Editing Basic externally

PicoCalc
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I got my PicoCalc working today (after replacing the screen that I broke during assembly).

Do you have some recommendations how to code using a laptop. I have Putty installed, I can connect to the PicoCalc, it sort of works but the backspace is working wierd, paste does not seem to work. Is this down to settings in Putty, or I should be using something else?

I also have MMEdit installed. I can do some coding there as well. In the help I was reading something like MMCC that can transfer files between the laptop and PicoMite. Has anyone used that for PicoCalc. The help is so basic, I could not get MMEdit to work with the DOS MMBasic to launch my program for the edit for testing.

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I dont remember too much about windows, but I used to use Tera Term instead of putty and dont remember having any problems with it in Picomite.
you can use Notepad to write your code and save as a .bas file by changing the file type from .txt to “all files” then typing in filename.bas manually.
You can either save that directly to your SD card of use Xmoden to send the file over USB.
hope that helps a little, it`s been a while since I went near windows.

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Thanks, I installed Tera Term and it works great. Backspace works.

Just make sure in Setup / Serial Port the speed is set to 115200 (from the default 9600).

And after typing XMODEM RECEIVE to the PicoCalc, I can send files over with File / Transfer / Xmodem / Send… and it sends the file to program memory.

I read the MMEdit can also be used to upload files, but I did not figure out how that is done.

Going slighly off topic:

  • I did my first program in MMEdit where I use CURSOR command to move the cursor on the screen. PicoCalc says: Unknown command. So is that not MMBasic?
  • Whenever I turn on the PicoCalc it goes to the bootloader screen. I have to remove the SD card at boot so it finds nothing and I can just press enter to get to MMBasic. Is that normal?
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You use the PRINT @(x,y) to move the cursor, where x and y are pixel locations on the screen.

function ToPixelY(line) as integer
    ToPixelY = line * MM.FONTHEIGHT
end function
function ToPixelX(col) as integer
    ToPixelX = col * MM.FONTWIDTH
end function

PRINT @(ToPixelX(y),ToPixelY(10)) "Some stuff";

No. This is not normal. I don’t know what the issue is here.

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I am still using the character mode, not graphics. I thought PRINT if printing text on the graphics mode.

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It doesn’t matter. That’s the way it works.

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MMBasic runs in pixel mode. It doesn’t have different modes for characters vs graphics. If you want a “CURSOR” command it is trivial to write a simple subroutine (untested)

sub cursor(x%,y%)

print @(x%*mm.fontwidth,y%*mm.fontheight); ‘the semi-colon is important

end sub

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Very interesting. I implemented the CURSOR sub and nothing gets printed on the screen. I can see the output in the terminal, but not on the screen. Just out of curiosity the COLOUR foreground, background still works, right?

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Started a different topic on this. The issue was that in PicoCalc you cannot use the color numbers in colour command like COLOUR 2,0, but you have to pass it with the RGB function like COLOUR RGB(GREEN), RGB(BLACK).

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