Newbie needs help installing BBC SDL in Raspbian

Discussions about the BBC BASIC language, with particular reference to BB4W and BBCSDL
nemozilch
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri 06 Apr 2018, 23:53

Newbie needs help installing BBC SDL in Raspbian

Post by nemozilch »

I am a rank beginner as far as Linux is concerned, but I like it, and am trying my best to get up to speed. I have done a lot of programming in the distant past, assembly language, DSP and FORTRAN, programmed AN/UYK-1 computer in 1961, Interdata, DEC, Data General, HP 21 MX, EAI But very little in the last 20 years or so. Now, at 82 years of age getting up to speed again is going a little slowly. I want to use BBCSDL on my Raspberry PI and have tried to install it without any great success. I could use a little coaching. I have tried to carefully follow Richards installation instructions and everything appeared to go OK except for how to start the program, also, I am not sure what directory I should be using. I just unzipped everything into the raspbian download folder and ran through the command lines as listed by Richard and all appeared to go OK. But the last step, starting the program, just says ./bbcsdl. I am not certain what this means. Some help will be greatly appreciated.
Bob
p_m21987
Posts: 177
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2018, 21:51

Re: Newbie needs help installing BBC SDL in Raspbian

Post by p_m21987 »

You have to change the current directory to the folder where the BBCSDL executable file (which is named "bbcsdl") is located. (I assume Richard's instructions tell you how to do that.)

Then once you do that, you type in the command "./bbcsdl". The "./" means the current directory, so basically the command means "execute the file 'bbcsdl' that's in the current directory".
nemozilch
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri 06 Apr 2018, 23:53

Re: Newbie needs help installing BBC SDL in Raspbian

Post by nemozilch »

OK Patrick I did that and the program opens and I loaded an example and that worked. Although I did get an error when I entered the ./

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd bbcbsc
pi@raspberrypi:~/bbcbsc $ ./bbcsdl
libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information

Thanks a million for your help. I am off and running at last.
Bob