About the PicoDOS8 TxBASIC Guide
A Persistor plus PicoDOS8 gives your TxBASIC programs the ability to store huge amounts of data with the addition of just a few BASIC statements to your existing programs. You need to have PicoDOS8 installed in your TT8’s onboard flash memory and version 4.10 or later of TxBASIC which has built-in PicoDOS8 support.
Complete PicoDOS8 installation instructions can be found in the Getting Started Guide that came with your Persistor or up on the www.persistor.com web site and updates to earlier versions of TxBASIC can be obtained by contacting technical support at www.onsetcomp.com.
You can access the five new TxBASIC commands for the Persistor by declaring them as extensions at the top of your program. There’s a command to save all or part of your TxBASIC DATAFILE to a file on the flash memory card using DOS 8.3 file naming conventions. When your experiment is complete, you can move the memory card from the TT8 to your Windows PC equipped with a very inexpensive card reader and quickly copy the files to your PC for analysis. There’s also a complimentary command to let you fill all or part of the DATAFILE from a named file resident on the flash memory card. Two other commands let your program monitor the total capacity and free space on the current memory card. Finally, there’s a very powerful command that lets you invoke any of the PicoDOS8 shell commands from within your program.
How to use the PicoDOS8 TxBASIC Guide
This guide is written as a follow-up to the printed Getting Started Guide that came with your Persistor and builds on information presented there. It, in turn, should have already convinced you of the necessity of mastering the TT8 using Onset’s documentation. That done, you should be ready to start using the Persistor with TxBASIC.
For a quick introduction, we’ve annotated a simple TxBASIC program that demonstrates most of the techniques you’ll need to learn to take advantage of the Persistor. We follow that with a reference section detailing the use of the PicoDOS8 extensions.
