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Commodore was very much the exception here. Pretty much every other 8-bit computer's Basic had a bunch of commands to do graphics and sounds. But Jack Tramiel j
by egypturnash 3y ago
Commodore was very much the exception here. Pretty much every other 8-bit computer's Basic had a bunch of commands to do graphics and sounds. But Jack Tramiel just slapped in a licensed copy of Microsoft's Basic with the least amount of work necessary to make it run.
- Someone 3y agoI know, but it also was one of the most common of the “common Basic computers” of the time.
- Cockbrand 3y agoThe Commodore machines at least had a fairly extensive set of graphics symbols to create basic [pun not intended] graphics. For sound, though, there indeed wasn't really anything in Commodore BASIC V2. Tangential: Artist Raquel Meyers does really great stuff with the CBM graphics character set, see https://www.raquelmeyers.com/ https://www.raquelmeyers.com/
- lproven 3y agoYup. I think the C64 alone was responsible for a lot of the bad press BASIC got in the 1980s-1990s, from former Commodore owners who knew that one, terrible BASIC and concluded from a sample size of 1 that BASIC was bad. Most other BASICs were better. Some on machines of the same era were much better. The BBC Micro had the same CPU and had BBC BASIC, the fastest interpreted BASIC ever written, with types, structured code, named procedures with local variables, inline assembler, rich graphics and sound support and more... in 32 kB of ROM (half for the modular extensible OS, the other half for the BASIC). Tramiel cheaped out: the machine had 20 kB of ROM, with an OS half the size and a BASIC half the size (plus a fancy character set). I expanded on this a few years ago, here: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html