GWBasic typing more than will hold on one line

[falter]

I am trying to manually type in the code for jsbach.bas, which was a demo program included on some versions of the Mindset GWBASIC disk. It wasn't included on the one that bitsavers has, but since 8bitguy listed it on his video about the Mindset, I thought I'd screencap and manually reenter. However, I'm hitting a snag - you can only enter a single line per line of BASIC code. It doesn't 'wrap' to the next line and won't include whatever you type below the first line as part of a single line.

You can see in the screencap there is line 100 which should read:

100 PLAY "T120 O5 L16 ED+E8O4 B8 G+8 B8 E F+ E D+ E8O3 B8G+8B8 E B F+ B

But GW will only let me type up to the second B8, the cursor won't wrap down and let me carry on adding more. It's been ages since I entered anything in BASIC.. is there something I'm missing here? I tried googling and found a few commands that spoke of line wrapping but none seemed to work in my situation.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I believe that Ctrl-J will feed to the next line but not end the current one. (Ctrl-Return may do the same thing). I'll have to get to a DOS machine (not an emulator) and check it out, if you wish.

 

[falter]

Thanks Chuck. I tried those tonight.. and it did advance to the next line, but then when I tried to run the program it would say something like syntaxes or invalid command. Forget the exact term it used. The manual is online.. I might dig that up and read through it again. I think the term for this is wrapping if I've got it right.

 

[carlos12]

GW-BASIC usually wraps the line . I don't remember the limit (maybe 256?) but at least on every version I tried, including on real hardware, for sure you can type a line longer than 40 or 80 characters. At least it's this way on more or less conventional hardware.

Maybe that's a quirk of Mindset's GW-BASIC specific version?

You could try a workaround: as GW-BASIC uses to admit text files apart of its binary format, you could write the program outside on a text editor of your choice (a modern desktop computer, an old PC, the same Mindset if it has a decent text editor, whatever...), transfer to the Mindset and load it.

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

This just being a bunch of PLAY statements, you should be able to break up each line into two. It depends on what your objective is, playing the music or finding out why its input line code seems to suck so much.

 

[krebizfan]

The line works with standard GW-BASIC. Maybe do the editing in 80 column mode and switch to 40 columns when running the program?

The Mindset manual claims a line can have 250 characters.