This blog is already lagging a few days behind actual events, but that is probably of no consequence to the few readers likely to encounter it. Since I had decided to code in BBC basic, I was faced with two options
- Get the old BBC micro from the loft. I know it works, but it needs to be connected to a TV screen via a coaxial cable, so that’s marginally inconvenient to my TV watching family. Somewhere I have a 12″ B&W TV that I originally used for the BBC micro, but I’d have to find that. Also I’d have to get the floppy drive working. My DAD had a 512Kb hard disk, but I’ve never used that….all in all it seems a bit too retro even for a retro project like this.
- Use BeebEM – a PC based BBC emulator which I used in the past to play classic BBC games such as Elite. I had a little bit of a fiddle around with this and wrote a few lines of code. However it wasn’t easy to save the code in any kind of text file.
This is a screen shot of BeebEm running on Windows10 PC.
- Whilst searching around in BeebEm for something to save the code in a way I can use in other applications, I found BBCSDL a version of BBC basic for the PC ! This website is well worth checking out for a wealth of historical information and has been recently updated. The code window itself features two basic editors and can save the code as ASCII text (my original aim).
So, decision made, I decided to use BBCSDL to produce code.