Jim, Thank you! Your guidance helped me over the last few hurdles. I have now been able to successfully load and run .BA files from the PC via mComm! My next question is naturally: what are some of the indispensable programs (games, utilities, etc.) that everyone should have on their M100?
Thanks again!! David On May 08, 2018, at 07:00 PM, Jim Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: -----Original Message----- So here is where I am so far: You've made great progress! - Able to download files from mComm/data into RAM... BUT those files, once in RAM seem to be corrupter. For instance when downloading some .BA files, I only get a few lines of code or no code at all, even though There's a bit of a trick here - well, not a 'trick' so much as a bit of information you need to know. Often when you find a .BA file online, it's a plain-text listing of a BASIC program which you can view in Notepad etc. The problem is that on the M100, a .BA file is a tokenized binary (to save space and improve execution time). If you transfer a text BASIC listing as a .BA file the M100 is going to try to interpret it as a tokenized binary file and, well, you saw what happens. :( The trick is to have a look at the .BA file on the PC, and if it's a plain text program listing, rename it to a .DO extension before you transfer it into the M100. Then, when it's on the M100, go into BASIC and type: LOAD "PROG.DO" This will load the program and tokenize it for you. (If it's a big program it might take a while.) When it's done, type: SAVE "PROG.BA" This will save the tokenized .BA file back into the M100's memory. You can now delete the .DO file from the M100, and you can transfer the .BA file back to the PC and keep it to save this step in the future. Some people adopt different naming conventions for these when storing them on a PC - often a program will have a document with it, so there will be a PROG.BA which is the plain text listing, and a PROG.DO which is the instruction manual. What I personally do is rename PROG.BA to PROG.BD (Basic-DO is I guess what I was thinking there) and then copy back PROG.BA from the M100 to save the tokenized version. jim
