8 ms·

PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC

75 points by tie-in 2y ago

fritzy 2y ago
There's similar projects like QB64 and L-Basic. I have to wonder if keeping language variants alive will be of historic significance hundreds of years from now. Will anyone care about early computing to this extent?
- fuzztester 2y ago
  There are quite a few other BASICs. FreeBASIC, PureBASIC, etc. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_programming_language_family https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_programming_l... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_interpreters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_interpreters Some will be obsolete, of course.
  - rkagerer 2y ago
    And a really weird one, BASCOM-AVR. Used it extensively in my robot built for my fourth year engineering project. Nice thing is you could still use ASM interrupt handlers without a lot of hassle.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      Plain BASCOM(.EXE) was the name of a BASIC compiler, IIRC, in DOS days, probably. Did not use it myself, but I think I remember a colleague using it.
hulitu 2y ago
> PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC Can it run nibbles ?
- fuzztester 2y ago
  donkey?
- CTOSian 2y ago
  nibbles is a QBASIC program..
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
donatj 2y ago
> It runs ASCII, tokenized and protected BASIC programs and supports the Microsoft Binary Format for full interchangeability of data files. I wonder, does that possibly include QBasic binary format? I have a couple hundred games I wrote as a kid in this format that I have yet to automate a fix for. I also have an outstanding Stack Overflow question about the process. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53051061/convert-from-qbasic-binary-fast-load-and-save-format https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53051061/convert-from-qb...
- Suppafly 2y ago
  You posted that 5 years ago, you should have been able to manually do it all by now :) Someone on the retrocomputing stackoverflow also asked a similar question, although the suggestion seemed to be to load it in qbasic and resave it back to ascii.
jll29 2y ago
I got to re-appreciate BASIC when evaluating options for teaching 11-year-old kids a bit how to program (in a single session). People recommended Scratch etc. but I felt talking about programs was important also, which is easier when you write textual statements. At some point, I briefly considered using an emulated BASIC due to the simplicity and built in graphic, but I ended up using Python together with the pyturtle library for LOGO-like graphics, because the main exercise was to let kids draw a house on paper and then ask them to generate the drawing commands (also first on paper). Using Python has the advantage that nothing they learned was "wasted" or "academic use only" - you can immediately build on or monetize Python knowledge. Interpreted BASIC certainly is a development forward from compiled FORTRAN from a didactic point of view.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Python is indeed the BASIC of today. I stoked my nephew's interest in programming by doing exactly what you said -- using Python with the pyturtle library. One flourish I'm particularly fond of is, we worked through the commands to draw a repeated object in the picture he was designing, and I said: "Now here's something programmers do, it's called refactoring. We're going to take this wheel here and make a function called 'wheel' that draws a wheel wherever you say. And then we're going to take the location and turn it into parameters for the 'wheel' function..." And on and on. He seemed really engaged. The ubiquity of microcomputer BASIC in the 80s -- often as the first thing users see, or the only thing they see absent a cartridge or disk or something loaded into the machine to run something else -- seemed to suggest that computers are meant to be programmed, the way pens are meant to be written with. It was a complete accident, of course, a side effect of market realities at the time: no one at the computer companies could think of what someone would want a microcomputer for, aside from video games. The devices were solutions still in search of problems. So the microcomputer manufacturers encouraged customers to invent their own uses and bundled a programming language that would let them do that. Once word processing, spreadsheets, and especially the internet took root, it became obvious what consumers would want a computer for, so the idea that they would be expected to program them fell by the wayside and programming tools became no longer easily accessible or even available except as a separate purchase. As a consequence we may not see the efflorescence of programmers among Xers to early millennials repeat itself the same way again. I don't even think it happened in the USA to the same degree that it did in the UK, thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair's ability to deliver cheap but serviceable and completely hackable units to even modest British homes; as a result, British computing, like British pop in the 80s, hit way different and became a source of endless fascination and influence.
incanus77 2y ago
The wildest part of this excellent software is that you can feed it WAV files of tape-recorded BASIC programs and it can decipher them.
- cubano 2y ago
  No...the REAL wildest part of this is that I am old enough to have sat in a Radio Shack window display and using a TRS-80 and TANDY-BASIC I believe it was (?), and actually saved and loaded my attempts at writing games using a off-the-shelf Radio Shack cassette drive and a funky interface cord OMG the crazy headaches that setup gave me...of course if you didn't actually press PLAY on the unit at the right moment after you typed LOAD in BASIC, the thing would hang...and to be honest...it loaded so slow that it often seemed like it hung when it didnt, thereby AT LEAST quadrupling the fun (not). One thing good did come of it...I never once cursed at 5 1/4 floppies as they were a godsend compared to the cassette drive days ...and while your at it, get THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
  - incanus77 2y ago
    Same here, though with a TI-99/4A. I never had a drive on that thing, so it was always on tape, complete with handwritten odometer counts on the insert card for reference.
msla 2y ago
There's also Bywater BASIC, which apparently isn't being developed anymore: https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic (It's also in the repos of many major Linux distributions as bwbasic.) A blog post where the developer comments on it a bit: https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/
- skissane 2y ago
  The original author, Ted Campbell, stepped away from it a long time ago, in the 1990s. (His story that his grandmother wrote it is a bit of creative writing on his part.) Ted is now a United Methodist minister, seminary professor, and author of several books on Methodist church history. Some other people have taken over the maintenance at various points, but I don’t know what its current state is. It has definitely seen development since Ted stepped away. Its emphasis has always been on portability and simplicity over features, which puts a limit on the scope of further development
32bitkid 2y ago
For a while, I was using PC-BASIC to generate audio files for the IBM PCjr cassette interface to do some more diagnostics, for a machine that I had that didn’t have a working disk drive. I don’t even know if there is anything else out there to generate those at this point. PC-BASIC is great!
acheron 2y ago
Awhile back I wrote a clojure program to take old PLAY statements (for playing notes on the PC speaker) from GW BASIC and generate a wav file. At the time writing GW BASIC it seemed pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of interesting timing options built into it.

75 points by tie-in 2y ago

There's similar projects like QB64 and L-Basic. I have to wonder if keeping language variants alive will be of historic significance hundreds of years from now. Will anyone care about early computing to this extent?

fuzztester 2y ago
There are quite a few other BASICs. FreeBASIC, PureBASIC, etc. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_programming_language_family https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_programming_l... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_interpreters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_interpreters Some will be obsolete, of course.
- rkagerer 2y ago
  And a really weird one, BASCOM-AVR. Used it extensively in my robot built for my fourth year engineering project. Nice thing is you could still use ASM interrupt handlers without a lot of hassle.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    Plain BASCOM(.EXE) was the name of a BASIC compiler, IIRC, in DOS days, probably. Did not use it myself, but I think I remember a colleague using it.

hulitu 2y ago

> PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC Can it run nibbles ?

fuzztester 2y ago
donkey?
CTOSian 2y ago
nibbles is a QBASIC program..
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

donatj 2y ago

> It runs ASCII, tokenized and protected BASIC programs and supports the Microsoft Binary Format for full interchangeability of data files. I wonder, does that possibly include QBasic binary format? I have a couple hundred games I wrote as a kid in this format that I have yet to automate a fix for. I also have an outstanding Stack Overflow question about the process. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53051061/convert-from-qbasic-binary-fast-load-and-save-format https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53051061/convert-from-qb...

Suppafly 2y ago
You posted that 5 years ago, you should have been able to manually do it all by now :) Someone on the retrocomputing stackoverflow also asked a similar question, although the suggestion seemed to be to load it in qbasic and resave it back to ascii.

jll29 2y ago

I got to re-appreciate BASIC when evaluating options for teaching 11-year-old kids a bit how to program (in a single session). People recommended Scratch etc. but I felt talking about programs was important also, which is easier when you write textual statements. At some point, I briefly considered using an emulated BASIC due to the simplicity and built in graphic, but I ended up using Python together with the pyturtle library for LOGO-like graphics, because the main exercise was to let kids draw a house on paper and then ask them to generate the drawing commands (also first on paper). Using Python has the advantage that nothing they learned was "wasted" or "academic use only" - you can immediately build on or monetize Python knowledge. Interpreted BASIC certainly is a development forward from compiled FORTRAN from a didactic point of view.

bitwize 2y ago
Python is indeed the BASIC of today. I stoked my nephew's interest in programming by doing exactly what you said -- using Python with the pyturtle library. One flourish I'm particularly fond of is, we worked through the commands to draw a repeated object in the picture he was designing, and I said: "Now here's something programmers do, it's called refactoring. We're going to take this wheel here and make a function called 'wheel' that draws a wheel wherever you say. And then we're going to take the location and turn it into parameters for the 'wheel' function..." And on and on. He seemed really engaged. The ubiquity of microcomputer BASIC in the 80s -- often as the first thing users see, or the only thing they see absent a cartridge or disk or something loaded into the machine to run something else -- seemed to suggest that computers are meant to be programmed, the way pens are meant to be written with. It was a complete accident, of course, a side effect of market realities at the time: no one at the computer companies could think of what someone would want a microcomputer for, aside from video games. The devices were solutions still in search of problems. So the microcomputer manufacturers encouraged customers to invent their own uses and bundled a programming language that would let them do that. Once word processing, spreadsheets, and especially the internet took root, it became obvious what consumers would want a computer for, so the idea that they would be expected to program them fell by the wayside and programming tools became no longer easily accessible or even available except as a separate purchase. As a consequence we may not see the efflorescence of programmers among Xers to early millennials repeat itself the same way again. I don't even think it happened in the USA to the same degree that it did in the UK, thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair's ability to deliver cheap but serviceable and completely hackable units to even modest British homes; as a result, British computing, like British pop in the 80s, hit way different and became a source of endless fascination and influence.

incanus77 2y ago

The wildest part of this excellent software is that you can feed it WAV files of tape-recorded BASIC programs and it can decipher them.

cubano 2y ago
No...the REAL wildest part of this is that I am old enough to have sat in a Radio Shack window display and using a TRS-80 and TANDY-BASIC I believe it was (?), and actually saved and loaded my attempts at writing games using a off-the-shelf Radio Shack cassette drive and a funky interface cord OMG the crazy headaches that setup gave me...of course if you didn't actually press PLAY on the unit at the right moment after you typed LOAD in BASIC, the thing would hang...and to be honest...it loaded so slow that it often seemed like it hung when it didnt, thereby AT LEAST quadrupling the fun (not). One thing good did come of it...I never once cursed at 5 1/4 floppies as they were a godsend compared to the cassette drive days ...and while your at it, get THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
- incanus77 2y ago
  Same here, though with a TI-99/4A. I never had a drive on that thing, so it was always on tape, complete with handwritten odometer counts on the insert card for reference.

msla 2y ago

There's also Bywater BASIC, which apparently isn't being developed anymore: https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic (It's also in the repos of many major Linux distributions as bwbasic.) A blog post where the developer comments on it a bit: https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/

skissane 2y ago
The original author, Ted Campbell, stepped away from it a long time ago, in the 1990s. (His story that his grandmother wrote it is a bit of creative writing on his part.) Ted is now a United Methodist minister, seminary professor, and author of several books on Methodist church history. Some other people have taken over the maintenance at various points, but I don’t know what its current state is. It has definitely seen development since Ted stepped away. Its emphasis has always been on portability and simplicity over features, which puts a limit on the scope of further development

32bitkid 2y ago

For a while, I was using PC-BASIC to generate audio files for the IBM PCjr cassette interface to do some more diagnostics, for a machine that I had that didn’t have a working disk drive. I don’t even know if there is anything else out there to generate those at this point. PC-BASIC is great!

acheron 2y ago

Awhile back I wrote a clojure program to take old PLAY statements (for playing notes on the PC speaker) from GW BASIC and generate a wav file. At the time writing GW BASIC it seemed pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of interesting timing options built into it.