Darklantha

The built in Atari BASIC is notoriously slow. Also, if I remember correctly, the Antic chip locks out the system bus on the Atari some percentage of the time thereby reducing the 6502's effective clock rate. I am not sure about this though. Hopefully, someone on this forum can provide a more accurate insight.

Hi folks, This is exactly the kind of discussion that I was hoping the video series would spark. Good stuff! Yes, my prime number program is not optimized but I was interested in seeing how a bog standard, potentially naive, but highly compatible program might run on each BASIC. Something that your average user might have written back in the day. BTW, dmsc, your fast basic looks really awesome.

Hello all, I've recently completed a series of videos that compare the BASIC interpreter performance of a variety of 8-bit vintage computers. I use prime number generation as the test bed. I think folks in this forum will be pleasantly surprised by the results! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOoCXsFhz0tlHCinV0rm64PQifIOApqdp Keep it vintage, -Rusty

@Larry: I'm no Logo expert but I picked it to teach my son programming because user developed functions and procedures can be called directly from the command prompt allowing the developer to interactively build and develop their programs. You can separate concerns very easily thereby allowing a more "agile" approach to problem solving. Also, no line numbers and it has a full screen editor. Additionally, it has very good support for player missile graphics (turtle graphics can be redefined) including collision detection between players and background graphics. Performance is okay. No where near assembly, of course, but respectable considering it is a LISP variant running with a full garbage collector in 48k of RAM on a 1.7 MHz machine . I can post a few short code examples if you are still interested.

Logo has an excellent implementation on the Atari 8-bit. In fact, I am using it to teach my son programming.