BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

BBC Basic for SDL 2.0

bbcbasic.co.uk

I was really surprised to download this today and find:

- Your choice of 2 IDEs, on startup

- A huge variety of example programs, including a gold BBC 1 logo with gold 3D spinning globe; a BBS terminal emulator with built-in menu of working BBSes you can access directly; a working Ceefax simulator which presents all sorts of news from around the world, in various catetgories, driven by gobs of RSS XML files; examples in 3D graphics, multi-touch, GUI-building, games including an upgraded version of Gorillas.bas

- Very easy compilation and packaging built together, including icon file generation

...kind of blown away to be honest! This is quite an interesting basic distribution.

Time to type in my undergraduate thesis from 1986, in which I used BBC Basic to do information theoretic analysis of DNA sequences [0]. I used to go and get dinner while the few-hundred-line program would run. Presumably now it would finish before I finished lifting my finger off the enter key.

[0] and thus established that so-called "junk DNA" has more information in it than the coding sequences. Go BBC Basic!

That's an interesting cross-disciplinary thesis for back then. What degree were you doing?

"Biomolecular science" at Portsmouth Polytechnic.

I used BBC Basic in my undergraduate thesis too.

I designed and built a board with multiple Transputers on. We didn't have the Occam development software so I had to write an assembler, which I did in BBC Basic as the transputer board interface connected to the BBC micro.

Transputer instructions are all variable length, and their length depends on their arguments. This includes jump instructions which used relative addressing. This meant that the assembler would take as many as 7 passes before the output converged into the optimum result.

Because the BBC micro had so little memory (32k) the intermediate result of each pass had to be written to floppy disk! I seem to remember it taking about 15mins with an awful lot of clonk clonk clonk from the floppy disk to get my code assembled.

I finally got my physics simulations (Ising spin models) assembled and with 3 Transputers they ran a little bit faster than the Fortran program I'd written for the university mainframe which I was very pleased about.

Happy days!

(edited: it is open source)

But the retro 1990s website is a refreshing island in today's sea of HTML 5 SPA sites.

'If the (users) don't find you (handling merge requests), they should at least find you handy' --Red Green

Just not linked on the site, I guess...

https://github.com/rtrussell/BBCSDL

R.T. Russell's Z80 BBC Basic Is Now Open Source (2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186308

Request for help in organising/releasing source code

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15667 (2018)

One other thing that popped up:

BBC Basic Editor (2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256853

I stand corrected. Thanks

> Linux (x86 CPU only), (...), Raspberry Pi 3 or later (Pi OS),

Kinda nit-pickish, but isn't that effectively "Linux (x86 and arm64)"? Or does it depend on something specific to RPi that is not portable to other devices with the same architecture?

Fair point, but I don't like to claim that it works on a platform I haven't tested it on. The only dependencies are SDL2 (which implies OpenGL), SDL2_ttf and SDL2_net so assuming they are available for the platform in question it should run.

That's a fair assumption - thank you for answering! (You might want to add that this is a list of platforms that you have tested on and can attest for yourself, and that your code might work elsewhere as well but you provide no guarantees for that.)

I was just looking for a "successor" to blitzmax for a basic dialect that had graphics/audio/network capabilities and could compile to multiple targets. This might be the ticket!

I know what you mean, that's a really nice (and fun) tool to have in the toolbox. The basic world periodically has, and then doesn't really have, good tools like that as business cycles or platform dynamics change.

Cant see Pac Man on there, used to be the main game played during break times and lunch times at primary school.

This is not a BBC computer emulator. It is BBC BASIC interpreter (+built in assembler) on top of SDL2, so you can write apps for Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android/iOS in BBC BASIC.

Here you go.

https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2345

I'd love to include a Pac-Man clone, and there are BBC BASIC versions that could easily be adapted, but I'm a bit concerned about IPR issues.

I understand, the word of law is very vague unlike coding.

Where is xonix? Better not answer this. I am still trying to make up for all the hours I lost 30 years ago...

Basic inspired so many of us to start coding. I love this.

The sample programs are really well made.

BBC BASIC still exists? This is pretty cool!

BBC BASIC was installed on computers at University of Aberdeen in 2008-2014, though curiously not in the Computing Science folder.

I grew up with a BBC B, and later an Archimedes.

Last time I wrote a BBC BASIC program was as a test on a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS.

What OS were the machines in Aberdeen running?

Windows XP, with some later having Vista/7 installed.

The BBC BASIC was provided in windows version. Some software used by engineering school was running through Xceed X11 server with actual software executing on few different unix machines (HP-UX, Sun, etc.)

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