Andrew Kesterson
a9600c3fcc
The narrowphase has been producing a contact since it went in, and the interpreter was throwing it away. `RCOLLISION(n, f)` reports it: what was hit (a sprite or a `SOLID` rectangle), which one, the contact normal, the penetration depth, the contact point, and which axis to reverse. **The normal points out of the other thing and toward this one**, so a program moves along it by the depth and is exactly clear. That sign is the one assertion in the new test that could not be caught any other way -- both parties of a sprite-against-sprite hit get their own record, each pointing the way *that* sprite has to move, and sharing one would tell both to go the same direction, which is how two things end up stuck inside each other. **Field 7 is the one that deletes the most BASIC.** It is the minimum translation axis, computed from the normal in C, and it is there because doing it in BASIC means comparing two floats -- which is exactly where this dialect's left-operand rule catches people. `BALLBRICKS`/`TESTCELL` in the artwork breakout spend six lines computing an overlap rectangle and comparing its width to its height to get this number. The record is **sticky and deepest-wins**: replaced whenever that sprite is in a contact and otherwise left alone, so `BUMP` stays the event and this stays the detail of it. Making it clear itself when nothing touches would break the pairing, because `BUMP` accumulates across steps and a once-a-frame poll would find the detail already gone. Reading `BUMP` clears both, so they cannot disagree. Deliberately narrower than `akgl_Contact`: no actor pointers, because BASIC has no actor; no tile fields, because there is no tilemap; no z, because every test is planar; and **no `dt` and no `sensor`**, which libakgl documents as filled in by the resolver. This interpreter never resolves anything, so those two come back zero and mean nothing, and an always-zero field in a reference table is a lie. Documented with the two caveats that matter: fields 2, 3 and 4 are floats and want a `%` variable, and the contact *point* is exact only for two boxes -- libakgl's solver returns a point on the portal it converged to, while the normal and depth are exact for every pair. Chapter 8's collision section stops claiming only type 1 exists, which has been false since the previous commit. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EwxGB6TdoVvZ11KQQME9cL
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 17 and 18 are tutorials rather than reference: they build one complete game twice, two different ways, in numbered steps you can type in one at a time. Start with 17 — it needs nothing but the earlier chapters, and 18 assumes 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 |
| 15. Error codes | Appendix: every value ER# can hold and every error line the interpreter prints |
| 16. Structures | TYPE, records, strict pointers, and sharing a C struct with an embedding host |
| 17. Tutorial: Breakout | Build a whole game out of the text grid and two DATA sprites, in sixteen steps |
| 18. Tutorial: Breakout with artwork | Build it again out of loaded artwork, powerups and a drawn colour HUD, in thirteen |
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.