RISC OPEN PICO Questions

RISC OS Pico is “RISC OS with lots of bits, like the Desktop, chopped off”. Yes, of course you can launch programs without a GUI from it – many of its demos are programs without a GUI. I sense you have specific programs in mind and I also sense by “without a GUI” you actually mean “without a Desktop front end”. The answer is a tentative “yes – just run them”. The complications are that old programs may not be compatible, in the same way they wouldn’t be with the full-fat RISC OS Pi (e.g. they may be ancient code built 26-bit only).

so ? (i am still a newbie !)

- I put the dowloaded files fof the program/game on the sdcard

- I launch RISC OS PICO

- and how do I process to launch a program ? What is the command ? RUN… something ?

A HowTo, hope it helps.

>10PRINT"Hello RISC OS"
>RUN
Hello RISC OS
>SAVE"Hello"
>CHAIN"Hello"
Hello RISC OS
>
>LIST
   10PRINT"Hello RISC OS"
>NEW
>LIST
>LOAD"Hello"
>LIST
   10PRINT"Hello RISC OS"
>RUN
Hello RISC OS
>

Within the Pico zip there is an introductory PDF in the FirstSteps folder, FirstSteps/pdf. It will need to be opened in something else, Pico itself will not know what to do with it.

I am not sure you understand my request

i don’t want to RUN a basic programm but any application as a game, emulator, etc (not made with Basic)… without using the GUI, but only RISC OS PICO interface.

Assuming that your ‘application’ is a RISC OS non-GUI application called say “!Game”, then you just type the application name at the command line.

e.g.

*!Game

Note the current directory has to be set to the directory containing the application “!Game”. Set the current directory using the “*DIR” command. Or else prefix your application start command with the directory path.

e.g.

*$.my_dir.!Game

where “$” = root directory of current selected disc.

“my_dir” = a directory previously created in the root of the currently selected disc, containing your ‘application’ “!Game”.

Ralph

So RISC OS PICO is like MSDOS with a basic inside.

Thank you Ralph, that’s what I was looking for ! I will try this tonight.

Very helpful

is the RISC OS PICO basic the last and definitive version of BBC Basic ? or is this basic still updated this last years ? or in future with new commands ?

The commandline is inside off all RISC OS ROMs. Here you can find also a small overview.
I mean it is more comparable to Unix/Linux, then MSDOS.
Use *cat to see the current directory.

In Basic all needed commands inside ;-)

great link again, thanks.

I forgot the “other” BBCBasic manual .

great again !!!!

Questions for a specialist of BBC basic (don’t hunt, reply only if you know)

1) How can a stock a picture-block in a variable ?

I know that i can display a block like this by loading pictures :
*SLoad Sprite
*SChoose Sprite
PLOT 184,x,y

but i will prefer to stock this picture into variables like block(1), block(2), etc…. to create backgrounds 8×8 pixels for my games. Hope you understand my request (so bad english)

2) Can we load .WAV sound ? (find nothing about this in the manual)

Thanks

BASIC does not have data structures. SLoad and SChoose use the system sprite area. You can always define your own sprite area and use SYS “OS_SpriteOp” calls.

Loading .WAV files is possible but you have to define the memory block and then tell the OS to play the sound.

For playing sounds, check out the PlaySound module and some of Jim Lesurf’s postings to these forums.

Hi all, just following this up as I was trying to figure out if I could get the conversion of Manic Miner running in Pico. If I do:

>*!Manic

I get:

>> An application that loads a file of this type has not been found by the Filer.

Given what is written above, am I to assume that the application has GUI elements, or am I missing something else?

As far as I know, there is no Filecore partition on the Pico SD card. So the files of the game have lost most likely their filetype information. I think Pico is just for tinkering in BASIC. For doing anything beyond that and keeping it nostalgically command line orientated, it is better to take a standard installtion and make it booting direct into BASIC, there are instructions about it somewhere in the forum. You probably need to copy the singletask editor (TWIN?) from a Pico card.