Ultimate 64: U64 BBC BASIC - BBC BASIC 3.10 on the Commodore 64

U64 BBC BASIC puts the BBC Micro's BASIC on a Commodore 64 with an Ultimate: the original BBC BASIC 3.10 interpreter, unchanged byte for byte, with a new BBC-style operating system written for the C64 and the Ultimate 64 / C64 Ultimate. It is a cartridge image, free and open source. Everything on the C64 in this video was captured from the video and audio streams of an Ultimate 64 Elite II, on real hardware. This first video tells why it exists: Xander learned to program on the TI-99/4A, the ZX Spectrum and the Oric Atmos, wrote board games in C128 BASIC 7.0, and always envied the BBC Micro's BASIC. Now it runs on the C64, at the Ultimate's turbo speed. In this video • The story: TI BASIC, a Sinclair User type-in, the Oric Atmos manual, C64 BASIC V2, C128 BASIC 7.0, the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes • Bubble Universe by Eric Schraf, on a real Archimedes and in U64 BBC BASIC • Structured BBC BASIC typed and run: procedures, local variables, BBC graphics in BBC colours • Speed: a million FOR loops in 5.4 s, about 33 times a BBC Micro • The BBC line editor (history, copy editing) and *HELP for every keyword and command • VS Code: formatting, Ctrl+F5 to run on the machine, the debugger with breakpoints and variables • A first look at the Ultimate side: 24 voices on 8 SIDs, Upic pictures, sprites, teletext pages from the internet, the file browser Thanks • Sophie Wilson and Acorn Computers, for BBC BASIC • Ivo van Poorten, for the annotated, rebuildable BBC BASIC source this is built on • J.G. Harston, for decades of Acorn documentation • Eric Schraf, for his graphical BASIC programs • Gideon Zweijtzer, for the Ultimate devices • Shown: "On the Road" by Ges and Hilary Taylor (Sinclair User 33, December 1984, EMAP; scan from the World of Spectrum archive); "ZX Spectrum BASIC programming" by Steven Vickers (Sinclair Research, 1983, cover by John Harris); "The ORIC ATMOS Manual" by Ian Adamson (Pan Books, 1984; scan from defence-force.org); emulators Classic99, Fuse, Phosphoric, VICE and B-em; Bubble Universe on the Archimedes from this channel's ArchBAS video Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:07 Where it started 1:37 U64 BBC BASIC 1:52 Programs 2:11 Speed 2:28 Line editor and help 3:01 VS Code 3:49 The Ultimate 4:04 Credits Links • Download (free, GPLv3), manual and source: https://github.com/xahmol/u64-bbcbasic • Releases: https://github.com/xahmol/u64-bbcbasi... • ArchBAS (the Schraf programs for the Archimedes): https://github.com/xahmol/ArchBAS • Blog: https://www.idreamtin8bits.com/ Requirements An Ultimate 64 / Elite / Elite II with firmware 3.15a or newer, a 16 MB REU and the Command Interface (the TwoMegabyter cartridge image switches them on). On the Commodore 64 Ultimate it is not fully functional yet: it relies on features of the Ultimate 64 firmware 3.15a, which Commodore has not yet released in a C64 Ultimate firmware update. An EasyFlash image runs in VICE and as a fallback. Narration: Piper text-to-speech, voice "Alba" (en_GB-alba-medium), from a University of Edinburgh speech dataset (https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/102..., licensed CC BY 4.0. #Commodore64 #BBCBASIC #Ultimate64