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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : CMM2 ordered last week, some newbie story and a couple of questions
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Lodovik Regular Member  Joined: 17/05/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 41 |
Hi to all! I was an avid BASIC programmer one the 80-90s (C64, C128, Amiga, QuickBasic, VisualBasic). A couple years ago, I really wanted to get back at coding again and I started learning Objective-C then Xcode and it wasn't as fun as I thought. Xcode is a moving target and it is evolving more rapidly that I have time to put in it to keep up. It also lacked the instant gratification of past machines I had and I wanted to get back at simply coding and having fun. I'm a retro gaming / computing enthusiast and I also have a MiSTer FPGA device which can re-create most 8 and 16-bit computers quite precisely, down to the cycle and I thought of using it to code on one of the old machines but they now felt too limited, too slow. So I thought that I would go for the Commander X16 because it is based on the (very familiar to me) C64 computer and the learning curve would be quite small. But the CX16 BASIC looked a little too limited after having used more modern versions of BASIC and more modern languages as well. It's still evolving and I'm not ruling buying one out one day when the project is fully completed. On The 8-bit Guy YT channel, I then saw a video about the CMM2 and was immediately hooked by the speed, simplicity and I started digging on the subject. I then discovered MMBasic and I said to myself: "This is exactly what I want!". The 1 second booting to BASIC and the demos were impressive. After seeing a ton of YT videos and reading most of the MMBasic manuals, I finally decided to order a fully assembled CMM2 from Micromite last week. The back log on orders seems quite long and, in the meantime, I downloaded MMBasic for DOS to get an headstart while waiting for my CMM2 to arrive. One thing I couldn't get sure about is the clock speed of the CMM2. Will it be a 400 or a 480 MHz unit? I couldn't get a definitive answer on the site or documentation as the description talks about "At least 400 MHz" or "Up to 480 MHz" clock speed. Is the speed determined by some binning tests or are the newer units faster? I wouldn't have minded paying a little more to be sure to have the faster one and this is the only quibble on which I hesitated a little. I'm very eager to get my CMM2 and start programming again! Edited 2021-05-19 13:37 by Lodovik |
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TassyJim Guru  Joined: 07/08/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 6283 |
Welcome to the forum and MMBasic That is an impossible to answer question. STM have used the same part number for both variants which makes it impossible to know what one you get when ordering the boards. There shouldn't be too many 400MHz chips still around but with the world shortage of all sorts of chips, I wouldn't like to make any predictions. In the practical "user experience" side, the difference in performance is undetectable. Jim VK7JH MMedit |
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thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
Note that both versions can be overclocked to the same 504 MHz speed: https://www.thebackshed.com/forum/ViewTopic.php?FID=16&TID=13398 Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| Rado Regular Member Joined: 27/11/2020 Location: CroatiaPosts: 59 |
I'd like to point out that there's an easy overclock option that would speed up both 400 and 480MHz versions up to 500-ish. edit: thwill had faster fingers. :) Edited 2021-05-19 19:01 by Rado |
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| Lodovik Regular Member Joined: 17/05/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 41 |
My CMM2 is still weeks away and I thought I could use the Windows / DOS version but it doesn't have graphics commands, which I need for my project. It's not a game, I need only to plot some points on the screen to visualise a binary file. Since I have a Raspberry Pi 3a lying around, could I install old versions of Raspbian and MMbasic to do some simple graphics programs? I searched the forum and the last supported version of Raspbian was Stretch with the 085257 version of MMbasic. Would I be better with Jessie and MMbasic 085241? I've already found the mentioned files but I just want to have some advice on which combination would be the most stable. I know that MMbasic development was terminated on the PI due to the frequently changing OS that became a moving target. |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3378 |
I'm not sure anybody knows for certain. If you try Stretch and mmbasic 085257 and it works reliably, you would give us a good data point--and there's no harm in trying. There's also a question as to whether pigpio was a moving target which went from not working reliably to working reliably to again not working reliably. PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed |
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hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 719 |
If you have a RPi ( and speed is unimportant ) There is also Basic256 and BBCBasic . my site |
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| Lodovik Regular Member Joined: 17/05/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 41 |
I finally succeeded in installing MMbasic on my Raspberry Pi 3b. It wasn't difficult, I just made bad assumptions at first and it diverted my efforts toward nowhere land. At first I tried older versions of Raspbian and it didn't worked. The system was abnormally slow with a lot of mouse lag. I wasted a lot of time trying to correct this and the GPIO errors from mmbasic. I finally installed the latest Raspberry Pi OS (kernel version 5.10) and MMbasic version 2019-11-29_215932. And it worked right away but I had to set the executable permission on the mmbasic file first and start it from the terminal using sudo ./mmbasic on the directory where the file is (Desktop in my case). I still haven't tried to enter some programs yet. I'm currently updating the Raspberry system files. I will report how it goes shortly. Thanks to those who helped me. I'm on holidays presently so I was eager to get it running while I have time to play with MMbasic. |
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| horus Newbie  Joined: 25/04/2021 Location: United StatesPosts: 12 |
Welcome, Lodovik, Sounds like you are on the right track and with the right outlook. Can you say more about how you intend to plot visual data to represent binary files? (If you'd rather not, I do understand, but it sounds like an interesting project.) |
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| Lodovik Regular Member Joined: 17/05/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 41 |
Hi Horus, I was a little vague in what I wanted to do because it would depends on what I can achieve on the Raspberry PI. In fact what I've done since, is to convert the Commodore 64 character set ROM and display it on the screen. I would like to use it as a font but on the Pi there's no DefineFont so I have to display the characters pixel by pixel for now. What I would like to write is a program that will convert a C64 BASIC PRG to something that you can run on the Maximite. Not an emulator, just something that would convert the C64 BASIC program to native MM2 BASIC with some adjustments and some poke interceptions. The C64 character set was a necessity. For now, I'm stuck with a ridiculously slow screen printing routine but I'm having fun optimizing it. It's what I was looking for: having fun to program again. Next thing I'm eager to do: decode a PRG file and adapt it to MMbasic. Fortunately, the C64 BASIC is so... basic that most of its instructions have near perfect equivalents in MMbasic. |
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