Time and memory that lasts

There's a clock chip in your ACE with a battery on it. It knows the date while the machine is unplugged, and it has 256 bytes of memory that survive with it.

Asking the time

TIME and DATE are statements, not functions. They print, on their own:

DATE
TIME

2026-08-03
09:30:17

OK

Setting it

SETTIME 9, 30, 0

Hours, minutes, seconds, on a 24-hour clock.

SETDATE 20, 26, 8, 3

Century, year, month, day — so 2026 is 20, 26. It reads oddly the first time and it's how the clock chip itself thinks about it.

Set it once and it stays set, through power cuts and across months on a shelf.

10 SETDATE 20, 26, 8, 3
20 SETTIME 9, 30, 0
30 PRINT "THE ACE SAYS IT IS"
40 PRINT
50 DATE
60 TIME

Memory that survives

NVRAM is 256 bytes of battery-backed memory, addressed 0 to 255. It's a statement to write and a function to read:

NVRAM 0, 123
PRINT NVRAM(0)

 123

OK

Switch the ACE off, come back tomorrow, and byte 0 is still 123.

What it's good for

256 bytes isn't much, and that's the point — it's for the handful of things that ought to outlive a power cycle without needing the memory card:

• a high score
• which level the player got to
• a difficulty setting
• how many times this thing has been switched on

10 P = NVRAM(0)
20 IF S > P THEN NVRAM 0, S : PRINT "NEW RECORD"
30 PRINT "BEST SO FAR:"; NVRAM(0)

A high score in three lines, with no card in the machine at all.

Scores over 255

One byte holds 0 to 255. For a bigger number use two bytes and put them back together: NVRAM 0, S - INT(S / 256) * 256 for the low half and NVRAM 1, INT(S / 256) for the high half, then NVRAM(0) + NVRAM(1) * 256 to read it. That gets you to 65535.

Timing something

There's no stopwatch, but there is a clock. Read the time, do the thing, read the time again:

10 PRINT "READY"
20 TIME
30 FOR I = 1 TO 1000 : NEXT I
40 TIME

For anything finer than a second, count loops instead — a FOR loop that counts to a thousand takes about as long today as it did yesterday, because there's no operating system to get in the way. That reliability is one of the quiet pleasures of a machine like this.

Next: reaching past BASIC to the machine underneath.