Category:Locomotive Basic: Difference between revisions

Locomotive BASIC was comparatively advanced for its time (with e.g. software interrupts and comprehensive graphics and audio commands) and was very cleanly implemented, just like the rest of the Amstrad CPC ROM. System calls could be made viawith "<tt>CALL"</tt> andvia dedicated jump blocks in RAM, whichso meantthey thatwere addressesunaffected forby systemchanges callsto remainedthe unaffectedROM whenbetween theCPC actualmodels. ROMThis addressesmade changedsoftware very compatible between the original three CPC models and ''mostly'' compatible for the later, much less popular "Plus" models.

Locomotive BASIC served as a sort of primitive operating system for the CPC and was also used (together with AMSDOS RSX commands<ref>http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/RSX</ref>) for disk and tape operations. As on many other 8-bit machines of the era, it was also common to extend BASIC programs by <tt>READ</tt>-ing Z80 machine code from <tt>DATA</tt> statements, <tt>[[wp:PEEK and POKE|POKE]]</tt>-ing it to RAM, and then <tt>CALL</tt>-ing the code, an approach especially popular with type-in games from old CPC magazines.