vic 20 - saving a file from basic usually does not work

[jinchoung]

so i start my procedure by creating a blank .d64 disk in bmc64 and attach that to drive 8.

• then i create a trivial basic program
• SAVE "HELLO",8
• VERIFY "HELLO",8
• usually both return positive results.
• then, after a reboot or on a new session, when i attach the disk again, the program may not be there. SOMETIMES it is. but usually it's not. and rebooting doesn't seem to bring anything back. once however, i created a new blank disk and then switched from attaching that blank disk back to a previous blank disk and then the program appeared. but this seems to be entirely unreliable too.

there's no way for me to attempt any programming in the vic20 because saving my work is so unreliable.

otherwise, really really fantastic. thanks much!

[Kugelblitz360]

You need to "flush" the disk. BMC64 does not automatically write back the content.

[jinchoung]

You need to "flush" the disk. BMC64 does not automatically write back the content.

hi! WHOA! this sounds important but i have no idea what it means! can you expand?

thank you!

[Kugelblitz360]

BMC64 minimizes writes to the SD card so you basically can just turn off the power without corrupting the file system. Unfortunately that means that all changes to a d64 are only in RAM, not on the disk, unless you either eject the disk (then it gets written back) or find the "flush" function that got implemented around the 3.6 version which basically ejects and re-inserts the disc. Powering off without ejecting means that all contents is lost.

[jinchoung]

oh wow! good to know! thank you very much.

ok so in order to "eject the disk" do i just "detach"? and then "attach" again to keep working? so basically just save a file and then "detach" to make it stick?

[Kugelblitz360]

There should be a "flush disk" function in the menus that also can be applied to a key combination. In my setup Ctrl-F7 flushes the disk, but this is a manually set key combination.

[jinchoung]

oh great. i'll look for that. i tried finding a function in the menus but couldn't see anything but maybe it's reserved for a key bind. thank you very much for the all the info.

[rhester72]

Detach will work.