Values for POKE?

[Paul Panks]

What values do I give poke for:

Poking a letter to the screen (a through z)?
Saving variables to disk using poke? (poking memory areas to disk)

Thanks.

Paul


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Few cats act their age, while
most just cough up furballs.

[Lance Edmonds]

You poke the ASCII values to the screen page. The page is located at segment &H0B800 for VGA and &H0B000 for mono, so using the internal variable pbvscrnbuff pointer value simplies the task of working out what the address should be.

The text-mode screen (SCREEN 0) is arranged thus:
Byte 0: Ascii code of the letter to display at column 1, row 1
Byte 1: color attribute of the character at column 1, row 1
Byte 2: Ascii code of the letter to display at column 2, row 1
Byte 3: color attribute of the character at column 2, row 1
...etc.

Here is a quick example:

cls
def seg = pbvscrnbuff \ &H10000
for x% = 1 to 26
  poke x% * 2 - 2, 64 + x%
next x%
def seg

Finally, I'm not sure what you mean about "poking to disk" - I guess you mean save variables to disk by peeking at their location in memory?

That would be done something like this (using both 32-bit pointers and seg/offet methods):

' pseudocode
DIM ps AS LONG PTR, x AS LONG
x  = 999
ps = VARPTR32(x)
OPEN "file.dat" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
' Write it as a "text" value, ie "999"
PRINT #1, @ps ' use the pointer target
 
' Or we could write it as 4 byte binary value (same as MKL$):
DEF SEG = VARSEG(x)
PRINT #1, PEEK$(VARPTR(x), LEN(x)) 
DEF SEG
CLOSE #1

Is that what you mean? If not, can you please rephrase the question a little. Thanks!

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>