Download Brainboxes IE-296 Technical information

Serial Solutions
BASterm
Chapter 10
BASterm.
____________
Introduction.
Large numbers of people turn to BASIC when they have a
programming problem to solve because of its ease of use and the
ability to get something working quickly. QuickBASIC and now
Visual Basic for Dos are true professional programming
languages. All of QBASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC
and Visual Basic for Dos allow the user to access the serial
ports supplied by NewCOM, though for accessing the BIOS to
set serial port parameters, BASICA/GW-BASIC programmers
may have to do a little more work.
BASterm is a BASIC terminal emulator, designed to run
under Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5, Visual Basic for Dos and,
with a minimal alteration to cover incompatible syntaxes, under
GW-BASIC/BASICA.
This chapter contains two main sections. The first and
most important section discusses the way that BASterm uses the
serial port. The second section takes a less detailed look at the
organisation of the whole of BASterm.
Running BASterm.
________________
_
Once the driver and port have been set up the user can
execute BASterm using the command
c>BASterm <definition_file>
where <definition_file> is the optional name of a text file
containing commands for BASterm to read when it starts. These
define the way that BASterm will work, and are detailed in the
chapter "Terminal Emulators".
The user could also load the source code into the
QuickBASIC environment and examine/execute it from there
with the command
c>QB BASTERM /L
Page 152
Chapter 10
ý