Using Thinbasic with Oxygen

[Arnold]

Hi Charles,

when I retired, I started experimenting with Thinbasic to learn some programming skills. Here I also found examples containing Oxygenbasic code, and since then the O2 language has fascinated me. In this context, my interest in Thinbasic somehow has taken a back seat.

Recently I downloaded beta version 1.11.1.0 and noticed that Thinbasic too has undergone some major changes in the last few years. Especially the option to apply Freebasic modules with Thinbasic offers many interesting possibilities.

I am interested in using Oxygen with Thinbasic. I assume Oxygen.dll in thinBasic_Oxygen.zip is the same file which is provided with OxygenBasicProgress.zip and thinBasic_oxygen.dll is the interface to Thinbasic? TB applies oxygen.dll / thinBasic_oxygen.dll of 2018, but I think I can replace these files. In the Help directory of the TB distribution I found thinbasic_oxygen_help.chm, and I suppose this file is not valid any more?

Roland

[Charles Pegge]

Hi Roland,

oxygen.dll is regularly tested with thinBasic and is usually located in C:\thinBasic\lib along with thinBasic_Oxygen and all the other thinBasic modules.

You will find a copy of the latest in projectsC\thinBasic, including some key examples, also available separately in GitHub.

I have not looked at thinbasic_oxygen_help.chm for  a very long time. It must be out of date!

[Arnold]

Thank you Charles. I have started to explore the examples of Thinbasic, there are many impressive demos included. The Oxygen demos of the distribution seem to be dependent on an outdated version of Oxygen.dll, but with some modifications they should work.

I like the idea of using Freebasic dlls very much. This is possible with Oxygenbasic too and also in 64-bit. If it should be possible  to apply some FB dlls more effectively with Oxygen then this would give many additional applications.

Roland

[Aurel]

then this would give many additional applications

Hi Roland
Ok ...when you said additional ...what you mean ?
or what kind of applications ?

[Arnold]

Hi Aurel,

obviously I had a short black-out. Sometimes I forget the limits of my abilities. But I think it is good to know that it is possible to create shared libraries with Freebasic which could be helpful in some cases.

Roland

[Charles Pegge]

FreeBasic produces GCC DLLs, and the virtue of DLLs is that they can be used with binaries produced by most compilers within the platform. SLLs (static link libraries), on the other hand, are compiler-specific.

I liked the FbPiano, Roland. It led me to look at MidiEdit, and BandLab-Cakewalk, (both freeware) to see how music editing is handled these days, and what style of controls are used. It looks formidibly complex. So I wondered whether it would be useful to get the computer to do all the composing, and just have a LIKE button

[Arnold]

Hi Charles,

I used a great idea from Thinbasic that I applied in Oxygenbasic. It helped me to better understand how to create a dll in Freebasic and how to use it. I was very happy that this will work in 64-bit mode too. Currently I work with another Freebasic wrapper (Fltk) which I also thought would not be possible. Surprisingly the results look very promising until now. I am curious how far I will come.

In the meantime I also found the original PBPiano project by Borje Hagsten and the discussion site. Besides the helpful information of the discussion there are also many useful constants and functions provided in the code which could be applied with other projects too.

Somehow I feel guilty because I have distracted from the purpose of the topic, namely to explore the possibilities of combining ThinBasic with OxygenBasic. But I will continue that soon.

Roland