8 ms·

Commodore 64 BASIC and KERNAL on Atari 8-bit hardware

92 points by TMWNN 5y ago

TMWNN 5y ago
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/p24fo8/i_modified_the_c64_kernal_and_basic_to_run_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/p24fo8/i_modified_the_...
fw4h5 5y ago
Fuck masks. Fuck vaccine passports. Fuck anyone that supports this totalitarian bullshit.
intricatedetail 5y ago
I remember Atari basic was quite superior, so probably that's why there was no port. Awesome work!
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Didn't it do something weird with strings where you had to periodically LIST and reload your program to prevent crashes?
  - jhallenworld 5y ago
    Yeah, famous bugs. Atari BASIC source is fully documented in this book: https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-the-atari-basic-source-book https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-the-atari-basic-sourc... See appendix B, memmove() was broken.
    - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      Interesting, never heard of that. I have this book, and my whole 800 setup today. The capacitors in my Commodore 1702 monitor need to be replaced, however...
    - timbit42 5y ago
      Has anyone ever fixed this? It would be cool if they managed to speed it up some as well. Of course there is TurboBASIC XL but it isn't ROM-able.
      - buescher 5y ago
        I think rev c as shipped on the XE models fixed it. But yeah, Turbo BASIC XL was the bomb.
      - unwiredben 5y ago
        Atari shipped a final Rev C basic both in the ROMs for the XE computers and on cartridges for people that requested it. There were several derivations. The original authors of Atari Basic produced BASIC XL and BASIC XE on cartridge, each with additional language features. There's also the really cool Altirra BASIC (see https://virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra%20BASIC%20Reference%20Manual.pdf https://virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra%20BASIC%20Reference...) which ships with the Altirra emulator as a tokenized-code compatible, but faster and more featureful, implementation. A version of that was included in the ROM for the new 576NUC+ all-in-one Atari-compatible.
- ataylor284_ 5y ago
  It's unfortunate that Commodore shipped BASIC 2.0 on the 64. They already had shipped PETs with the much superior BASIC 4.0 years earlier. It was likely a cost saving measure: they had a more favorable licensing deal with MS on BASIC 2.0 and it fit on fewer ROM chips. Too late the C128 came with BASIC 7.0 which was actually quite good (for an 8-bit BASIC anyway).
  - timbit42 5y ago
    It is quite good but it is also quite slow compared to BBC BASIC on the 2 MHz 6502-based BBC Micro.
  - rasz 5y ago
    Jack Tramiel was the OG of cutthroat business practices. He bought Basic for a flat fee from Gates in 1977, that included rights to modify and ship on any hardware platform he wanted. >Doing business with Gates was decent, Tramiel said. "He came to see me, tried to sell me Basic, and he told me that I don't have to give him any money, all I had to give him was $3 per unit. I told him I was already married," Tramiel said. >Tramiel instead told Gates he'd pay a flat fee of $25,000, rejecting the idea of paying $3 for each Commodore 64 sold. "In about six weeks [Gates] came and took that $25,000. Since then he did not speak to me," Tramiel said. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2813900/innovators-reminisce-about-the-pc-wonder-years.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2813900/innovators-rem...
  - vardump 5y ago
    > It's unfortunate that Commodore shipped BASIC 2.0 on the 64. It might also have contributed to the success of C64 by "encouraging" early use of machine language. BASIC is great, but to truly make C64 shine you do need assembly language. Notably, it was also pretty trivial to expand BASIC capabilities. A lot of utilities did just that, like adding graphics commands and sprite extensions. Simons' BASIC is probably the most comprehensive example, and it also came as a cartridge.
    - classichasclass 5y ago
      Really, BASIC v2 is at its best as a scripting language to load and call machine language subroutines ...
ecpottinger 5y ago
If I remember right, Atari Basic had 4 byte floats and Commodore Basic has 4 byte floats. The extra precision mattered for some programs, but the small size made the Atari Basic faster.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Atari had 6 byte floats, BCD. Commodore had 5 bytes, binary.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  CBM had 5 byte floats I think you meant--edit: maybe it was 6. 5 byte mantissa and 1 byte exponent?? CBM BASIC was a Microsoft product and I think more or less what all the Microsoft BASICs did was convert everything to floats internally--even when not really needed. For example the index in a FOR I=1 to 10 was dealt with internally (and slowly) as a float--including the operation to increment it by 1 or the STEP value. If Atari BASIC didn't do that it would have made things faster in many situations. Apple's Integer BASIC was faster because it didn't support floats at all, if you could deal with the almost C-style strings IIRC.
  - jhallenworld 5y ago
    I always thought it would be cool if the line numbers were floating point. You could always insert a line between any existing ones then.
    - adrianmonk 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure Netflix queues used to work this way. For the DVD-by-mail service, I think. Basically, the web page had a text field next to each movie, and you could type in numbers, then submit a form, and it would reorder your queue. The obvious thing to do was swap "1" and "2" to flip the order of the top two items. But you could just set the second one to "0.5" and leave the first at "1". When you submitted the form, it would renumber them all with integers.
    - nl 5y ago
sys_64738 5y ago
Blasphemy.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  Username checks out. :)
yitchelle 5y ago
Talking about retro technology, I am shamelessly plugging my twitter account for retro tech adverts. https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.
bwship 5y ago
Old school gaming is just so great. Jelly Boy just got released on the Switch for Super Nintendo Online. I seriously can't believe that up until like 3 days ago, I had no idea this game existed. My get woken up every morning now by my 4 year old to play it. We go around the house saying JELLY BOYYYY, and fist punching through our t-shirts to make it look like the game. Just so fun to have those little flashes of when games where just quirky and fun.

92 points by TMWNN 5y ago

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/p24fo8/i_modified_the_c64_kernal_and_basic_to_run_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/p24fo8/i_modified_the_...

fw4h5 5y ago

Fuck masks. Fuck vaccine passports. Fuck anyone that supports this totalitarian bullshit.

intricatedetail 5y ago

I remember Atari basic was quite superior, so probably that's why there was no port. Awesome work!

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Didn't it do something weird with strings where you had to periodically LIST and reload your program to prevent crashes?
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Yeah, famous bugs. Atari BASIC source is fully documented in this book: https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-the-atari-basic-source-book https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-the-atari-basic-sourc... See appendix B, memmove() was broken.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    Interesting, never heard of that. I have this book, and my whole 800 setup today. The capacitors in my Commodore 1702 monitor need to be replaced, however...
  - timbit42 5y ago
    Has anyone ever fixed this? It would be cool if they managed to speed it up some as well. Of course there is TurboBASIC XL but it isn't ROM-able.
    - buescher 5y ago
      I think rev c as shipped on the XE models fixed it. But yeah, Turbo BASIC XL was the bomb.
    - unwiredben 5y ago
      Atari shipped a final Rev C basic both in the ROMs for the XE computers and on cartridges for people that requested it. There were several derivations. The original authors of Atari Basic produced BASIC XL and BASIC XE on cartridge, each with additional language features. There's also the really cool Altirra BASIC (see https://virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra%20BASIC%20Reference%20Manual.pdf https://virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra%20BASIC%20Reference...) which ships with the Altirra emulator as a tokenized-code compatible, but faster and more featureful, implementation. A version of that was included in the ROM for the new 576NUC+ all-in-one Atari-compatible.
ataylor284_ 5y ago
It's unfortunate that Commodore shipped BASIC 2.0 on the 64. They already had shipped PETs with the much superior BASIC 4.0 years earlier. It was likely a cost saving measure: they had a more favorable licensing deal with MS on BASIC 2.0 and it fit on fewer ROM chips. Too late the C128 came with BASIC 7.0 which was actually quite good (for an 8-bit BASIC anyway).
- timbit42 5y ago
  It is quite good but it is also quite slow compared to BBC BASIC on the 2 MHz 6502-based BBC Micro.
- rasz 5y ago
  Jack Tramiel was the OG of cutthroat business practices. He bought Basic for a flat fee from Gates in 1977, that included rights to modify and ship on any hardware platform he wanted. >Doing business with Gates was decent, Tramiel said. "He came to see me, tried to sell me Basic, and he told me that I don't have to give him any money, all I had to give him was $3 per unit. I told him I was already married," Tramiel said. >Tramiel instead told Gates he'd pay a flat fee of $25,000, rejecting the idea of paying $3 for each Commodore 64 sold. "In about six weeks [Gates] came and took that $25,000. Since then he did not speak to me," Tramiel said. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2813900/innovators-reminisce-about-the-pc-wonder-years.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2813900/innovators-rem...
- vardump 5y ago
  > It's unfortunate that Commodore shipped BASIC 2.0 on the 64. It might also have contributed to the success of C64 by "encouraging" early use of machine language. BASIC is great, but to truly make C64 shine you do need assembly language. Notably, it was also pretty trivial to expand BASIC capabilities. A lot of utilities did just that, like adding graphics commands and sprite extensions. Simons' BASIC is probably the most comprehensive example, and it also came as a cartridge.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    Really, BASIC v2 is at its best as a scripting language to load and call machine language subroutines ...

ecpottinger 5y ago

If I remember right, Atari Basic had 4 byte floats and Commodore Basic has 4 byte floats. The extra precision mattered for some programs, but the small size made the Atari Basic faster.

jhallenworld 5y ago
Atari had 6 byte floats, BCD. Commodore had 5 bytes, binary.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
CBM had 5 byte floats I think you meant--edit: maybe it was 6. 5 byte mantissa and 1 byte exponent?? CBM BASIC was a Microsoft product and I think more or less what all the Microsoft BASICs did was convert everything to floats internally--even when not really needed. For example the index in a FOR I=1 to 10 was dealt with internally (and slowly) as a float--including the operation to increment it by 1 or the STEP value. If Atari BASIC didn't do that it would have made things faster in many situations. Apple's Integer BASIC was faster because it didn't support floats at all, if you could deal with the almost C-style strings IIRC.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  I always thought it would be cool if the line numbers were floating point. You could always insert a line between any existing ones then.
  - adrianmonk 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure Netflix queues used to work this way. For the DVD-by-mail service, I think. Basically, the web page had a text field next to each movie, and you could type in numbers, then submit a form, and it would reorder your queue. The obvious thing to do was swap "1" and "2" to flip the order of the top two items. But you could just set the second one to "0.5" and leave the first at "1". When you submitted the form, it would renumber them all with integers.
  - nl 5y ago

sys_64738 5y ago

Blasphemy.

classichasclass 5y ago
Username checks out. :)

yitchelle 5y ago

Talking about retro technology, I am shamelessly plugging my twitter account for retro tech adverts. https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.

bwship 5y ago

Old school gaming is just so great. Jelly Boy just got released on the Switch for Super Nintendo Online. I seriously can't believe that up until like 3 days ago, I had no idea this game existed. My get woken up every morning now by my 4 year old to play it. We go around the house saying JELLY BOYYYY, and fist punching through our t-shirts to make it look like the game. Just so fun to have those little flashes of when games where just quirky and fun.