[Coco] New version of SDCX

[Francis Swygert]

Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 10:53:07 -0300
From: coco at jechar.ca
Cool, I have heard that a very old version of GW-BASIC has been open sourced I wonder if anyone would be looking at the code to either port GW-BASIC to the COCO or patch RS-BASIC to add some new commands taken from GW-BASIC?
Not possible! I converted a GW-BASIC program to CoCo3 Super Extended Color BASIC way back in the day... or at least that's what I had intended to do! 90% of the code had to be re-written, and some commands had to be replaced with 2-6 line subroutines. This was an all text program (CoCo Family Recorder, a genealogy program) -- I can't imagine what work a graphics program would take! I did credit the GW-BASIC author in the code, but instead of "converted from" I put in "based on" the original. I couldn't have done it without the framework and outline the original provided, but there was extensive re-writing! No more than 10% of the code could be "converted" easily with just some restructuring. The GW-BASIC commands are just to different, and take advantage of the more powerful processor and memory available. A lot of why the 6809 based programs run as fast or faster than GW-BASIC on an 8088 is because of the simpler BASIC used -- CoCo BASIC ported to an 8088 would be a lot faster than GW-BASIC, and possible...