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G'day from Adelaide, Australia

Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2016 7:47 am
by RetroHawk
Hi All,

I'm new to this forum, although I've lurked here occasionally.

I recently attended a local Retro Computer Club meet here and had my interest in the Dick Smith Wizzard sparked again. The local club likes to have a theme for their meeting each month and this month's theme was programming in BASIC...what can you do? I was enthused and started adapting a card game for the Amstrad NC100. As the meeting date got closer, my progress stalled and I could see that I wasn't going to get finished in time so I thought of an alternative BASIC theme...the Dick Smith Wizzard!

I acquired my Wizzard off Ebay quite some years ago. I had never used one back in the day but had obviously seen them advertised in the Dick Smith catalogue. (My first computer was an Atari 400 in 1982) It was the first computer that my wife (software engineer) ever used, and I thought she may be interested in playing with it again...WRONG! Oh well...back then I had an idea that I wanted to learn to program CC65 from various 6502 platforms and since the Wizzard was a 6502 platform it was fair game. I kept searching for a BASIC cart so I could program for it and when I finally got one I found out how restrictive the BASIC really is. I couldn't believe that you couldn't even execute machine code routines from basic.

Anyway, it sat in it's box for quite a few years, only being taken out occasionally for a play. But when I was looking for a BASIC platform to take to the meeting I remembered the great Dick Smith DEMO tape that talked to you as it loaded each ot the demos programs...how novel.

As it turned out, I never did get to the club meeting but I started tinkering with the Wizzard anyway. When I found out how slowly it runs, it made me wonder whether there was any type of game that it would be suitable for writing. I used to think that the ATARI BASIC was limited, with not having string arrays, but the VT Basic is far worse...only 26 variables!

Luca has been telling me about some of the great addons that have been developed for the Creativision which sound great.

Anyway, not sure how much I'll be able to add to the forum..Luca has already checked out my stuff to see if there's anything that needs archiving. ;)

One of the things I usually play with first on my older platforms is trying to work out how to get programs from the internet onto the target platform so that might me my next challenge for the Wizzard.

Hawk

Re: G'day from Adelaide, Australia

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 9:03 am
by MADrigal
You are most welcome to this forum!
Thank you for your very interesting story :)
We are all aware of the limitations of the CV BASIC, not only it is limited buy also extremely slow!
You may want to download some nice BASIC programs from the CreatiVEmu website, in the "BASIC listings" section.

Re: G'day from Adelaide, Australia

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2016 6:15 am
by mr_bogus
Welcome Hawk! Greetings from Melbourne (previously Birmingham, UK; and before that, South Africa) :)