BBC BASIC for Feersum MicroBeast

This is a z80 BBC BASIC v5.00 port to the Feersum Technologies MicroBeast and NanoBeast.

It is a builder project wrapped around Richard T Russell's BBC BASIC original repo

The webpage/manual for BBC BASIC is here

Things I have added in the build wrapper:

1. a DIST.Z80 specific to MicroBeast/NanoBeast to enable timer and terminal functions
2. an easy way to build it in a linux environment

The build wrapper is MOSTLY all the stuff you get from a standard BBCZ80V5.zip from Russell's website.

On top of this we overlay Russell's source repo, our modified DIST.Z80, a copy of RunCPM for linux, and our own build.sh script.

Why should I use this over stock BBCBASIC.COM ?

The stock BBCBASIC.COM works very well on MicroBeast, with a couple of exceptions:

• TIME, and INKEY or INKEY$ with a timeout value don't work
• CLS and TAB(x,y) don't work

This port provides the shims to make those functions work.

N.B.: VDU12, VDU30, and VDU31,a,b still won't work! AFAICT, there is no clean way to patch them in.

Did you change the editing keys?

I mean, I tried. But BeastOS messes about with the cursor keys, CP/M messes about with them too, VT52 terminals send ESC prefixed sequences for cursor keys, and BBC BASIC is adamant that ESC means Escape (as in "break out of program"). There is no portable way to achieve any sort of sane layout, so I've left it in the defaults, which are:

Key	Action
Ctrl-G	cursor UP (move left)
Ctrl-O	cursor DOWN (move right)
Ctrl-F	start of line
Ctrl-N	end of line
Ctrl-X	delete to end of line
Ctrl-H	BACKSPACE (delete left)
Ctrl-U	delete to start of line
Ctrl-J	cursor left
Ctrl-L	cursor right
Ctrl-R	delete right
Ctrl-Q	insert/overwrite toggle

I know, I know. Why do up & left do the same thing? and down / right? Near as I can tell, they are redundant in this line based editor, but are holdovers from the original BBC Micro's rather splendid full-screen copy edit malarky (which incidentally also exists on RISCiX!) Sadly that method doesn't exist in other versions...I wonder if Acorn patented it?

Build it

First, init the submodule:

git submodule init 
git submodule update

Then run the build script:

./build.sh

This will build a new version of the executable in the build directory.

More details in BUILD.md.

Can I just get a prebuilt binary?

Sure: click "Releases" over on the right, then "latest release" then "assets" and download the BBCBASIC.COM executable.