Loading and saving files

Traditionally, the Spectrum used cassette tapes for loading and saving programs and data.

With BasinC, the commands LOAD, SAVE, MERGE, and VERIFY refer to files on your actual computer's hard disk. Full Windows paths are acceptable (such as c:\programs\fruit.bas), but be aware that programs that load or save with long paths will not work correctly on an original Spectrum. When no path is specified in a filename, the most recent path is used.

You can specify an empty filename if you wish to locate the file manually instead of typing its full path. For example, LOAD "" displays a dialogue box where you can select a file to open.

Note: Loading and saving work differently with tape files. See that topic for more information.

Note: Since files cannot be 'deleted' from cassette tape (unless you record over them!), unexpanded Spectrum BASIC does not include the ERASE command. In other words, it is impossible for anyone to create a malicious BasinC program that would delete files from your computer.

Programs are saved and loaded in .bas format or Spectrum Emulation Snapshot format. .bas format is a text representation of a BASIC program. Escape characters can be used to indicate embedded colour commands and UDG or graphics characters. In all load and save dialogs relating to programs, the .bas extension is assumed, and will be added if the user omits it in the filename. In all respects the emulated Spectrum receives the data from a .bas or snapshot file as if it were a tape block - program files are encoded into tokenised BASIC before being passed to the ROM for loading into the emulated memory space.

Data saved or loaded as CODE is stored in one of two formats - .bsc format and raw binary format. The .bsc format is saved including the 17 byte Spectrum header information so that it can be reloaded without having to specify the address and length of the data to be loaded. If the .bsc extension is omitted in a filename, then the data will be saved as raw binary format, a straight dump of memory byte by byte. This can be used, for example, to save screens in the .scr format. When reloading, you can specify addresses (indeed, you must do this when loading raw binary format files) and an optional length. BasinC will load all data up to your length limit if the file is too large, and will truncate the data if it overflows the maximum address of memory location 65535. If your length specified is too large, BasinC will load all available data and then continue.

When loading or saving variables, the extension .bsd will be used, regardless of whether or not it has been specified. These files are a special type of CODE block which saves the memory used by a particular variable out to a file using a similar format to the .bsc format.

File formats

See the following topics for a detailed description of the file formats that BasinC supports:

• The .bas format, which is BasinC's preferred format for programs.
• The .bsc format, for code blocks.
• The .bsd format, for array variable data.
• The .scr format, for Spectrum screen images.
• Snapshot files, which describe the complete state of the emulated Spectrum.
• Tape files, which contain sequential data blocks like a cassette tape.

To extract data from a damaged or unsupported file, use the Import Binary File window.