Thoreau BASIC: a GW-BASIC interpreter that boots on bare metal and runs on Windows
Show HN: I wrote a BASIC interpreter that boots on UEFI machines
Thoreau BASIC is a GW-BASIC-compatible interpreter that runs directly on UEFI firmware, with a Windows port. It supports 32/64-bit integers, double precision, strings, graphics, text windows, error trapping, and disk I/O via UEFI. The data segment sizes to available memory, allowing arrays with billions of elements. Recent updates boosted performance 25×, added bitmap support, and fixed bugs.
The data segment is sized to the largest block of conventional memory the firmware (or Windows) reports, which on a modern machine is gigabytes.
- Rygian
"The machine boots into BASIC" :-)
I was 8 or 9 years old when the ZX Spectrum +2 arrived home.
I'm seriously considering installing this on an old laptop and giving it to my son when he's 8 years old, together with a hard-copy of a BASIC reference and a few simple programs and games to type in.
Getting a FAT32 filesystem on day 1 is already a huge jump from my childhood experience (loading from tape).
- roryirvine
Not FOSS? That's a real pity.
I learned to program on 8 bit micros, and created a rough boot-to-BASIC experiment ~15 years ago following the JeOS pattern. So this project sounds really exciting, but I'd be more interested if I weren't restricted to being a passive end user.
- JoeAltmaier
Very cool! The raw-metal boot part is impressive.
BASIC requires more support than you'd expect. Here's an interpreter, with a similarly long list of features it has to support:
- glimshe
This is a great project. How do you handle saving/loading data? You mentioned file operations but you need some sort of file system - perhaps FAT32 - to support that. I'd need that to consider using it on UEFI.
One thing you could use for more test cases is the book 101 BASIC Computers Games by David Ahl. Games always encouraged people to use computers and that's as classic as it gets!
- dlcarrier
I learned to program on the Commodore 64 and in QBASIC in th 90's. I'll give it a try.
Considering how much it supports, if it could chainload a full operating system, it would make a great replacement for GRUB or rEFIt.