Vintage BASIC

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Hamurabi under Vintage BASIC

Vintage BASIC is a since 2009 open source mainly from Lyle Kopnicky in project Haskell developed BASIC - interpreter for Microsoft Windows , macOS and Linux , the strongly on the classic Microsoft BASIC oriented. The interpreter became particularly important within retrogaming for the execution of old BASIC games on modern computers.

description

The BASIC dialect is largely compatible with the original Microsoft BASIC and other similar dialects from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Commodore BASIC . Incompatibilities result primarily from the screen size not specified in Vintage BASIC , which means that targeted screen outputs, such as line breaks or the setting of graphic characters, are sometimes not displayed correctly. However, since early BASIC programs were mainly text-based, this has little practical effect.

The interpreter was originally developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the direction of Tim Sheard as a scientific work on the demonstration of dynamic structures using monads for the functional programming language Haskell, but is now an independent project that has been in a stable release since 2017.

One aim of the project was to be able to correctly run all the games from the book BASIC-Computer-Spiele by David H. Ahl . Apart from a few graphic representations, this was achieved. Because of this property, Vintage BASIC is now used by some media historians as a reference interpreter for old computer games. Because of its ease of use, the interpreter is sometimes used in teaching.

See also

Web links

Vintage BASIC homepage

Individual evidence

  1. Vintage BASIC on haskell.org
  2. Advanced functional programing by Tim Sheard, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1985
  3. List of compatible games
  4. Computer games in the 1950s , on videogamehistorian.wordpress.com, 2019