PC-BASIC
A free, cross-platform emulator for the GW-BASIC family of interpreters.
PC-BASIC is a free, cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), PCjr Cartridge Basic and Tandy 1000 GWBASIC. It interprets these BASIC dialects with a high degree of accuracy, aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility. PC-BASIC emulates the most common video and audio hardware on which these BASICs used to run. PC-BASIC runs plain-text, tokenised and protected .BAS files. It implements floating-point arithmetic in the Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) and can therefore read and write binary data files created by GW-BASIC.
PC-BASIC is free and open source software released under the GPL version 3.
See also the PC-BASIC home page.
Quick Start Guide
This quick start guide covers installation and elementary use of PC-BASIC. For more information, please refer to the PC-BASIC documentation.
If you find bugs, please open an issue on GitHub. It would be most helpful if you could include a short bit of BASIC code that triggers the bug.
Installation
PC-BASIC desktop installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux can be downloaded from GitHub.
Python users can obtain the PC-BASIC package from PyPI through pip3 install pcbasic.
BASIC survival kit
PC-BASIC has a 1980s-style interface operated by executing typed commands. There is no menu, nor are there any of the visual clues that we've come to expect of modern software.
A few essential commands to help you get around:
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
FILES |
show current working directory and its contents |
LOAD "PROGRAM" |
loads the program file named PROGRAM.BAS into memory |
LIST |
displays the BASIC code of the current program |
RUN |
starts the current program |
SAVE "PROGRAM",A |
saves the current program to a text file named PROGRAM.BAS |
NEW |
immediately deletes the current program from memory |
SYSTEM |
exits PC-BASIC immediately, discarding any unsaved program |
Use one of the key combinations Ctrl+Break, Ctrl+Scroll Lock, Ctrl+C or F12+B
to interrupt a running program.
Program location
If started through the start-menu shortcut, PC-BASIC looks for programs in the shortcut's start-in folder.
- On Windows, this is your
Documentsfolder by default. - On Mac and Linux this is your home directory
~/by default.
If started from the command prompt, PC-BASIC looks for programs in the current working directory.
See the documentation on accessing your drives for more information.
External resources
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for pcbasic 2.0.8
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | Provenance | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pcbasic-2.0.8.tar.gz | 1.9 MB | Without provenance | Details for pcbasic-2.0.8.tar.gz |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Actions Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pcbasic-2.0.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl | Python 2, Python 3 | none | any | Details for pcbasic-2.0.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl |
Total release size: 3.8 MB
Release files / pcbasic-2.0.8.tar.gz
| Download URL | pcbasic-2.0.8.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 1.9 MB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
No |
| Uploaded via |
twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.3 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.10 tqdm/4.64.0 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/10.6.0 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.5 CPython/3.6.9
|
Release files / pcbasic-2.0.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | pcbasic-2.0.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 2.0 MB |
| Tags | Python 2 Python 3 |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
7a7be0709be21ef92f506a6b6efc2db366f04fc72d06242d7fb99b3ab9d2de00
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| Upload date | |
|
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
No |
| Uploaded via |
twine/3.8.0 pkginfo/1.8.3 readme-renderer/34.0 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 urllib3/1.26.10 tqdm/4.64.0 importlib-metadata/4.8.3 keyring/10.6.0 rfc3986/1.5.0 colorama/0.4.5 CPython/3.6.9
|
Security for pcbasic 2.0.8
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