RetroBasic - a future vaporware project for amusement

[Quadko]

I was looking through the PC BLUE II archives on cd.textfiles.com, and a lot of the early disks have BASIC games on them that won't run under any of the variants of GWBASIC/BASICA I tried. In fact, I'm thinking many of the first disks were actually for CP/M'86, and MBASIC, not DOS. They also have a custom basic complier, and games for that.

(Later disks finally become compatible with DOS & GWBASIC.)

There are probably lots of ways to run these programs, and I didn't look all that hard, but it got me thinking about a cool project that could be:

"RetroBASIC", for running all those old x86 basic programs from magazines!

True, to get those basic programs running probably just means a small program to convert them to GWBASIC compatible syntax, but if I'm imagining, why not imagine big!



No real point other than to hopefully amuse you as well as me. And Version 2 would of course include Apple, Atari, Spectrum, etc. support, why not!

[dosraider]

As far as I emember (and I think I'm right) you can run CP/M on a Z80 emulator ....
need check ..... I'll be back

[Back ....]
Indeed, and some interesting stuffs about it @
http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/howto_cpm.html

RGB has also some stuffs...
http://www.classicdosgames.com/utilities/cpm86.html

And there seems to be a lot of emulators floating around ....

Of course, software can be tricky, standard hardware was still far away those days .....

Ah well, you gonna get there, if you put enough time in it ...

[Quadko]

Heh heh heh. Thanks for the links - I had found some less exciting CPM in DosBox discussion links last night, but these are much better.

Hm, "PCem - a PC emulator" - that's a new one on me. I'll have to check that out, too.

[dosraider]

Glad I could be of some help ..

Hm, "PCem - a PC emulator" - that's a new one on me. I'll have to check that out, too.

PCem is pretty good, however don't expect a 'dosbox', it's a bit different.
Not so ... how to say, prepared to run stuffs 'out of the box', needs more setup-tuning than dosbox, but on the other hand it's more how to say, versatile maybe? Also regarding hardware emulation it demands a bit more input, but can be extremely fine tuned... ah you'll see when trying out.

There goes your free time .....

[Quadko]

Excellent! I've used VirtualPC/Server and other "real" VMs, but they were too clunky to play games, especially long term. Once upon a time I even wrote (attempted?) a dos game emulator "DodGE", but DosBox rocks and made it mostly pointless to spend time there. I've still got the code floating around, and prefer my debugger interface code, but for anything real I need to spend some time familiarizing with dosbox's build & codebase package...

So I'm all for another take on the pc emulator! Look forward to it. I'm still waiting for someone to provide the near-or-cycle-perfect emulation of the original PC & XTs like we get with other game machines, but haven't had the ...free time... to contribute more myself.

Most of the Basic games are probably just silly (there was a magic 8-ball variant that answered yes or no questions, there was a guess-a-random-number) but then there was Janitor Joe, which is a bit of fun. Most of the games I looked for after the "runs in GWBASIC" disk are readily available elsewhere, often packaged as an executable rather than code, so it's mostly just my curiosity about the missing stuff from before then.