TPUG Presents: Vision BASIC creator Dennis Osborn !

I've watched some videos on Vision Basic and it's pretty remarkable. You can compile your program into a stand alone machine language program for great speed that's fast enough to even write games with. It also allows you to code in machine language and basic together on the screen and pass routines between them. It features sound and graphics basic commands to make creating stuff much more easy too.

Another big perk is it's highly compatible with the stock basic on the 64 so you can take existing programs and greatly enhance their speed by compiling them with it. It requires ram expansion but this also gives you the ability to write bigger programs, quickly memory bank code or data such as graphics into and out of active memory, etc.

It reminds me of a compiler I use to use that would compile Amiga Basic for greater speed. I used it to speed up a bulletin board I wrote. On the C64 I wrote a BBS in basic but had to code certain routines in machine language to speed them up since no basic compiler existed in those days for the C64. Probably due to there not being much of a market for such a program because it would need memory expansion to be useful in any big way. With today's advent of cheap memory expanders for the C64 as well as easily expanding memory in emulation I can see why Vision Basic came about. The one sore lacking feature of the C64 was no dedicated sound or graphics commands when doing basic programming.

Honestly this will sound like I'm pandering but he did such a good job with it there's no features I can think of that he should add, and no questions come to mind at the moment. I assume you've also posted your message on the Lemon 64 forum too? Because that site is probably the most active for this sort of topic. This forum is mainly for fans of the C64 mini, C64 maxi, Amiga mini, and other forms of retro emulation.

Thanks for the compliment on the BBS coding being interesting. On the C64 I wrote the entire bbs in basic except for opening and reading text files on disk to spit out to the screen and to send over the modem was written in machine language to speed it up because even at 300 baud it was too slow in basic fetching one character at a time from a sequential file to send out to both. This was needed for things like the message forum or various parts of the board that had a lot of text to display that would be too memory hungry to keep in the coding of basic as text.

Funny story: For a while I couldn't figure out how to create or read files where you could specifically access any section of data you wanted without having to read the whole file to find it like you have to do with a sequential file. I can't remember what those types of files were called but they had the speed advantage over sequential files for that reason, so for a while when a user would log in it took several seconds for the program to read through the sequential file until it found their username and checked if their password matched, as well as to then load in any other data specific to their account. Later I figured out how to do the other type of file and logins were much faster.

The BBS was for C64 users only, so I even wrote a special terminal program they had to initially download from other C64 BBS's to use to log in to mine, and this angered a few Apple II BBS owners who kept trying to hack into the BBS. Lol.

Anyway, this C64 specific terminal program also allowed features that didn't exist early on in bbs programs, such as color and font changes, petsci graphics, etc. Later with the Amiga BBS program I got even more ambitious, with a special terminal program for Amiga users calling into it that allowed use of mouse control to click on icons, color and font changes as well, and so on. The Amiga bbs I never finished though, but it was functional and close to being done.

Good times. Can't tell you how many nights I spent coding until daylight, or chatting with somebody logged into the C64 BBS in the middle of the night. The BBS scene was big here in the states, and it's often how software was traded via downloading off C64 and Amiga bulletin boards. There were also text games on many C64 BBS systems where you'd do things like battle in dungeons and dragons or space war games against other C64 users. The thing is obviously only one person would be logged in at a time of course, so you'd make your move and then have to wait sometimes days before the other person logged back in and made a move.

Last thought: Half the fun was when people would try to hack or crash my BBS. I had one that was successful. He took advantage of the bug in C64 basic's text display that would sometimes crash the machine if you entered several lines of text and then held down the delete key to delete a character at a time which would sometimes make the C64 crash as the cursor wrapped back up the screen to the next line of entered text. I then limited all text input prompts to something less than the amount of text that caused that to prevent this flaw from crashing it. For typing in messages too I made it so they had to hit return to start a new line so I could avoid it. If memory serves I think that bug only happened after you entered 3 or more lines of constant text without hitting return and then tried to delete all the way up. It would sometimee crash, and I think it was when the cursor was wrapping up from the 3rd line to the 2nd line as you deleted.

I might also throw in that a version to cross platform to the Spectrum would also be nice.