Monday, November 17, 2008

Open Source Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language

On October 28th Michael Steil announced on his blog Pagetable the release of Commodore BASIC as a scripting language for Linux, Windows and Mac (OS X 10.4/10.5 -Intel and PowerPC).
What he has done is a simple recompilation of the original 6502 Commodore 64 binary which is 100% compatible and runs at a quite high speed.
So if you feel a bit nostalgic and in the mood of writing a few lines of code on behalf of the old times you can download the .zip package here
Inside the archive you will find the Windows and Mac binaries. For Linux you will have to compile it (why on Linux it's always compile and compile!).
There are lots and lots of online resources to teach yourself programming in Commodore BASIC and the temptation for me to write a tiny, even insignificant, app just for the sake of my forever lost youth is very strong, but my workload so high to halt me.
However if you're interested in retrocomputing you could start checking this interesting website (floodgap)and if you wat just have a glimpse of Commodore BASIC this page will introduce you briefly to this epic language.
For now, let me just do this:

10 PRINT "HELLO FOLKS"
15 PRINT "WELCOME TO WIZ AND CHIPS"
20 GOTO 10

Picture by:
ExtraKetchup

No comments:

Post a Comment