Post questions and discussion related to version 5.5 here.
True BASIC v5.5 Discussion
16 days later
Does True BASIC 5.5 run on Windows 10?
Hi,
The current installer for v5.5 is not compatible with Windows 10, but if you have an existing installation of v5.5 you may be able to copy those files onto a Windows 10 machine and get it working by running in compatibility mode, or using a Windows 98/XP emulator or similar.
mrshogi
Hello, mrshogi,
If you can get to the exe files, you can run them, as far as I have ever experienced, on any windows machine. I have never "installed" any of the True Basics I have had over the years. I just click on the exe. I run both Silver 5.33and Gold 5.5 off external drives and usb flash sticks. Nothing ever actually gets "installed" in the conventional sense, as far as I can see. I still have 2 Win98's, a Win2000, and 2 Win7's and both TB's work OK on all of them. Some of the later Windows systems won't run the old DOS version, however, because those won't deal with any DOS program. I can't see why you would need any emulator or anything like that. Maybe there's something in the current "installer" that causes some sort of problem with Windows 10. I don't have Win10 but I don't see any reason the TB exe's wouldn't work on it.
Regards,
Mike C.
I run 5.5 on Windows 10, no problems. I also have version 6 running. Nothing special required, 64 bit windows version. I do not have them installed in the programs folder, direct to my C drive.
Thanks for your replies.
What are the main differences between versions 5.5 and 6? I own 6 bronze edition
The editor is the main difference. The language is the same. I believe there is documentation in the downloads section on the site that explains it all.
- Edited
The editor in 5.5 appears to be very buggy, at least on current Windows versions.
It improved a little bit when I enabled Windows 10 compatibility mode, but not much. Sometimes it seems to crash, when just clicking on it. Forget about clicking on most of the menu options.
I'm not sure if it was released in this state (5.5 was a beta version after all, wasn't it?), or it was simply introduced when Windows was updated several times since it was released. 5.5 has a copyright date of 1998 in its About screen... It's unfortunate, as it had some interesting ideas.
The version 6 editor is more stable, but still has issues: the well known by now 100% CPU load, of at least one CPU core, all the time. And I still get an error occasionally when starting the editor, that a file with a strange filename cannot be found. I have not written large programs with it, but it generally seemed to work fine for smaller ones.
The V6 editor was written in TB itself, by John R. Arscott. I bet it must be one of the larger programs out there that was written in True BASIC. He has not been on the forum for some time now, hope he is doing well.
The good news is that you can use your own text editor and run/compile your programs with TBSystem.exe, but strangely this is not documented clearly AFAIK. I would suggest the TB folks to add an article on the website for this. This could be a viable option, if you don't want your CPU to become hot and could extend the lifetime of version 6 a bit longer IMO. I would gladly contribute an article on this, if @admin would be interested.
TL;DR I would recommend staying on version 6.
Hi Vintzend,
The ability to use TB with different editors and/or adapting an open source editor for TB is a project we're looking at currently, as it happens. If you wanted to send us your article we'd very happily share it on our site; I'd also be open to packaging a version of TB intended to use with external editors. All constructive feedback for keeping TB viable is welcome.
Re: v5.5 vs v6, the main difference is indeed John Arscott's editor, which gives some added flexibility in which version of TBSYSTEM you can use with it, but it further has some built-in accommodation for known bugs/issues with 5.5.
2 months later
A hint for people that encountered the same issue I did with 5.5 editor (Silver in my case) on Windows 10:
If I clicked Save or Save As, in the Save dialog I could not enter a filename, only choose an existing file. Which is not nice, if you are writing a new script from scratch (which is not without risk, as the 5.5 editor is very flaky on my computer and seems to crash randomly often...)
The fix for the file name issue could be solved by setting the Compatibility Mode to Windows XP (right-click on the tbsilver.exe file in the Windows Explorer), instead of Windows 95 that I had chosen earlier.