Altirra BASIC comes in two forms, an 8KB cartridge ROM image (atbasic.bin) and a DOS executable (atbasicx.xex). Both start the same BASIC interpreter, with minor differences.
Cartridge version
The 8KB cartridge version is made as a drop-in replacement for the Atari BASIC cartridge or system BASIC ROM (XL/XE systems). It can be burned into an EPROM to replace the original BASIC ROM in hardware, or written to a compatible flash memory cartridge. With emulators, it can substitute for the ATARIBAS.ROM file required to supply BASIC.
The cartridge ROM is configured to allow a disk boot on startup so that if a disk drive is attached, DOS boots before BASIC is started.
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- Altirra Basic uses the same memory area as Atari Basic, $A000-BFFF - it does NOT use RAM under the OS - it is 30%-50% faster than Atari Basic, but still slower than TB XL (for several games Altirra Basic is already too fast and I have a few Basic games, that work under Atari Basic and TB XL but not under Altirra Basic)
- it has approx. 30 additional commands, modelled after Basic XL, e.g. DIR, Lock, Unlock, Erase, etc. (TB XL programs that use the same commands in the listing, like e.g. lock, unlock, rename, erase will either not work or execute something else, as said before Altirra Basic is compatible to Atari Basic and Basic XL, not fully compatible to TB XL, because for the additional commands Altirra Basic uses different "tokens" in the tokenized/saved format than TB XL; the same is true for Basic XL, it uses different tokens than TB XL and when phaeron had to decide which tokens he should use, he decided for compatibility with Basic XL tokens...)
- there is no compiler for Altirra Basic (just like there is no compiler for Basic XL; the Basic XL runtime does NOT execute compiled BXL programs, it simply loads uncompiled BXL programs without the BXL cartridge...), but as long as you use only Atari Basic commands, one could use the standard Atari Basic compilers...
- Altirra Basic automatically executes a program named Autorun.BAS (this can be changed easily in the program and I already changed it into Autorun.AIB)...
- alas, there is no memory left to include more commands in Altirra Basic, so you have to live with the approx. 30 additional commands that are already there...
Sorry, I can't, since I never worked with Advan Basic and do not even know programs that are written with it...
Attached is an ATR image with various Basic dialects I have for the A8. It is incomplete (e.g. does not include Advan Basic, BasiX, MultiBasic, etc.) and errmm, when I first created it, there was only one Basic version named Fast Basic - the A8 fileversion by Tom Hunt/CTH (which is approx. 9 kbytes in size but not any faster than Atari Basic, since it is just Atari Basic +1k additional code). Nowadays there is also Fast Basic by dmsc and since the CTH version does not offer much, it will be surely forgotten in a while.
Afair, all Basic dialects on this image do provide an Autorun, thanks to Fandal who did this for me (many of them did not originally come with an Autorun option). Simply load one of the Basic dialects and it will load a short Autorun, which will say "File not found!" - if you see this, you know you have executed the Basic dialect succesfully and can now start programming. (And if you want, you can also use this extremely simple and short program to load your Basic program automatically and display a title during loading, but you have to change the filename to be loaded and the title manually.)
