Family Basic

Started by Saab93, May 01, 2022, 01:26:29 pm

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Saab93

Hi guys, I'm considering buying the bits for the Family Basic program, and because the data recorders are expensive, i want to use a much cheaper Radio-Shack tape deck. But will this work considering that these are from 2 different regions?

P

May 02, 2022, 12:52:04 pm #1 Last Edit: May 08, 2022, 08:44:06 am by P
You only really need the keyboard and a BASIC cartridge. If you have the Everdrive or other flashcart you can use that to load Family BASIC or Family BASIC V3. The physical backup switch serves no purpose in this case so the flashcart don't need it, it acts like it's always OFF.

The cassette tape drive is just a standard cassette tape recorder so you don't need any specific brand, and audio hardware regions doesn't even exist. You can use anything that can play and record sound: a tape recorder, MD recorder (Edit: actually this might not work since MDs are compressed), MP3 player, smartphone, computer sound-card and so on.
I've been unsuccessful with my computer though so I use a normal tape recorder, it works flawlessly and I also use it with my MSX.

ozidual

When using the computer, you have to set it at mono 32000Hz when recording and playing back.  It's also good to make sure the mic/audio ports don't have any background sound filters or amplification turned on.  I use an older version of Audacity from before they sold out and it works great but I'm sure any program that lets you set it to 32000Hz or 32KHz for recording/playback should work fine.

Otherwise, I used a combo CD Player/Tape deck, and it also works great.  You can later convert the tapes into wav files using your computer too.

You can also type up programs on your PC using an emulator and then convert those to recordings that you can load into your Famicom.  I use VirtuaNES but I hear Nestopia works well too.

P

Thanks I might give it another try sometime. I remember I did eventually manage to load a program but I couldn't save to Audacity. It was long ago and long before Audacity sold their soul to the devil. Hopefully there are free open-source alternatives to Audacity without bloat and that are equally straight-forward to use, but I haven't really looked for one since I still have the old Audacity.

I actually usually write Family BASIC programs on my computer in Notepad++ and "paste" them into Nestopia using F12. I wish a more modern emulator supported this great pasting feature (openMSX has an even better variant of it). I did request to Sour to implement it in Mesen, and he actually had it on his todo-list, but he was burnt out before he could do it and stopped updating Mesen. I would try to implement the openMSX variant of the pasting feature myself into Mesen-X (the new official fork of Mesen) if it just wasn't above my skill level.

-N2

Where there any FDS games or other floppies that used the keyboard?

P

No, I don't think any licensed FDS game used the keyboard. The only games using the keyboard other than Family BASIC were games like Lode Runner that only used the tape drive part of it, which is kinda pointless for an FDS game that can just save data on the disk.
The FDS BIOS actually has a BIOS call for reading the keyboard (and it is slightly different from the keyboard reading routine used by Family BASIC), but I don't know if any games actually ever calls this.

UglyJoe

There's a recent homebrew version of Wordle that supports the keyboard.  Cartridge, not FDS, though.

https://vectrex28.itch.io/wordle-nes