Re: Tetris in Basic

["winston19842005@yahoo.com" <winston19842005@yahoo.com>]

On Mar 9, 6:44 am, lyricalnan...@dosius.ath.cx (Steve Nickolas) wrote:
> winston19842...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Yes, I think it would be a good candidate. TI Extended Basic "graphic"
> > commands are merely printing characters to the screen. The TI does
> > have sprites, but I'm pretty sure they were not utilized in this game,
> > as Tetris is a tile-based game.
>
> I've thought of writing a GR Tetris or Dr. Mario but haven't grasped the
> guts yet.
>
> TI BASIC is itself run in an interpreter, not?

Yes, mostly, with some assembly support routines. Written in GPL
(Graphics Programming Language), a low-level interpreter that was
probably developed to ease developers into developing software for the
99/4, which has a TMS9900 processor, unfamiliar to those used to
6502's, Z80's, 808x's and the like. The 9900 was based on the PDP-11.

GPL abstracted working with memory (there are several memory types in
a 99/4, ROM/RAM, GROM, VDP, the last two being port-addressed, auto-
incrementing, but slightly different) and had another small
interpreter built-in for processing display commands (FMT short for
format - nothing spectacular).

Many of the modules (especially early ones) are written in GPL. Some
even contain TI Basic! (Personal Record Keeping, for example).

TI Extended Basic optimized some of the routines to assembly.