What Happened To Dragonbasic?


dpunker

Still Fresh
Joined
Feb 16, 2004
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5
It was announced about spetember, that DragonBASIC was being ported and a early demo would be avalible around november. I'm sure lots of ppl were looking foward to this. It would have started off lots more homebrew stuff. Anyone have any idea what happened? :unsure:
 
It's an IDE for dragonBASIC (a variation of BASIC) that was orginaly released for GBA. It has standard basic instructions plus some graphical ones that handle sprites etc like BlitzBasic. the author said he was porting it over to the GP about 5 months ago. As of yet nothing
 
Hi! I was wondering too so I made a little search...
Found this from the author in a forum...

"Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2004 11:10 pm Post subject:

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This is actually a very "sensitive" issue in Dragon BASIC. Let me explain. Between 0x8000004 and 0x80000BF is the Nintendo header. It is a proprietary program that loads the GBA ROM and displays the "Nintendo" graphic on the screen. Every ROM that is to run on the GBA requires this! It is how Nintendo can require that you be a licensed developer with them. Right now, Dragon BASIC is (shh) plajorizing this code.

The reason that all other ROMs you are downloading don't have any code is that for hobbyists, it isn't really needed. All emulators will run code w/o the header, and flash and multi-boot packages will actually insert a proper header for you. If you are having problems, this could be part of it. It is possible that your linker program is inserting another header before the Dragon BASIC header... causing problems?

I wanted Dragon BASIC to just take care of this for you, because there are several instances where a literal address is required in Dragon BASIC code. I can't do this without inserting that header first (so I know where the ROM begins). However, if Nintendo wanted to, they could squash me like a bug for inserting that header... it is their code after all.

Lastly, I've been toying with the idea of making Dragon BASIC a multi-trick pony now that TIN is rocking. If I removed the header from the Dragon BASIC compile, then it is completely possible to use Dragon BASIC (and TIN) to write GP32 games (which is also ARM based). Of course, the API would only work for the GBA, but another library could be make for the GP32...

Jeff"


http://www.dragonbasic.com/phpBB2/viewtopi...&highlight=gp32


I hope he works it out because this would be really cool...
 
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