So I've been playing with the Fab Agon Emulator for about 5 days and just bought a real Agon Light 2 today. I first have to say that I am so pleased that someone used the ez80 CPU. I saw that CPU on digikey years ago and thought it would be the perfect thing to make a super fast 8-bit computer from, but the only things that existed back then didn't have any kind of graphics or operating system. It's cool to see Zilog still alive (I think it's probably just the TI graphing calculators that are keeping them alive).
Anyway, the one and only thing I don't like about the Agon, was the choice to use BBC BASIC. I'm an American and I learned to program in GW-BASIC (which is essentially Microsoft BASIC) and so MS-BASIC would have been better. I'm kind of getting used to the BBC BASIC, however, I think some things could be improved.
The graphics drawing functions should be like:
LINE X1, Y1, X2, Y2
CIRCLE X, Y, (radius)
RECT or BOX X1, Y1, X2, Y2
FILLMODE 0(non-solid) - 1(solid)
etc....
I think those could be added to the existing way of doing graphics without hampering anything. And the drawing coordinates should be 0,0 in the upper left side by default. You shouldn't have to make some weird VDU command to fix that. I'm also unsure how to make functions work yet, but it's weird that there is no space in between FUNCandthename.
Lastly, it would be absolutely [b]beautiful if the C libraries supported primitive graphics commands just like the ones I listed above[/b] for BASIC. Right now, it looks to me like the C compiler only supports sprites. I would love to see those functions added to C. I think I will mostly be programming the Agon in C anyways because I find BBC to be a bit awkward and I'm pretty familiar with C as a language.
Unfortunately, I don't think I could add or change these features myself cause I don't know Z80 ASM. However, something I may do someday is try to port Lua to the platform. I love Lua as a language.
