IBM floppy 5.25 # 30597

[Marspau]

Hello FT fans,
I bought on EBay, an old 5.25'" floppy # 30597, for Plotter/scanner , Training roboter.

I tried it on an old 386 pc, with DOS 6.22 and Qbasic ver 1.1.
I had the bad surprise to see inside qbasic, a listing that look very strange, and I cannot do anything with the programs on the floppy.
Does some of you know which language is on the floppy , is it a different type of Qbasic ?



Ich kaufte bei eBay, eine alte 5,25 "" floppy # 30597, für Plotter / Scanner, Schulung Roboter.

Ich versuchte es auf einem alten 386-PC, mit DOS 6.22 und Qbasic Version 1.1.
Ich hatte die böse Überraschung nach innen qbasic, eine Liste, die sehr merkwürdig aussehen, sehen, und ich kann nichts mit den Programmen auf der Diskette zu tun.
Was einige von euch wissen, welche Sprache auf der Diskette ist, ist es eine andere Art von Qbasic?

Grub

Marspau

[schnaggels]

Hi Marspau,

have to look it up at home or if you are online just post a code example here please

Couldn't find a hint online about the content, the ft Museum only lists:
http://www.fischertechnik-museum.ch/mus ... m=9&pos=57

Für IBM Computer, deutsch/englische Version.
5.25" Diskette mit den Steuerprogrammen zu den fischertechnik 30571 Computing Plotter/Scanner und 30572 Computing Trainings-Roboter Baukästen.
Diese Software konnte mit einem dem Baukasten beigefügten Coupon bei fischertechnik bestellt werden.

Thanks,
Thomas

[schnaggels]

Hello Marspau,

I have good and bad news...

Found a copy of the disc on my hard drive, the .bas programs seem to be done for Gwbasic and not the Qbasic you have included in your "new" DOS version



Details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC

Download:
http://www.gw-basic.com/downloads.html

Hope this helps

Regards,
Thomas

[Marspau]

Hello Schnaggels,

Thank You very much for your research and help.

I had some doubts that it might be Gwbasic , but ,at the time those old FT programs were put on the market. I thought were up to Qbasic.

Thank You again,I will try to do something with Gwbasic, if I do not succeed , well too bad for my 5.25 floppy

Marspau

[vleeuwen]

A lot of old MS-DOS and old MS-Windows is available for free in the MSDN area (the official website from Microsoft).

[Marspau]

Hello FT fans,
I found a link that may help those interested in Gwbasic.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/72502.

Grub
Marspau

[schnaggels]

Hi Marspau,

to convert them without Gwbasic (to let Ford sleep quiet again...) you can use tools to convert the programs into Qbasic!

http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbtools/gw2ascii.zip
(Found here, were good Qbasic side BTW: http://www.antonis.de/qbdown/qbtools.htm)

Inside there is a Qbasic program to read the Gwbasic file and write it to an ascii based for Qbasic.
The other tool is a binary to do the conversion without any Basic installed.

I tried it with the ft program Diagnost.bas (which is loading the ft driver Interfac.com as a binary) as this seems to be the most useful one in the beginning

Saving as ascii from Gwbasic and with both tools did work with small differences.
Had to correct some (Linebreak caused?) errors in the Qbasic program (line 28, 51, 127, 129) to get it running.

Also the memory area for the machine language program to load was changed by the Qbasic program from the original &HFF00 to &HC0C
Not sure if this is needed for Qbasic or a translation error, try it out
If you need the fixed version of the Qbasic program GW2ASCII.bas just sent me a mail...

The more I do with this old programing environment (currently only in a 32Bit WinXP VM to get the DOS based Basic running...) I get more and more excited about the possibilities of this old DOS environments. Never expected the many features of Qbasic I now read about

Thomas

[Marspau]

Hello schnaggels,

well ok this is again very interesting documentations.
I tried the Microsoft converter, but there was some lines in the listing that make the new program unusable.

The same with me, with these old programing languages, I found new pleasures with those old FT robots kits.

Thank you again.

Marspau

[schnaggels]

Hello Marspau,

maybe we could work together to get a running Qbasic version of the old programms?

Please send me a zip file with the files from your floppy, just to make sure we speak about the same version...
My 30597 folder contains an english and german subfolder and some other stuff, looks like the original content was extended.

Thanks,
Thomas

[Marspau]

Hello schnaggels ,

Ok I will prepare something.

Grub
Marspau

[DoDi]

Nach dem deutschen (europäischen? internationalen?) Urheberrecht sind Programme wie sonstige Werke geschützt, d.h. der Schutz erlischt 70 Jahre nach dem Tod des Urhebers. Im Gegensatz zu den meisten anderen Werksarten gibt es bei Programmen kein Recht auf die Herstellung (und Benutzung) einer Privatkopie.

Aber natürlich darf der Rechtsinhaber sein Werk beliebig zugänglich machen, z.B. im Juristendeutsch "ein einfaches Nutzungsrecht für jedermann einräumen". Dies dürfte für alles gelten, was Microsoft oder sonst ein Rechtsinhaber zum *freien* Download anbietet.

IANAL
DoDi