life as if nothing happened. This is difficulty to support perfectly in the present architecture of PC-BASIC, which keeps track of the evaluation state of expressions by mapping them to function calls rather than some more easily storable object.
Finally, deployment of the app tends to be painful with lots of things going wrong without much feedback. For Apple OSes in particular, you basically need a jailbroken device or a "development licence" which carries fairly high yearly fees, which makes it an unattractive platform for free software.
All in all, it's certainly not impossible, and would be nice to have - as you say, toying around with silly BASIC programs while on a bus could be fun - but at present, realistically, I don't have the time to make much progress in that direction...
Rob
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Hi Rob,
Programming low level on Basic ever since the 80's, I'm SO glad I can still now, these days, combine two passions I have: looking for a system to win at Roulette (still looking) and programming those systems in Basic. It's a blast to be able in 2017 to clumsily program something without a care. If the programme fails, it's fun to find out why; good for the aging grey cells.
I use PC-Basic now since a couple of years and fulfills all my humble wishes. But I was wondering if it could be ported to Android and so I landed on this post; which gave a negative answer, unfortunately.
All the same, thanks for your wonderful work, Rob!
Henkus Schumacher
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Hi Rob,
Using several technical calculation programs on several portable processor-based machines - originally written to some versions of BASIC. I just succeeded to download/convert them to PC-BASIC on Windows-based PCs. All of them work now perfectly on your PC-BASIC emulator !
I am studying now a way to adapt them from Windows to Anroid-based systems. I understood, that you are not working to that direction due the huge conversion work required !?
So far on I found two somehow possible methods for aproach by trying:1) coversion of PC-BASIC-package on DOS-Level or 2) with conjunction INNO-setup ... ?
I understand, that some part of usabilty may be lost ...especially with keyboard-functions ...
I would like to appreciate your comments/proposals ...
Best regards,
Jorma Paavola
Hi Jorma, thanks for you message and great that your programs work on PC-BASIC! I'm not currently working on an Android version mainly because I don't have the time - indeed there is quite a bit of work involved: even if there are solutions to run Python and SDL on Android, it takes time and work to get those working and on top of that fairly big adaptations are needed to make e.g. suspend/resume work as well as to make it work somewhat intuitively in the absence of a physical keyboard. AT the moment I don't have a lot of time to put into PC-BASIC, so I am limiting myself mostly to bug fixes and support.
I'm not familiar with INNO-setup, so I can't really give any useful comments there, and I don't really know what you mean by conversion on DOS-level...
Rob