Commodore OS BASIC

[LeoNigro]

Announcing Commodore OS BASIC™ V1

Commodore OS BASIC - Coming soon to a terminal near you.

COSBASICV1.jpg (64.2 KiB) Viewed 25731 times

[LeoNigro]

Of course Commodore OS BASIC V1 will not be something built from scratch and will utilise an existing, very C64 inspired, open source interpreter with an extremely permissive license. And just because I pick one, doesn't mean we can't pick a better one later.

I have an idea, which may or may not come to fruition. A potential roadmap if you will.

If I have the time, and I really don't, I would really like to build function libraries on top of COSBASICV1 to facilitate game development for classic machines like the C64 and A500, which would make software compatibile with the majority of Commodore machines produced.
I think any machines higher spec than that would be better served by other development environments and technologies.
Then of course, once the libraries are fully developed, they could be ported to a fork of the original BASIC interpreter to be utilised as native BASIC commands. (edit: I am not suggesting a port of Commodore OS BASIC to those classic machines, just a cross compiler to them.)

Things like Scorpion Engine look really cool, but there are so many menu options I wouldn't know where to begin without watching a video, but if that is your jam I think you should go for it and hopefully we could facilitate pulling in assets produced via these tools. However, I would be looking to make coding a game follow more of a C64 oriented programming paradigm. (edit: it won't be in Commodore OS because it is commercial)

Like the Pico-8 Fantasy Console that imposes artificial limitations on graphics, I would seek to do something similar, optionally allowing the mimicking of the memory structures of the classic C64 (which you could even POKE to), including graphics structure limitations and the limitations of 320x200/160x200 resolution software. I would want to enable programming the C64 way with or without language abstractions, with 8 concurrent sprites, charsets, C64/Amiga bit-mapped graphics, memory bank limitations and scrolling routines(maybe not scrolling straight away) that are C64 compatible, and a game loop that makes sense. I would want the A500 to be an upscale of that but sticking to Amiga OCS graphics hardware limitations, so obviously there's would need to be native C libraries written to enable the Amiga to behave similarly to this C64 game programming paradigm. Then, to top it off, a BASIC to C parser to allow compilation to both the C64 and A500 OCS. And of course the games would run natively in Commodore BASIC, perhaps with the ability to scale pixels up in a neat retro fashion.

But with all that said, I think it would be unrealistic to expect COSBASIC itself to be a graphics workhorse compared to other significant technologies, and I think it would be foolhardy to even pursue that course. However, even interpreted, it would likely be similarly as powerful as the classic machines, but superior in regard to memory size and processing speed, particularly at 320x200. And focused on that narrow hardware subset I think it could produce some fairly decent software (although its not realistic to expect it to be cutting edge for the classic platforms). Of course sound wise you would want to be able to play SIDs and MODs for C64 and Amiga respectively.

What do you think? Probably just a pipe dream. Not sure its worth it. And on top of that, I have so much going on right now, I don't think I can get there for a few years, but at least you get my line of thinking. I'm just gauging enthusiasm for such a project, as it would need community support for it to get anywhere.

[LeoNigro]

Putting the cart before the horse........but I have some cool news to report.
After talking to the author, "Commodore OS BASIC V1", in the upcoming Commodore OS 3 will be based on RCBASIC v4.

Here is a video of nOOb playing some of the games 2 years ago that were created with the previous version.

Commodore OS BASIC will prove even more powerful.

Featuring:
* 3D graphics
* Built-in sprites
* Built-in Tilemaps
* 2D and 3D physics
* User Types

What more could you want to build your dream retro game?

The author, nOOb, has a game out using the previous version you can check out here:
store.steampowered.com/app/2620110/Batt ... d_Graizor/

Of course these games are also Windows compatible.