Happy (1 week late) 15th Birthday batari Basic!

[kisrael]

Last Tuesday, batari Basic turned 15 years old! 

 

here's the original post by @batari

 

Thanks batari! Now I feel old!

 

happy15bB.bashappy15bB.bas.bin

[KevKelley]

I for one am happy with this creation!  I'm only mad I didn't discover this sooner.  Happy Birthday!

[+Andrew Davie]

Still seems unlikely and impossible to achieve on the '2600, to me.  Nice idea, though

 

[+Gemintronic]

Now all we need is batari BASIC BASIC: a TinyBASIC clone with graphic, audio and joystick input commands.  Hold down the reset switch to enter monitor mode.

 

Hard to believe my first bB game was written in 2010.  Thank you, Fred Quimby!

 

 

 

[RevEng]

There are now some very good 2600 games (and some 7800 ones too) that wouldn't exist otherwise, without Fred's vision and follow-through! ?

 

This is without even considering the impact of his other projects, like Harmony. (If you could hear it, I'd start a chorus of "for he's a jolly good fellow" ? so perhaps it's for the best you can't hear it.)

[kisrael]

1 hour ago, RevEng said:

There are now some very good 2600 games (and some 7800 ones too) that wouldn't exist otherwise, without Fred's vision and follow-through! ?

 

This is without even considering the impact of his other projects, like Harmony. (If you could hear it, I'd start a chorus of "for he's a jolly good fellow" ? so perhaps it's for the best you can't hear it.)

Some good ones... and some... worthy experiments
 

I used to be more of a "4K" purist, but I think the sweet spot for Batari might be the DPC+ stuff... just, if you're not going to take on handrolling you're own kernal, you might need the wiggleroom that provides, or else the easy path you took might become a little too obvious.

[RevEng]

59 minutes ago, kisrael said:

I used to be more of a "4K" purist, but I think the sweet spot for Batari might be the DPC+ stuff... just, if you're not going to take on handrolling you're own kernal, you might need the wiggleroom that provides, or else the easy path you took might become a little too obvious.

Yep, the more powerful the hardware, the narrower the gap between basic games and assembly games. DPC+ helps greatly in that regard, and has silenced those old occasional complaints about all bB games "looking the same".

 

I noticed the same thing in 7800basic too, though more exaggerated there, because there's no display kernel as such on the 7800.

[+TwentySixHundred]

batari Basic is what got my feet wet with programing and without it i probably wouldn't have been able to complete my life long dream of creating a 2600 game (well several now). Maybe i would have kept trying with assembler however the basic language just sits well with me and is a comfortable environment. Now with learning 7800basic and having all these resources im kind of overwhelmed with the possibilities. Thanks to everyone that puts in the hardyards maintaining these languages for us. Both bB and 7800basic are perfect for my needs and much appreciated ?

Edited July 21, 2020 by TwentySixHundred

[+Karl G]

I'm not sure I would have ever gotten into Atari 2600 development either if I didn't start with bB. Also, after I learned to make games with assembly, I was even more impressed by the magnitude of the feat of creating a working Atari 2600 Basic compiler. I'm guessing many people would have said that it wouldn't be possible.

[kisrael]

4 minutes ago, Karl G said:

I'm not sure I would have ever gotten into Atari 2600 development either if I didn't start with bB. Also, after I learned to make games with assembly, I was even more impressed by the magnitude of the feat of creating a working Atari 2600 Basic compiler. I'm guessing many people would have said that it wouldn't be possible.

Yeah, I woulda probably been a skeptic.

And in defense of that view - you still can't do a Kernal in Basic! But the original bB found a great compromise, and DPC+ built on that. (I wonder how many people use bB for a the rough draft then go to assembly...)

And you know, it really goes to show how surprisingly similar old BASIC was to assembly - Goto/Goub vs "proper" functions etc...
(and it's interesting that early slow 8-bit computers went with interpreted Basic... compiled Basic was possible but kind of a novelty...)

[CapitanClassic]

3 hours ago, kisrael said:

Yeah, I woulda probably been a skeptic.

And in defense of that view - you still can't do a Kernal in Basic! But the original bB found a great compromise, and DPC+ built on that. (I wonder how many people use bB for a the rough draft then go to assembly...)

And you know, it really goes to show how surprisingly similar old BASIC was to assembly - Goto/Goub vs "proper" functions etc...
(and it's interesting that early slow 8-bit computers went with interpreted Basic... compiled Basic was possible but kind of a novelty...)

I am currently working on a game, and using bBasic for the rough draft. Trying to start in assembly is extremely hard, because getting multiple players, missiles and playfield updates on the screen is extremely difficult. 
 

I figure with bBasic / DPC+ I can work on the game logic and get a feel of how the game could look (if I can fit it all in the kernel), before trying to do the game in assembly. Trying to get an every marginally complicated kernel working without tutorials for all the more complicated kernels (switchdraw, skipdraw, dodraw, maskdraw) makes it a chore to get anything going on the screen. 

 

[RevEng]

6 hours ago, kisrael said:

And in defense of that view - you still can't do a Kernal in Basic! 

Bah, sure you can...

 

bbkernel.bas bbkernel.bas.bin

 

...oh wait, you probably meant a non-rubbish kernel. Fair enough. ?

 

This is a general problem for any higher level language targetting the 2600. A kernel is going to be crippled unless the higher level language exposes stuff like cycle counts and page crossing penalties, at which point the higher level language starts to look an awful lot like assembly language.