NSB8 Datasheet, PDF (129/158 Pages) List of Unclassifed Manufacturers – BASIC interpreter for Z80 family

ITALIAN TECHNOLOGY
grifo^®
1 MEMORY SIZE
Initially, the standard version of BASIC doesn’t leave much room for your BASIC program/data
area, BASIC is made to assume that you have only 65536 bytes of working memory. The GDOS 80
and BASIC itself take up a large part of this. In order for you to write and RUN reasonably large
programs, you must have more memory beyond the 16384 bytes (16K) limit. Moreover, you must
inform BASIC of the extra memory availability using the MEMSET command. See command
MEMSET for detailed information on the use of this command. You may use MEMSET to enlarge
or shrink the program/data area that BASIC is allowed to use. Simply determine the address (in
decimal) of the highest memory cell you want BASIC to be able to use, and employ that number as
the argument to the MEMSET command. For example, if your memory extends all the way to 48K
(49151 in decimal) and you want BASIC to use all that’s available there, type:
MEMSET 49151
The argument to MEMSET is, among other things, translated to binary, and put into bytes ORG+09H
and ORG+0AH, where ORG is BASIC’s origin (starting address) in your system, usually 0E00H. In
the standard version of BASIC, then, these addresses are 0E09H and 0E0AH, respectively. The
standard default high address for the program/data area is E3FFH.
2 SETTING A VARIABLE TO BASIC ORIGIN
For many of the following steps, the FILL statement is used to modify memory locations within
BASIC. In the examples to be given here, it will be assumed that the numeric variable S has been set
to the decimal number corresponding to the address in memory where your copy of BASIC starts. If
you have a version of BASIC which starts at 0E00H in hexadecimal, then use 3584 for BASIC’s
origin. Otherwise, if your BASIC starts somewhere else, determine the decimal (base 10) equivalent
of the origin, and use that number. Set S in a direct mode assignment statement. For example, for
standard versions of BASIC, type
S=3584
3 LINE LENGTH
See statement LINE for a description of the significance of the input/output line length in
BASIC. The standard version assumes that the console terminal has a line width of 80 characters. If
the actual per line capacity of your terminal is smaller or larger than this, set variable L to the
appropriate line length for your terminal. If that is 40, for instance, then type
L=40
Once L is set, then type
FILL S+14, L
NSB8
Rel. 5.10
Page 117