The Sinclair QL Forum

Thanks to Mr Navigator managing to make contact with the authors of Giga-Basic and E.A.S.E. (Easily Applicable System Environment) I have been able to make the software and manuals available to download from my website.

Giga-Basic provides over 70 commands and functions, making it a useful extension for the QL. Covers the areas of graphics, sprites, base conversion, full screen basic editor, direct access to medium, multitasking clocks, mouse driven screen orientated menus, pull-down menus, multitasking control commands, programmable function keys and so on. Download from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/program/index.html

EASE: Also known as Giga-Desk, E.A.S.E. (or Easily Applicable System Environment) is a user interface for the QL, it supports a desktop environment, described by the original publisher as being "similar to GEM". It includes pulldown menus, icons, really scrollable windows, a calculator and a game. This program enables the user to have access to all system functions in an easy manner. Can be used with the Giga Soft Mouse originally sold by ABC Elektronic. http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/frontend/index.html

Both packages were originally sold by Giga-Soft and the authors are André Claaßen and Gerd-Uwe Neukamp

Also, if anyone has been trying without success todownload the latest version of Lear PCB-Design v7.34 on Graphics page, I have fixed the problem on the page now. Thanks to Ralf R for letting me know about this.

That sounds very interesting. I keep meaning to try some of the various environments but never get round to it. I'll have a read of the pdfs over lunch

Would be nice, if someone could try the SuperBASIC Editor of Giga-Basic and post a screenshot.

Would be interesting to know, how they have realised it. Must be similar to "ED".

As far as I know, there are just this one and "ED" of TK2.

Screen (GIGABASIC's editor) is very similar to ED and looks identical when in editing mode, but it can be passed parameters as described thus:

• SCREEN #dev, linenr, tab

Default: SCREEN 11, 1, 3

This command enters the screen editor. It allows the user to edit BASIC programs in a way similar to QUILL. Unlike a normal ASCII-Editor all entered lines are syntactically checked by the interpreter.

Note: The interpreter will not accept lines after a program break if the functions and procedures are not reinitialized. This is possible by using the CLEAR command, which will produce the message 'PROC/DEF CLEARED'. After this message the work with the screen editor can go on.

With the following code, you get the screen shot, pretty straight forward I think

Ah, thank you. this looks similar to the "Pointer Environment" of the Graphics Toolkit from Pyramide.

Would be interesting to know, if the pointer is movable with a SerMouse. I fear it does not run on higher resolutions.

Any chance to get the source? (Dilwyn ?). I always wanted something easy of this kind for the PE, but noone has written such things. Even EasyPTR is overloaded for such simple things.

And now: Who was first? GigaBasic or TK2? (For the SB Editor)...

Ralf R. wrote:Ah, thank you. this looks similar to the "Pointer Environment" of the Graphics Toolkit from Pyramide.

Would be interesting to know, if the pointer is movable with a SerMouse. I fear it does not run on higher resolutions.

Any chance to get the source? (Dilwyn ?). I always wanted something easy of this kind for the PE, but noone has written such things. Even EasyPTR is overloaded for such simple things.

And now: Who was first? GigaBasic or TK2? (For the SB Editor)...

Source: Haven't got the sources. Contact with the authors was made by Mr Navigator. Might be worth a follow up request,perhaps?

I think TK2 came first (not 100% sure). Might be worth disassembling the editors with a keyword extraction tool like DEA, so study how the syntax checking etc works in Giga-Basic's SCREEN command.

Hi,

I had a quick look at Giga-Basic in Disa, which looks like an assembly language programme, so could be disassembled and modified to work with SMSQ/E.

EASE is a QC Programme, so disassembling C programmes is hard

dilwyn wrote:Thanks to Mr Navigator managing to make contact with the authors of Giga-Basic and E.A.S.E. (Easily Applicable System Environment) I have been able to make the software and manuals available to dokwnload from my website.

Great! Good job

This just shows why the QL Commercial Software Preservation project is so important (that is how E.A.S.E., GigaBasic and now GigaChrome came about) - and why more help is needed to track down the copyright holders

Just a further throw into the mix, Gigachrome has now also been made freeware