Sunday, March 28, 2010

CE-232 Programming

Thanks to another kind soul (and fellow ham), I was able to secure a copy of the developer's toolkit for the HE-232 (precursor to the CE-232) including sample Basic code. Whoo-hoo! Programming can commence!

The demo code that comes with the developers toolkit is written for QBasic, which used to come with every DOS and Windows computer. Alas, Micro$oft stopped shipping it with WinXP. But the folks over at the QB64 project http://www.qbasic.com/ make an updated version that appears to work just as I remember QuickBasic working all those many years ago. QB64 even created a compiled version of the code that will run as a standalone .exe under the WinXP command prompt. Back in the day, you'd have to pay M$ the big $$$ to buy a stand-alone compiler.

I took a quick look at the programming guide, and it's obvious this won't be a simple task to create software for the CE-232. I'll have to spend some time mapping out the program flow to learn exactly how this works. But it looks doable.

1 comment:

  1. Your biggest problem will be finding all the errors in the code. Getting the computer to talk to the interface is easy, or it was way back in the day. Being able to program it wasn't all that bad, but the scripting language was the killer, it was full of errors and some mods had to be made just to get some of them to work, but we managed.

    The hours we have into Pro-Turbo well lets say we can't count that high.

    We got involved when Bill put it out that he had had many wanna be programmers look at the code and say ya we can do that, then he showed them the scripting language and the story changed.

    Well we took the challenge and surprised the shit outa bill when we sent it to him.

    Good luck on your endevor, would love to see it in action when you finish it.

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