Imagine Atari BASIC on the 2600

[Mr SQL]

If you know Atari BASIC, you may like this BASIC for the 2600!

 

Virtual World BASIC is old-school like Atari BASIC which means you can start writing programs for the 2600 immediately!

You can write Atari 2600 programs that are literally just a single statement:

Classic BASIC programs can be just one statement without the extra fluff required by other languages.
BASIC was originally designed that way to make it easy for anyone to start programming.

 

Here's a short program with several lines of BASIC that:

1. sets a pixel on the screen
2. prints a box on the screen
3. draws a pattern on the screen and off the screen as well
4. lets you use the joystick to scroll the screen around (there's a big world out there).
5. Shows a sprite on the screen but binds it to the virtual world so that the sprite is stuck to it's relative position as you move the camera about.

4 & 5 illustrate use of the Virtual World - while you don't have to use it, this BASIC has a soft blitter chip!

With a few more lines of BASIC you can write games like 9LineBlitz or this DLI demo: DLI_Demo_5.bin

 

The download for Virtual World BASIC is here and the IDE is already on your computer! Just click play to compile and launch your BASIC program in the emulator - the read me will have you setup to use the IDE in minutes!

 

Hope Atari BASIC programmers have some fun with this! I'm also working on a verison for the 5200 and 8-bit

 

[Shawn Jefferson]

The Atari Lynx needs one of these BASIC compilers.