eben’s bbc basic programmes

I wrote this as a comment to Learn to write games for the BBC Micro with Eben – Raspberry Pi, but it didn’t seem to save:

BeebEm? Lawks, that’s a bit old (2006). All the cool (*cough*) kids are running b-em – https://github.com/stardot/b-em – these days. It’s lovingly maintain by Stardot forum members. It’s a little crashy on some Linux platforms, but seems stable on the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian. You may need to install the liballegro5-dev and zlib1g-dev packages to get it to compile.

If you want a native version of BBC BASIC, Richard Russell’s version is pretty neat: http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/ . You’ll most likely need to change line 280 to use some variant of the WAIT command to make it playable.

Another native interpreter is Brandy. There’s an ancient one in the repos, but I’m completely taken with the Matrix Brandy fork: https://github.com/stardot/MatrixBrandy . It may need a few packages installed to get it to build (libsdl1.2-dev might be a good first try), but it’s really fast. For cross-platform happiness, change line 280 to WAIT 10. If you stick to using a FOR loop, you might have to have it as high as 2,000,000 on a fast computer!

Lastly, if you want to run the game in a browser, JSBeeb to the rescue: https://bbc.godbolt.org/?autorun&loadBasic=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/scruss/f5a8eb83f28b85d6399142cac460c806/raw/74c4e39de7661bb2e3dd7f435840dd8db7172589/helicopter.bbc
It’s a bit slow in Chromium on a Raspberry Pi, but it does work!

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