Retrogamecoding and Basicprogramming Forum Migration

[Mike Lobanovsky]

This is to inform all those interested that the Retrogamecoding and Basicprogramming forum is closing down this November 4.

A read-only copy of that site was migrated to a subdomain of AllBasic.info at the address https://retrobasic.allbasic.info/ together with all the forum message attachments (images, audio, visuals, etc.) to preserve the rich user code base it used to host.

Everyone is hereby encouraged to join the AllBasic.info site to continue the cause the older reincarnations of Basicprogramming forums used to serve.

[Arnold]

Hi Mike,

thank you for the reference to this link. I already discovered some interesting topics. Will it be possible to find the RetroBasic site from within AllBasic.info? What is the difference of visiting RetroBasic as a guest and as a forum member of AllBasic? 

Well, I'm not an active BASIC-er any more ...

... (who is the watcher?) ...
It's me when in a don't-care stand-by mode.

I definitely miss your posts. What is necessary to reawaken your interest? I do not know what happened to FBSL, but some demos from the last distribution would also be very interesting (and helpful) for an implementation in OxygenBasic.

Roland 

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hi Roland,

Thanks for taking interest in the retro-BASIC heritage.

1. No, RetroBasic is not a part, sub-forum or child board of AllBasic forum. It is rather a distinct sub-domain (section) of the entire AllBasic.info site featuring its own unique IP that you have to address explicitly in a separate tab of your browser to be able to access its forum contents.

2. There is in fact no difference. Unlike its former host (retrogamecoding.org that's scheduled by its owner -- Cybermonkey -- to close down on November 4), RetroBasic doesn't require the visitor to be a registered member of either forum to be able to access the contents in their entirety -- messages, images and zipped attachments. The only thing you can't do is you can't alter the contents by editing the existing messages or posting newer ones. This means RetroBasic is a read-only snapshot of the message and code base that accumulated at the former Retrogamecoding over the years of its existence.

3. The AllBasic site has been designed predominantly as a conference of BASIC developers. Now that RetroBasic is also there as a read-only knowledge base, the AllBasic site Administration has taken a decision to extend its focus to BASIC users as well, so that the former Retrogamecoding user base could migrate to AllBasic, if they so wish, and continue their (retro) BASIC and related activities  (of course barring spamming, evil trolling, and flaming) at the new home.

We decided to extend the target audience of AllBasic existing child boards, and add a few new ones, specifically for the BASIC users to be able to post their content to:

BASIC User Group
-- Code Challenges
-- Not BASIC
-- Code Repository
-- Off Topic.
_____________________________________________

Actually, I am not dead but rather inactive in what regards BASIC development. FBSL was good, after all, and I feel it would be unreasonably difficult, if not impossible, for me to develop anything better than that completely from scratch at my current age and state of health.

In other respects, I'm still interested in the latest developments among the programming languages that I value. OxygenBasic is definitely on that list, and I'm trying to show signs of life in the topics where I feel I can stick my couple of cents (or a twopence) and still sound clear and coherent.

[Arnold]

Hi Mike,

unfortunately, I started too late to seriously learn programming and programming languages, and I will never reach your experience.

... my current age and state of health.

Age matters, health matters. On the other hand, I also learned that in later years I should still be curious and doing sports to train the brain and the body. That is why I am still active in a dance club with my wife and I am happy to learn something new every day about programming and about the English language. Apart from that I live by the motto: In God We Trust (Ann Coulter must have confused something).

I am interested in the development of OxyScheme which worked nicely in previous versions of Oxygen but does not work very well any more with the latest version. Is it presumptuous if I try to approach this topic and ask for help if I get stuck? The first action I would like to do is to use unprototyped functions and explore the impacts.

Roland

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hi Roland,

My state of health forbids me to remain in the sitting position for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, let alone dance or go in for sports. It may change some time in the future but for now, I can only be a watcher and, sadly, a witness of general BASIC decline.

Re. OxyScheme, it was deliberately a very close C language port because the same source was also used to test the performance of my Dynamic C layer in FBSL. It utilized a couple of 32 bit-only msvcrt.dll interface hacks that aren't available in the 64-bit runtime version -- primarily related to the C-style stdin/stdout interface. I think the differences can be overcome one way or another provided some extra effort be put into it. Also, the FBSL DynC implementation called NanoScheme proved to be a bit faster than O2 and was a little richer in features than OxyScheme covering almost all of the Scheme Language R5RS standard.

If you choose to engage yourself in OxyScheme upgrade, I'll be glad to give you a helping hand wherever I can.