Commander X16

Hello everyone!

I was just curious - since there has been some discussion over licensing BASIC and related stuff - why not use FreeBASIC (https://www.freebasic.net)? It's licensed under GNU General Public License and actively developed by the community. In contrast to any commercially licensed product, it has a great potential when it comes to community involvement. I might be missing something, but it really does seem like a perfect fit for the purpose - doesn't it?

With best regards,

Michael

I've been browsing the free basic documentation... Does it currently support the 6502 processor, or would it require porting?

On the website, it says:

Quote

FreeBASIC is a self-hosting compiler which makes use of the GNU binutils programming tools as backends [...]

Which makes me seriously doubt that it could be made to run reasonably well on an 8MHz system with 2MB RAM.

 

To put certain things into perspective, the page just listing all the keywords alone takes up more than 7 kilobyte...

It looks to be a very powerful basic (just look at the number of keywords) and from what I see the compiler itself is also written in Freebasic itself. Remarkable.

Wow, I've never seen a BASIC with double-underscore keywords before.  That's more d'unders than Python!

FreeBASIC looks pretty awesome.  The world needs a better 'modern' BASIC than MS VBA?. 

For the reasons others have mentioned, it wouldn't be a good choice for the X16, at least not as the built-in BASIC.  Porting a processor-appropriate version of it might be a fun challenge for someone, though.

I wonder how it compares to the Color Maximite's BASIC.

(I don't know much about either, but it seems both are pretty powerful.)

Thanks for the comments. Fair points - it'd probably require some porting and a whole lot of adjustments to support the limited hardware specs. Anyway, it would be great to have the X16 run on free/libre software which is unlikely since parts of it had to be licensed, although I haven't found any info on what the license terms would be.

As far as I can see, it should be absolutely possible to build a free/libre open source firmware for the X16 and also use it with the final hardware.

This might be a fun project. Compatibility with software that uses Kernal functions might be an issue though; I don't know how much work it would be to reimplement the API.