I love all things ‘BASIC’. I learnt how to program by following BASIC ‘type-in’ programs from magazines in the 1980′s. You can find out more about BASIC type-ins from a recent RetroGamer article: https://www.imagineshop.co.uk/magazines/retro-gamer-issue-111.html

I’ve tried a few modern variants of BASIC but my favourite is GLBasic. I’ve owned a registered version since 2005. GLBasic is written and maintained by Gernot Frisch and he is very generous – you pay for GLBasic once and get unlimited updates. From 2005 until now I’ve been able to update to a registered copy of the latest version. Incredible.

It’s also fantastic that GLBasic supports a number of consoles and iOS and Android. I am fortunate enough to own an Open Pandora console from an original preorder in 2008.

Being a Mac owner, I’ve found it fiddly to run GLBasic on OSX. I’ve tried with WINE and Crossover but it’s hit and miss. I’ve been running it in a virtual machine for some time, but I thought it would be better, and conserve system resources by being able to run it natively. A Mac IDE surfaced a couple of years ago but it hasn’t been maintained and I can’t find a place to download it.

So, I decided to write my own Mac IDE. I’ve written it from scratch rather than using an existing IDE code base. It’s early on in the development process but it works well for me.

It’s not yet ready for release. For one thing there’s no working OSX version of the GPC precompiler available. As a stop-gap my IDE calls the windows version of GPC (gpc.exe) from a WINE installation. The editor is native but the precompiler is run with WINE. This makes it more complicated to set up.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Enjoy the video.

Dont’ call scifi novella “The Fat of It” or potential audience will think it’s about how to lose weight.

I’ve had many ideas for scifi stories – just look at the short stories on this blog!  I wanted to develop an idea into a novella. I spent long hours perfecting and polishing and then it was time to sell. I wanted to self-publish, even if some call it a vanity. To the Kindle store! Time to find my pot of gold.

I excitedly scoured the web for tales of riches. This article caught my attention: How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book

I published with Kindle Direct, filled out all the tax forms and shouted for someone to show me the money.

Well, I didn’t instantly become a millionaire.  Not even a thousandanaire or hundredanaire. So I decided to follow the advice of that article and use KDP Select. For those who don’t know, a book can’t be given away on Kindle Direct. The main method of having giveaways is to use KDP Select. Joining KDP Select allows 5 free days to promote your book to the masses.

So I joined and I knew that I was locked in for 90 days. That’s right!  Once you join KDP Select you can’t publish anywhere else, even for free, for 90 days.

I used my 5 free days  - not all consecutively. Anyway, even with the freebies, not many bought my novella. In fact, I don’t want to say how many bought it because it would be highly embarrassing. I’d rather say how many didn’t buy it – thousands.

The worst thing was that, with no benefit, I had to ride out KDP Select for the full 90 days and let my novella languish without having the ability to even give it away! There is even an automatic renewal scheduled unless you opt out. I unticked that box pretty quickly.

Would I use KDP Select again? Almost certainly not.

Should I have made a greater effort marketing in other ways: hell yes!

KDP Select is not a panacea. The gold rush is over.

Free to download from Smashwords

Description

Nick’s got an unpleasant job. He gets paid to exercise the bodies of his overweight clients while they sleep peacefully! If that wasn’t painful enough, after a messy accident, Nick is ordered to remain permanently in the severely damaged body of his least favourite client. Depressed, Nick resolves to retrieve his body with the help of a dangerous and cunning entrepreneur he knows he can’t trust.

Thanks to commenter, Guy (See Comment) for helping me find a bug in TapBASIC.    It may cause some unexpected “Missing ‘(‘” or “Name expected” errors when running a program.

It’s all fixed and I’ve submitted an update (TapBASIC version 2.5) today to Apple for review.  Hopefully, Apple will approve the update quickly.

If you’re unsure whether the error is within your code or within TapBASIC, please post here and I’ll help you sort it out.

I’m very grateful to Guy and other posters on this blog that ask for help and uncover bugs.  Thanks! If you post your issue, I may even be able to help with a bug in your code

Download

Sine Waves

Graph some sine waves.

rem graphing waveform*
clrmem
dim x(33)
dim y(33)
for a = 1 to 33
x(a) = (a-1)/10
y(a) = 1.5+sin(2*x(a))+0.33*sin(6*x(a))
next
for a = 2 to 33
line 3+60*x(a-1),60*y(a-1),3+60*x(a),60*y(a),r
next
text "finished - open graph screen"

Click to Download

Camera exposure calculator

This program is an electronic simulation of “Focus Columbus”, the venerable old 1950′s exposure calculator, which consisted of two pivoting aluminium disks with numbers for film sensitivity, diaphragms and exposure times, how they depend on date, time of day, weather and scene type.

Although modern cameras have automatic exposure,  it still very useful, because one can, at home, and late at night, predict what one will need the next day out, for example camping in the woods.

clrmem
text "Focus Columbus"
text " compute exposure"
ask " film speed in ISO=",a
s= log(800/a)/log(2)
ask " Month (1 .. 12)",m
n=int(abs(m-6)/1.6)
ask "hour=",h
if m<3
h=h+1
endif
if m>=10
h=h+1
endif
g=int(abs(h-12)/1.1)
t=n+g
input "Weather (1 light ... 4 dark)",w
text " "
text "Subject ( 1 landscape, 2 street,"
text "3 forest, 4 room)"
input "choose 1 ... 4",x
input "property 1 light ... 4 dark",l
y=24-(s+t+w+3*(x-1)+l)
text"EV="+y
text "Aperture .... time"
for i = 0 to 5
a = 2^i
t = (2^y)/(a^2)
text"A="+a+" t=1/"+t
next

Click to Download

Feel free to submit your own programs in the comments!

… until 19 September.

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