Retro programming

BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0

One of the great things about home computers in the 1980s is that you could learn almost everything. They were not abstracted, nor were they typically complex, and many would even come with their own BASIC interpreter. Perhaps the most famous of these, especially in the UK, was the Acorn BBC Micro, a modest home computer built for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. They were expensive, but discounts were offered to teachers. They were widely used in schools, so most students of the time played with them. The best thing about the BBC, and its cheaper cousin the Acorn Electron, was that it came with a book teaching you how to use its ROM-resident BBC BASIC programming language, which was surprisingly adaptable. It was generally better than the competing BASIC interpreters because it offered IF, THEN, and ELSE statements, as well as named procedures and long variable names, helping many young developers onto the first steps of their software engineering ladders.

Many developers did just this, with many BBC machines being used for serious development work and research. As a result, BBC BASIC has kept its cache. BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 is a modern recreation of the same language, built this time on the powerful foundations of SDL rather than a 2MHz 6502. For a start, it's cross-platform, which means you can finally run your Linux-written BBC code on almost any other system, from Windows to almost any Android device. Programs can even be compiled into WebAssembly for web integration, and the project includes its own graphical development environment, much like Arduino. But the best thing is that you can now access the power of SDL from your code, which means this new BASIC is capable of advanced sound and graphics processing, including OpenGL and shaders. In this way, it's both a refreshing change to something like Python and a genuinely useful prototyping tool for anyone with BBC BASIC burned into their teenage neurons.

Project Website

https://github.com/rtrussell/BBCSDL

While raw machine code could be embedded within original BBC source code, BBC BASIC for SDL makes this much easier with its own assembler.