BASIC Stage Manager

The Stage Tool lets you allocate memory to one or more BASIC "stages," or memory ranges. This is useful in development in cases where you have a main program under development, and one or more BASIC utility programs to support development.

To change to another BASIC stage, use the Stage Tool:

.↑ start-page [end-page] [NEW]

where start-page and end-page are valid 8-bit hexadecimal numbers. They represent the start and end of BASIC memory on page boundaries. If end-page is omitted (or if it is lower than the start page), then the end page will be 3.5K after the start page. For example

.↑ 10

will reset the stage back to the default of an unexpanded VIC-20. If you provide page-end, the stage will end at the specified page. For example

.↑ 60 62 NEW

will create a new 512-byte BASIC stage at $6000.

If you add NEW after the page numbers, wAx will set the first three bytes at the stage to $00. If you don't do this before the first use of a stage, the Stage tool may lock up. If this happens, simply exit with STOP/RESTORE, and try entering the stage again with NEW.

To see the address range (in pages) of the current BASIC stage, enter ↑ on a line by itself:

.↑

Note: When you enter a BASIC stage, variables will be cleared.