Odd Man Out: Advice for BASIC on Macintosh?

Archiver

I tried follwoing links on this, but Parallax has precious little on
their site in this regard (a bad sign). I've tried other URLS but am
hitting dead links. Is there a viable solution to work with the
equipment I have:


Powerbook 3400
PPC 7100

Both non-USB computers.




Yes, yes,I know.

But I'm an artist (painter actually) and backin the early 90's GUI was
all MAc. Besidesm here in NYC the design world is largly still Mac.

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Archiver

>I tried follwoing links on this, but Parallax has precious little on
>their site in this regard (a bad sign). I've tried other URLS but am
>hitting dead links. Is there a viable solution to work with the
>equipment I have:
> Powerbook 3400
> PPC 7100
>Both non-USB computers.


In short, no. It was possible to run the a special dos version of
programming software (stamp2x.exe) under early versions of softPC,
but it never worked very well. That was for the stamp 2, not the
more recent chips.

Once you try the windows version of Stamp2w.exe, it is hard to go
back to the dos version.

The new version of virtualPC/windows is quite demanding of Mac
resources. Even on a fast Mac it responds like a slow PC. And it
does take a USB port and a keyspan PDA adapter.

Your cheapest solution is to buy a low end PC or laptop. Even a
<100mhz one running windows95 is fine.

I like Macs. That is where I do most of my work, but there are those
things (like this programming software) that are exclusively wintel.

-- Tracy

Archiver

> >I tried follwoing links on this, but Parallax has precious little on
> >their site in this regard (a bad sign). I've tried other URLS but am
> >hitting dead links. Is there a viable solution to work with the
> >equipment I have:
> > Powerbook 3400
> > PPC 7100
> >Both non-USB computers.

As to whether or not you can use the above configuration, I'm not
sure. But I do know that running VirtualPC 3.0 and the Windows stamp
software is no problem on a Firewire PowerBook or a Titanium
PowerBook, an iBook, or a G3 Blue and White Tower. I've been doing it
for many months, and as soon as I get clearance for this at one of my
larger developer sites, I'll post a tutorial. It's pretty simple.
However, all of the systems I've tried it on use a Keyspan Serial
Adapter for USB, which cost me about $75, I think.

This turns out to be a much better solution for me than my Sony VAIO,
as I am using the Stamp (and the video board, can't recall name, but
it's on the Parallax site) to do text on an incoming video signal and
output it to QuickTime. It's a giant freakin' loop, but it works
great. In my particular case, I generate the signal on my TiBook's
second screen S-Video Out, using the RCA adapter that comes with the
TiBook, and passing that to the video board the Stamp interfaces with,
overlaying my text, then sending it back into the TiBook with an iRez
Zoom Video PC card. From there I pass it off to SuperCard, which
converts it cleanly into QuickTime and/or stills, depending on what I
need. Man, if I could find some time I'd take a stab at calling the
stampm directly from SuperCard. That would save a lot of work, since I
could use the Slinger code for SuperCard to generate the pBasic
commands dynamically. That would be sweet.

Also, I adapted a version of PerlSlinger to help me generate the Stamp
code faster. As soon as I get that tutorial up, I'll post a link to
that, too. PerlSlinger is MacOS only right now, but there is a version
in development for OSX and another for Linux.

Doing this on a Win 98 Sony VAIO was eh, problematic. Ditto with a
Gateway laptop (I think), but both were USB, and the Gateway had
WinME. I hear it works great on PC laptops that have serial ports.

-Chilton