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Cant wait to get my hands on this BBC! Basic was the first language I learned so its nice to see it repackaged. 256 Megs is alot! Modern BBC is alot bigger than what we used to have available to us in the 90s.
Looking at the difference page, it's not BBC BASIC as one might remember it. But that's not possible outwith actual BBC Micro hardware, complete with Kenneth Kendall's voice in ROM. And I suspect that Kenneth Kendall cannot be open sourced. (-: It looks like it has preserved the spirit of BBC Micro development on modern platforms, though. The use of INKEY$(-256) to determine underlying platform is amusing.
It’s a reimplementation in C by Richard Russell. If you want a version by Sophie Wilson (who created BBC BASIC) there’s one in RISC OS written in ARM assembler.
It's good to see old software being released as open-source with no-strings-attached OSI approved open source licenses. Although this trend also attracts certain for-profit entities who like to release their code as "open source" to join the bandwagon, except the license used is decidedly not open source.
This is not old software being open sourced. It's a cross-platform re-implementation of BBC BASIC, and it's been around for years.
The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct? I do think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su... To do a pixel read there's at least a lock, memcpy, format conversion and an unlock.
SDL is simply not optimised for this use-case, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. If you're writing single-threaded code (which I assume BBC Basic is!), you can cut out the locking and directly poke a 640x480x3 array in memory. This part is extremely fast, as fast as your memory subsystem can go. Then, convert that into a texture and send it to the GPU once per frame. This is the only added overhead relative to…
https://gist.github.com/DavidBuchanan314/2f68ff42df047a448be...
The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…
The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…
I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me. Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and pla…
That was your queue to literally physically stick the box over that square on the screen and then a few minutes later during the end credits that square would turn into what would look like to the human eye just plain old static but to the sensor in the box stuck over it, it was reading it as a datastream that the software would interpret and save.
To be honestly it wasn't terribly reliable, I think we got it to work maybe once or twice in the few times they did it but was an interesting experiment by the BBC back in the 80s!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The nostalgia for me around the language is strong Same here. I cut my programming teeth on BBC Basic and later 6502 assembly, initially on an Electron, then the Model Bs at school, and we later had a Master 128 at home. The integrated multi-pass assembler was a godsend for someone who got to the point of wanting to play around at a lower level, but before getting to that stage the language had other things that se…
The name lookup routine is "Find name in catalogue" here: https://archive.org/details/BBCMicroCompendium/page/314/mode... There's no obvious length check. I guess the actual limit will be 255 or 254 characters, maybe minus a bit if the info block has any extra data. EDIT: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246063
Line length was limited by a byte-length counter and IIRC included the line number and maybe EOL, so would be something like 253 or 252. Do the maximum usable variable name length will be a couple of bytes less than that as you'll need a couple of characters to do something with is (LongLongLong...Long=1 and so forth).
EDIT: oh, interesting. The only references I can find to a variable name limit of 40 characters are referring to the PC BASIC implementations by MS: GWBasic, QuickBasic, and QBasic. I did do work in those too.
My first computer was a PDP-8 single board that I had to program in octal (but I wrote an assembler on my company’s Dec-10, so slightly civilized). Later I bought serial number 71 Apple II and loved the built in basic. Older HN readers might have run across my open source Land of the Dwarf adventure game, and I wrote the shitty little chess program Apple distributed on their demo cassette in Woz’s Basic. So, BBC Basic just made me feel nostalgic.
The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…
I had a ponder on the attractions of the 8-bit era a few days ago ...
https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-virtues-of-the-8-bi...
Closest I've found to a modern version is the Colour Maximite