• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

BASIC Save strangeness

E

ewige

Member
Joined
Mar 11, 2011
Messages
28
Location
Ohio/USA
So yesterday I finally got around to playing with BASIC on my IBM 5155 again, and I wrote some nice code and decided to save my work. I typed SAVE "TEST" and the program just hung for like a good 2 minutes and then came back with the error "Disk not Ready"

I frowned and tried SAVE "C:\TEST" and also with the ,A option, but no dice. Always the same error, Disk not Ready. I tried SAVE "A:\TEST" and got a device I/O error...

I tried this both in BASIC and BASICA under DOS 3.3 with the same results. Has anyone encountered this beast before?

The hard disk in question is obvious working (since I was able to boot from C: in the first place and have played dozens of games on it and written other files to it) but just for completeness sake: it's an SD adapter going to XTIDE in an otherwise stock (to my knowledge) IBM 5155 running DOS 3.3.
 
ewige said:
So yesterday I finally got around to playing with BASIC on my IBM 5155 again, and I wrote some nice code and decided to save my work. I typed SAVE "TEST" and the program just hung for like a good 2 minutes and then came back with the error "Disk not Ready"

I frowned and tried SAVE "C:\TEST" and also with the ,A option, but no dice. Always the same error, Disk not Ready. I tried SAVE "A:\TEST" and got a device I/O error...

I tried this both in BASIC and BASICA under DOS 3.3 with the same results. Has anyone encountered this beast before?. . .
The hard disk in question is obvious working (since I was able to boot from C: in the first place and have played dozens of games on it and written other files to it) but just for completeness sake: it's an SD adapter going to XTIDE in an otherwise stock (to my knowledge) IBM 5155 running DOS 3.3.
Click to expand...
Try 'SAVE C:\TEST.BAS" and see what happens
 
I've seen that behavior in the past when using ROM basic on older IBM's with IDE controllers. Many old PC ROM's like Basic rely on the disk rom having it's calls in exactly the right memory locations as they'll call them directly instead of using the ISR. For xt-ide to not work on such a platform isn't exactly surprising...

Try finding a copy of the non-ROM reliant GW-Basic (from MS-DOS instead of PC-DOS) and try that instead -- it's generally better behaved on things like that.
 
I was thinking in the same direction as Deathshadow, but if there is a problem with ROM calls, why didn't save to floppy disk work? Would each floppy disk controller allocate different ROM areas so BASIC or BASICA only works with certain floppy drive controllers?
 
Running GWBASIC worked like a charm! Was able to save to the hard disk no problem. Thanks again!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top