Vision BASIC for Commodore 64 - BLACK FRIDAY SALE

[Marcio D.]

If anyone's inspired to create their own C64 games and demos, the price of the 1.0e package of Vision BASIC is massively reduced for Black Friday / Cyber Monday.  The regular price is USD $49, but it's now temporarily reduced way down to only USD $33.  For that price, you receive a digital copy of Vision BASIC plus FREE worldwide shipping of the 318-page physical manual.

 

Since its release earlier this year, this product has been garnering praise for the near machine language speeds of its compiled programs, its full-featured programming environment, and its ability to seamlessly mix BASIC code with assembly language.  According to the product website, it has over 100 BASIC commands for bitmap graphics, sprites, characters, sound, and interrupts.

 

The product page is here:  https://visionbasic.net/product/vision-basic-manual-digital/

 

An introductory video is here:

 

 

 

Happy Black Friday and Cyber Monday, tout le monde !

 

 

 

 

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[1980gamer]

This looks cool.  I did a little bit of C64 basic programming in the 80's

 

I no longer have a c64.  I do have the Maxi.  Will this work with that easily?  I have not tried to add any software to it yet?

But based on the memory expansion requirements to use this package, I don't know if it will work.

 

Need to investigate 'The C64" next.

 

[1980gamer]

to answer my own question...  YES, it supports RUE up to 16MB

 

Now, do I want to start a new C64 project when I have 5 TI99 projects at some stage of completion and NO time to pick them back up?  Hmm.  This does look pretty awesome.

 

[Marcio D.]

4 hours ago, 1980gamer said:

to answer my own question...  YES, it supports RUE up to 16MB

 

Now, do I want to start a new C64 project when I have 5 TI99 projects at some stage of completion and NO time to pick them back up?  Hmm.  This does look pretty awesome.

 

 

Yes, Vision BASIC absolutely works with THEC64 Maxi, provided you enable REU through file flags or CJM files of course.

 

What I've come to realize is that you don't have to do projects in order to have fun with the C64.  Even if everyday life keeps you constantly busy, you most likely still have free time every now and then, especially during holidays like Christmas.  During those rare periods of rest, there's nothing wrong with firing up the THEC64 Maxi and tinkering around by writing very short programs that do something neat, but are otherwise meaningless.

 

So by all means, grab a copy of Vision BASIC and let the tinkering begin!

 

 

Edited November 29, 2022 by Marcio D.

[+DZ-Jay]

This looks very neat.  Has anybody used it for their own projects?  Are there any contributors out there that can share their experiences?

 

    -dZ.

[Arnuphis]

Can you create a stand alone program that any user of C64 can load and run or do they also need Vision Basic?

[carlsson]

Yes. Vision BASIC is a compiling language. While you need a REU or similar to run the compiler, the resulting executable should be runnable on standard C64. I put "should" in italics because even the official website is a little vague about that aspect.

[+DZ-Jay]

4 hours ago, carlsson said:

Yes. Vision BASIC is a compiling language. While you need a REU or similar to run the compiler, the resulting executable should be runnable on standard C64. I put "should" in italics because even the official website is a little vague about that aspect.

 

I saw the video, and it states that it runs on a standard C64 because it's just compiled 6502 machine code.  It also states that it runs on unexpanded C64s, unless you select project options that require expanded memory.

 

I think it's neat.  My only complaint would be that the author went through great lengths to make it fit "look and feel" like the standard C64 BASIC -- and he makes a point of emphasizing this -- but I always thought that the standard BASIC was quite limited.  I wish he would have adopted a higher-level and more modern BASIC syntax, like QBASIC, with code blocks, etc.

 

I also wish he would have offered a nicer editor, perhaps with 80 column characters, rather than having to rely on the typical scrunched up formatting of C64 BASIC programs.  To me that makes the program harder to read, and if you try to inject ASM within it, as he does in his examples, it would be hard to discern.

 

 

 

     -dZ.

Edited November 30, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[Marcio D.]

On 11/29/2022 at 1:10 PM, Arnuphis said:

Can you create a stand alone program that any user of C64 can load and run or do they also need Vision Basic?

 

Once you've compiled the Vision BASIC program into a machine language executable, that executable program can be run on anyone else's C64.

 

[Marcio D.]

On 11/29/2022 at 7:17 PM, DZ-Jay said:

I also wish he would have offered a nicer editor, perhaps with 80 column characters, rather than having to rely on the typical scrunched up formatting of C64 BASIC programs.  To me that makes the program harder to read, and if you try to inject ASM within it, as he does in his examples, it would be hard to discern.

 

 

I don't think 80 columns looks good on the C64 given the limited 320 x 200 resolution.  I remember experimenting with artificially-induced 80 columns on the C64 back in the 80's, and the results looked horrible, with characters looking so squished and skinny.  Now THAT'S hard to read - No thanks.

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

17 minutes ago, Marcio D. said:

 

I don't think 80 columns looks good on the C64 given the limited 320 x 200 resolution.  I remember experimenting with artificially-induced 80 columns on the C64 back in the 80's, and the results looked horrible, with characters looking so squished and skinny.  Now THAT'S hard to read - No thanks.

I dunno.  I used Novaterm's 80 column mode and it was pretty impressive.  On hard mode, I used it with a TV and on my SX-64.

[Mr SQL]

On 11/29/2022 at 7:17 PM, DZ-Jay said:

 

I saw the video, and it states that it runs on a standard C64 because it's just compiled 6502 machine code.  It also states that it runs on unexpanded C64s, unless you select project options that require expanded memory.

 

I think it's neat.  My only complaint would be that the author went through great lengths to make it fit "look and feel" like the standard C64 BASIC -- and he makes a point of emphasizing this -- but I always thought that the standard BASIC was quite limited.  I wish he would have adopted a higher-level and more modern BASIC syntax, like QBASIC, with code blocks, etc.

 

I also wish he would have offered a nicer editor, perhaps with 80 column characters, rather than having to rely on the typical scrunched up formatting of C64 BASIC programs.  To me that makes the program harder to read, and if you try to inject ASM within it, as he does in his examples, it would be hard to discern.

 

 

 

     -dZ.

 

Vision BASIC does have code blocks, the IF THEN structures are expanded to span multiple lines.

 

I think it's a plus being backward compatible with C64 BASIC because more programs can be compiled.

 

Commodore BASIC 2.0 is pretty robust with multidimensional array support and programmers are familiar with it so they can start coding in Vision BASIC right away. 

 

I also like the inline assembly in Vision BASIC with concatenators, the BBC had that feature bitd and it's very powerful, in ways better than a regular Assembler because you can create horizontal structures as Assembly code blocks instead of vertical only.

 

I did some prototyping recently in Commodore BASIC 2.0 and was also surprised at how good the keyboard on the C64 is!  Feels like an IBM mechanical keyboard and those are the best, the keyboard I am typing on right now is a modern chiclet with no play in it.

 

[+DZ-Jay]

7 hours ago, Marcio D. said:

 

I don't think 80 columns looks good on the C64 given the limited 320 x 200 resolution.  I remember experimenting with artificially-induced 80 columns on the C64 back in the 80's, and the results looked horrible, with characters looking so squished and skinny.  Now THAT'S hard to read - No thanks.

 

 

 

Perhaps it should be an option.  40 columns makes things hard to read, even when writing assembly (especially for those of us who comment our code excessively in order to understand it later).  I did use 80-column text editors in the C64 (and even GEOS for a while), and in my opinion it is not all that bad.  I believe that the additional horizontal space (and the improved visual field that it provides) is worth the trade-off of a smaller, squishy font.

 

(Then again, that is based on my experiences with 11 year-old eyes ... I don't have those any more, so I imagine that smaller fonts will indeed stress my 50 year-old eyes extensively.  Still, reading glasses may compensate for that so ... may it's be still worth it.)

 

In any case, my main concern is legibility and intelligibility of the code, so perhaps some modern-ish additions towards this goal (inspired by more modern versions of BASIC such as QBASIC or even Visual Basic).  I imagine that when you separate "writing/reviewing/editing code" from "compiling code" and "running program," you can dedicate higher resources to the editor.

 

I just personally do not think that keeping the feel of the old-school way we used to write C64 code back in the 80s as a design goal is such a good idea.  It may be great for extra retro-points, but I remember writing code back in the 80s on my C64 and ... well, it wasn't pretty.  Having to scrunch up everything, using pre-tokenized symbols, multiple statements in the same line, no empty spaces, all capital letters, terse strings -- all in the name of conserving precious RAM -- is not something I look forward to.

 

Just my two cents.  Not meant to knock the project -- I still admire it immensely.  Vision Basic looks like a very neat project, and I am still very interested in it.

 

 

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

Vision BASIC does have code blocks, the IF THEN structures are expanded to span multiple lines.

 

I saw the whole presentation video, and I have to say that the spanning multiple lines of the conditional expression is not the same as enclosed statement blocks -- and I suspect you know what I actually meant.

 

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

I think it's a plus being backward compatible with C64 BASIC because more programs can be compiled.

Commodore BASIC 2.0 is pretty robust with multidimensional array support and programmers are familiar with it so they can start coding in Vision BASIC right away.

 

Of course being backwards compatible is a good thing -- I wouldn't take that away.  I meant more in the writing style and design choices for the syntactic extensions.  An IF/THEN statement in a single line is absolutely compatible, in syntax and semantics, with an IF/ELSE/THEN/END IF code block.  Many programming languages do this already.

 

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

I also like the inline assembly in Vision BASIC with concatenators, the BBC had that feature bitd and it's very powerful, in ways better than a regular Assembler because you can create horizontal structures as Assembly code blocks instead of vertical only.

 

Inline assembly is a great addition, I agree.  I, however, would have preferred a more emphatic syntactic separation between the two.  Take a look at how Turbo Pascal does this with the "ASM" block statement.

 

IntyBASIC for the Intellivision uses the "ASM" as a line (rather than block) directive, but in practice this turns out to be fairly limited when you want to add more than the one- or two-off operations.  (For instance, handling label definitions becomes a concern due to the necessary white-space delimiter.)

 

That said, I find prefixing the statement with a singular symbol in Vision Basic ("[") is superior than the three-letter mnemonic of IntyBASIC ("ASM").  Still, it can get tedious after a while if you're writing a long-ish block.  Why not support enclosed blocks as well for those instances?

 

 

5 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

I did some prototyping recently in Commodore BASIC 2.0 and was also surprised at how good the keyboard on the C64 is!  Feels like an IBM mechanical keyboard and those are the best, the keyboard I am typing on right now is a modern chiclet with no play in it.

 

 

Oh yes!  I've always loved the big, clanky keys of the C64 keyboard.  It's definitely solid and provides a satisfactory tactile feedback.

 

By the way, the above is just my own personal view and provided as honest constructive criticism and feedback in the hopes of improving the product.  It is not at all intended to knock or criticize Vision Basic, which I find exceedingly cool and visionary.

 

     -dZ.

Edited December 1, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[Arnuphis]

10 hours ago, Marcio D. said:

 

Once you've compiled the Vision BASIC program into a machine language executable, that executable program can be run on anyone else's C64.

 

Thanks! I purchased a copy. Always happy to support new projects for retro machines.