Andrew Kesterson
5c5bf63356
The graphics verbs documented a coordinate transform that did not exist. With SCALE off a coordinate went straight to akgl_draw_* as a pixel address, so an 800x600 window drew a C128 listing into its corner and left the rest unused -- while the chapter said coordinates were 320x200 and stretching to fit was the host's business. akbasic_GraphicsBackend gains a size entry point, require_graphics() asks it before every verb that draws so a resized window is honoured between two statements, and 320x200 becomes the fallback for a backend that leaves it NULL. It is the record's one optional member, so a host written against the old header keeps the behaviour it had. SCALE now maps onto the device, and RGR(1)/RGR(2) report the drawing surface so a program can use a window whose size it did not choose. RGR(0) is BASIC 7.0's own field, the GRAPHIC mode. SCALE also mapped xmax onto the width rather than onto the last pixel, so SCALE 1, 319, 199 followed by DRAW 1, 319, 199 drew nothing at all -- one pixel past the surface. Fixed in the same line, because it is what makes "SCALE gives a C128 listing the whole window" true rather than nearly true. The akgl test renders against a 128x128 target, deliberately smaller than the old constants: a SCALE still dividing by them misses it entirely rather than landing somewhere plausible. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The akbasic guide
akbasic is a BASIC interpreter in the style of Commodore BASIC 7.0 — the dialect the C128 shipped with — and Dartmouth BASIC. It runs programs from a file or from an interactive prompt, and it is also a C library you can link into a game so that players can script it.
These chapters follow the shape of the C128 Programmer's Reference Guide: the language first, then each hardware area, then the reference sections. If you know BASIC 7.0 you can skip to Chapter 13, which is the list of everything that behaves differently here and why. Chapter 14 is the odd one out: it is about the interpreter rather than the language, for anyone embedding it, debugging it or changing it.
Chapters
| 1. Introduction | What akbasic is, what it is not, and how to build it |
| 2. Getting started | The prompt, your first program, saving and loading |
| 3. The language | Variables, types, arrays, operators, expressions |
| 4. Control flow | IF, FOR, DO, GOSUB, labels, ON, error trapping |
| 5. Strings and formatting | String functions, PRINT USING, PUDEF |
| 6. Graphics | GRAPHIC, DRAW, BOX, CIRCLE, PAINT, shapes |
| 7. Sound | SOUND, PLAY, ENVELOPE, VOL, TEMPO |
| 8. Sprites | SPRITE, SPRSAV, MOVSPR, collision |
| 9. Files and disk | Channels, DOPEN, program storage |
| 10. Embedding | Driving the interpreter from C |
| 11. Verb reference | Every statement, alphabetically |
| 12. Function reference | Every function, alphabetically |
| 13. Differences from BASIC 7.0 | What a C128 programmer needs to know |
| 14. Architecture | How the interpreter is put together, how to debug it, how to change it |
The shortest possible start
$ cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build
$ ./build/basic
10 FOR I# = 1 TO 5
20 PRINT "HELLO " + I#
30 NEXT I#
RUN
HELLO 1
HELLO 2
HELLO 3
HELLO 4
HELLO 5
READY
Two things in that program are not Commodore BASIC and will catch you out
immediately: variables carry a type suffix (I# is an integer) and +
concatenates a string with a number. Chapter 3 explains both.
Every example in these chapters is executed by the test suite and its output
compared byte for byte — see MAINTENANCE.md if you are editing them.