What home micro had the best version of Basic?

[CraigGrannell]

C64 18% [ 7 ]

Man, the loony bin's going to be full tonight.

[Celebaglar]

C64 18% [ 7 ]

Man, the loony bin's going to be full tonight.

[RetroRik]

I liked programming in Speccy Basic but if i am honest i always felt that BBC Basic was excellent. I voted for BBC.

RIK

[GarryG]

Did anybody ever use Turbo Basic on the 8Bit Atari?

I seem to remember this being much better than the standard Atari Basic, especialy for the PM graphics. (can't remember why though!)
I think you could compile the code as well!

I also remember mucking about with a version of C on the Atari 8Bit.

[woody.cool]

I would have to say the CPC - the problem was, the C64's BASIC was rather limited and the Speccy's BASIC was rather annoying, un-intuitive and also rather limited. The CPC had plenty of commands including the ability to do some graphics stuff which weren't as easy in Commodore BASIC or Spectrum BASIC.

But you did miss my favourite - the C16 - although based on the same Commodore BASIC as the C64 (& C128 if you wish) it contained many improvements over the earlier Commodore BASIC V2 (C64 had V2 iirc - where as C16 had V3.5)

My fav BASIC interpreters:

1. AMOS or AMOS Professional (Amiga - I suppose STOS for ST can also fall into this one)
2. Locomotive BASIC (Amstrad CPC)
3. Commodore BASIC V3.5 (C16)
4. BBC BASIC (BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Acorn Archimedes + more)
5. RM BASIC (RM Nimbus - however it's based on BBC BASIC & IBM'S GWBASIC) and Microsoft BASIC (MS-DOS in the form of QBASIC, Atari 8-bit, MSX + many more)

[Dark Reaper]

The only BASIC I ever really used was the Spectrum version (I preferred 128) so I've gone for that. I kind of gave up on it though after a while so I never bothered with AMOS after I moved on to an Amiga. I was much more interested in animation so I spent a lot of time on DPaint.

[woody.cool]

The only BASIC I ever really used was the Spectrum version (I preferred 128) so I've gone for that. I kind of gave up on it though after a while so I never bothered with AMOS after I moved on to an Amiga. I was much more interested in animation so I spent a lot of time on DPaint.

DPaint is the mutt's nuts !!!!! I spent alot of time using DPaint myself

[Dark Reaper]

I spent the better part of a year on DPaint making an animated version of the Bram Stoker's Dracula graphic novel (I loved Mike Mignola's artwork and it just looked so good animated). Unfortunately, I didn't have a hard drive and my brother copied over most of the disks that it was on with some crappy game (I've still not forgiven him)

A couple of years later, I used some of the surviving stuff in one of my A Level video projects so my time wasn't completely wasted.

[pottyboy]

Out of all the ones on the list I've tried, I'd say that Spectrum BASIC is the best one, especially the 128 one where you just typed. No keywords etc

[Malc74]

Even though I'm a Speccyhead I had to go for the BBC, as it was miles ahead of anything else I ever used.
Still can't believe 7 people voted for C64 BASIC, although the C128's is excellent.

[CocoBriza]

It would be a fight between the BBC and the Tandy Color Computer 3.

Mainly because in normal basic you had simple words to represent objects.

example , to do a 320x192x16, you would just use HSCREEN 2
circle was HCIRCLE(30,70),6,8(6 was the border color, 8 was the color you wanted to use).

to do a box you just used HLINE, to do fancy lines. just use HDRAW.

How easy is that in Basic.

But as for the BBC. been years since I used the Basic programming. But I'm sure they used simple xcommands to do circles, lines. and boxes also.

And to do assembly was easier to learn on either the BBC or Coco 3. None of the Peeks and Pokes stuff.

[GarryG]

26 votes for Spectrum basic!?

Hmm...

Are the spectrum people that suddently appeared on other threads(8 votes per person etc) sudenly jumping into this one, perhaps?

Can somebody please justify why you think spectrum basic was the best?
I remember spectrum basic as being ok, but nothing special. And let down by the single key entry method.

[TMR]

Can somebody please justify why you think spectrum basic was the best?
I remember spectrum basic as being ok, but nothing special. And let down by the single key entry method.

i didn't vote for it personally, but Spectrum BASIC, although not as feature-packed as other dialects, does have a good selection of keywords and it's pretty quick as well. The single keystroke thing, apparently, becomes intuitive after a while (the same is true of BASIC to be honest, it's only loosely based on English so we have to adapt to use it) and the 128K machines have full keyword entry.

[GarryG]

I have to admit I probably didn't give this basic the efort I put into others as I couldn't get past the single key input system. I was used to typing commands in as normal from my VIC 20 days, so I was probably biast towards the entry system from the start.
I did like the colour and drawing commands though, coming from the VIC It was suddenly very east to draw a straight line and even a circle, wow!
And yes it did run quite fast, especialy when drawing graphics; all things considered!

I probably did most 'home computer' programming on the Atari 8Bit, in basic, then Turbo basic, then MC.

but objectively, I still say spectrum basic was nowhare near as powerfull or flexable as the BBC