Retro idea...too retro?

Hm Was a while ago I did a bigger project...When you got that brilliant idea of a new project, nothing can stop you...

This maybe sound odd, but anyway:

A Basic emulator in Flash. You write your Basic program online in Flash (compiled with Flasm-compiler on-the-fly on server if needed for speed) and its running in a kind of 80x25 text mode. Too boring with ascii graphics? Too young people to remember the early years of Basic?

It maybe end that Im doing an online Actionscript-compiler for smaller projects...

kind regards
Tomas

How would you use Flasm to
a) Run on the server
b) Convert your BASIC tokens to byte-code ?

Also BASIC was an interpreted language, rather than a compiled one ( Yep I'm more than old enough to remember coding in BASIC ;) ).

Not picking holes, just wondering how it would work.

Squize.

I think it was about 15 years ago I started with basic. Working since about 7 years back in my internet business company. (Oh allmost feel old at 25)

If I would guessed I would say interpreted language because it was quite slow and can't remember that I did exe-files of it.

a) Download the Linux version to my server. I generate the code and pass it to the program. As experienced of assembler programming I only had to took a glance at the flasm-code to understand it and how it working.
b) A little bit more work. A few days ago I wrote a math engine parsing char-by-char complex math expressions with parenteses, functions, variables etc.

A start could be to do just Actionscript -> Flasm Bytecode and from there adjust it a little bit. But maybe making games for an ascii-screen isn't so fancy...

Basic was an interpreted language.

I still don't see how Flasm could help with this ? Flasm is for disassembling and then re-assembling AS. It still wouldn't convert your tokenized basic into pure byte-code. Your interpreter itself would have to do that.

If you were to write a basic interpreter running in Flash, it would be another layer on top of the AS layer running on a virtual machine, which would be painfully slow. At it's core, it would be in effect an emulator.

Be great, but I'm not sure I fully understand your logic behind powering it.

Squize.

PS. 25 ? Wait til you hit 31 mate, then you're old :)

i think he's suggesting that he converts the users code to byte code mnemonics (?) then uses flasm to generate the .swf

The idea is:

* Analyze the basic code and generate "flasm language" (hard part but I can do it with some work)
* Let Flasm generate (originally from an empty one-frame-swf)
* Simply load the swf-file and have Flash performance (depending how well my bytecode is)

You understand the idea?

Yea Blink, the code Flasm wants..

I get you now ( Sorry for being a dumbass ).

Yeah, it'll ( The Basic ) have to be compiled rather than interpreted, but should work.

Squize.

There's no reason why it won't work. It'd actually be rather easy - all you have to do is write a basic scripting language, following BASIC syntax, and a parser.

Along similar lines, I've written a LOGO interpreter in Flash, and there's another one on Flashkit somewhere. I'm also thinking of writing a Chip8 emulator - the Chip8 was a virtual CPU implemented by a few early 80's games consoles for cross-platform compatibility. It only has 40-odd instructions so it shouldn't be too hard to write (though the graphics output might be problematic).

Instructions is usually little bit easier than a language with blocks, expression and nested things of everything. Im actually into parsing actionscript at the moment. Still much to go, but its both good learning and interesting. Talking about games, anyone think it would be fun to program games directly on web? ;) A little bit limited of movieclip/vector construction (as in macromedia software), but could be external images or something.