BBC BASIC in RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi is really cool!

The Raspberry Pi, Acorn Archimedes, and the BBC Micro have played a significant role in shaping the microcomputer industry. They were designed to be affordable and accessible to the general public and educational institutions, with the goal of promoting computer literacy and technology education.

The Raspberry Pi is a series of small and low-cost single-board computers that were first released in 2012. It was designed as an educational tool to help teach computer science and programming to students, and to provide a platform for hobbyists and DIY enthusiasts to build their own projects. The Raspberry Pi runs on a variety of operating systems, including Linux, but its most notable operating system is RISC OS.

The Acorn Archimedes was a range of personal computers produced by Acorn Computers Ltd in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was one of the first computers to use the ARM architecture, which is now widely used in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The Archimedes was notable for its advanced graphics capabilities and was used in educational institutions. The Archimedes ran on the RISC OS operating system, which was developed specifically for the platform.

The BBC Micro, also known as the BBC Microcomputer System, was a series of microcomputers produced by Acorn Computers Ltd and released in 1981. It was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as part of their Computer Literacy Project, with the goal of promoting computer education in schools and homes. The BBC Micro was widely used in educational institutions and was one of the most popular computers of its time. It was equipped with a 6502 CPU and ran on the Acorn MOS operating system and was programmed using BBC BASIC.

BBC Basic is a high-level programming language that was developed by Acorn Computers Ltd for the BBC Micro. It was designed to be simple and easy to use, and was intended to introduce beginners to the concepts of programming. BBC Basic was widely used in educational institutions. The language has been updated and maintained over the years, and is still in use today by a dedicated community of users and developers.

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Video Title: BBC BASIC in RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi is really cool!

[MrPDawes]

You can write |BBC BASIC programs in Edit or better editors like StrongEd or my favorite was Zap. Once saved you can then execute from the desktop. You have access to all the modules under RISCOS including outlined fonts too and Draw. I Once wrote a sprite drawing routine in ARM assembler using the inline assembler. Not easy but I didn't have access to a C compiler as it was expensive. It was capable of running animations and calculating if a something collided with a non-transparent pixel in the sprite. My first sprite was generated using BASIC code to draw a 3D object and rotate to create a spinning sprite. It was really cool. On Raspberry PI that would run really fast today. Sadly stored on a hard drive somewhere on one of my many Archimedes and can't find.
I liked mode 7 which was the Teletext mode. The lines you saw being displayed across the screen was probably the graphics mode character which made everything on the same line change to graphical objects. Another character would switch it back to text mode which is the default state at the beginning of each line.

[SDX]

Never thought I'd catch General Zod talking about BBC BASIC!

[YesiPleb]

I've got an A420 upstairs, it's actually the very machine we had in CDT at school. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be able to get it from my school many years after I'd left and moved away from the area. It's been stuck in a state of not working as the hard drive died at some point in its life and trying to adapt it to use modern storage like memory cards (like I've done with many other of my machines like the BBC Master and Amiga 1200) has been very difficult due to having to source hard to find podules. I did get one but the ROM needs updating.

This video has shown me a way I can get back into the Archimedes without having to spend loads of money and time upgrading a machine I probably won't get to use much because of space having these machines set up. My Amiga 1200 is my main retro machine (thanks to the PiStorm) and after that it's my BBC Master (which also has a Pi inside it being used as a PiTUBE) so it looks like a Pi 400 will be purchased soon but I have one question - is there any way of getting the keyboard from my A420 plugged into the Pi 400 via an adaptor of sorts? I've never liked using BBC emulators because of its awesome keyboard - mapping has always been an issue, similar to trying to use a Spectrum 48K under emulation with the tokenised keywords. I wrote a new games menu for the hard drive in my Master (yes, it's 2GB!!!) in a mix of BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler.

Many thanks for this video - it's opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me with the Archimedes and BBC BASIC, I can't wait ton get in and play plus with it being so small (I have a RetroPie for gaming) I can store this so much easier than a full sized computer.

[chrisearl]

Excellent video 👌 this is what youtube is for 👍

[AndrewRoberts]

FYI: <CTRL>+F12 Will open a Command Window, you can run BASIC in, within the Desktop. Not forgetting free editors, like !Zap, allow you to write and run BASIC from a colour coding, line number free environment, using a font of your choice. Not forgetting, by default, Shift clicking your BASIC source files will open them, in the built in, !Edit app (or whatever App you've associated), making editing a bit easier, no

[Inaflap]

That inline 6502 assembler was a very neat feature on the BBC micro. I think Locomotive BASIC on the Amstrad CPC let you do that too... but with Z80. Possibly the Memotech MTX machines allowed Z80 inline too... just a vague memory. I had a ZX Spectrum (and C64), and you either POKEd using READ and DATA, or loaded a CODE file. However, there were lots of assemblers available on tape. I used the one by Picturesque, but I think the most popular, was Zeus. Nowhere near as convenient as that inline assembler. The BBC Model B had a much better BASIC and OS in its 32K ROM... but being 8-bit, that size ate into the 64K of memory addresses; it didn't have enough RAM if you were in a high res mode.

[bobmcbob]

Never had any assembler manual for my BBC B. Did a lot of BASIC. Eventually wrote a font editor to redefine the standard font using a gui/mouse with a grid editor and outputting VDU commands to redefine the font/glyph of every letter. Then you go back into Archimedes Desktop mode and everything takes on that font. Won a regional programming competition with my Scorch game entry too. haha fun times. Never learnt Assembler though. If I knew that, perhaps I could have made some really good action game bits and pieces.

[MikePerigo]

Thanks for a great video. Actual original content. Not just a rehash of the same old superficial impressions. I would love to watch your adventures with Arm assembler code. One thing that would be a nice addition would be access to the code listings for the examples used in the video. If you could add a link to a Githb repository or something similar, viewers could try them for themselves and easily modify them to try out their own ideas.

[schismaticschematics]

Nice to see RISC OS getting some love. I've booted it up on a Pi a couple of times but never really got off the starting blocks. But it's ace that something that old is still going and what's more that it's been adapted to the Pi (yes, that ARM chip has some serious heritage cred'). I never got to touch the BBC Micros at the school I went to, so no idea how to deal with them at all, but having managed to get off the starting blocks with z80/ZXspectrum assembly it would indeed be interesting to see what could be done talking directly to the ARM processor in the Pi. Looking forward to some more stuff from NCOT :-D

[WXCB]

i miss my bbc!!!! went all the way up to the archimedes way back when. but i did my 5th year computer project for my GCSE on the beeb.... was a teletext clone that ran pages in a similar way to the way teletext did.

[geoffcollins]

This is awesome I’m going to do this right now, many thanks 🙏

[samshort]

I still use my Risc Station 7500 and I also updated my Pi400 with Artworks 2 and Techwriter 9, both fantastic packages. What I lament is that Risc OS is only 32 bit and cannot be easily ported because of all of the low level code that made it so versatile on low end hardware 30 plus years ago. Still, I would rather a modern Risc OS that is not backward compatible than have it die. As for programming, I have used GCC, but a lot of code often needs Linux compatibility libraries that defeat the GUI standards.

[wskinnyodden]

I love that Model F keyboard! Quite jel!

[LordmonkeyTRM]

A video showing the speed against og BBC basic in stuff like complex plotting, fractals etc would be interesting

[wskinnyodden]

ARM CPUs were developed FOR the BBC Micro NOT on the BBC Micro, pardon the correction.

[dcocz]

I've never seen the MODE statement used like that

[SuperHaunts]

How about accessing the GPIO inBASIC? Also auto starting a BASIC program at boot running RiscOS?

[navalenigma]

If you use the editor package (in command line not riscos, ) you don't need line numbers. They may be there just under surface, not sure. It was a bit like nano from Linux. You had to know the keyboard shortcuts but was easier than using basic command line. I used it to code with back in the day.

[DominicWatkins]

Top stuff! I appear to be living in a parallel universe.

[nangld]

Nice video, but it doesn't really show the full beauty of the RISC OS (most people wont care about BBC Basic, while the RISC OS itself comes with native C++ compilers plus a Unix compatibility layer with GCC). RISC OS was the first OS to introduce Apps and did it better than OSX or Android. Or how RISC OS allowed seamlessly running Apps directly from the zip archives (they had to invent their own arc format, since zip wasn't around yet in 1987), which sped up running stuff over network, from floppies and cdroms. Back in the day it allowed stetting up RAM disk with just two clicks (RMB on the OS logo, and clik and drag the RAMDisk slider). Compare that to DOS or Amiga. Today it allows for easy virtualization. You can seamlessly run 1987 apps on the modern system (you just have to give them a virtual floppy or a virtual CD), if Aeumulor is launched. That is despite RISC OS getting forked and switching several companies and dev teams over the years. OSX can't run NextSTEP software or even older OSX stuff (not speaking about the classic mac software). Apps themselves also prioritized user friendliness, instead of overwhelming the users with annoying nonsense, like MS Word did with Clippy. So what people care nowadays, if it will make running Python easier. Which it can, if it gets wrapped into a nice App with all dependencies included.