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I think Commodore was just being cheap. The Commodore 64 basically (haha) used the same BASIC as its predecessor the VIC-20. It's strange to imagine them releasing a computer with some nifty chips (video & sound) and no BASIC commands to make use of them, but they did.
I used to have a BASIC translation poster. It listed (haha) a number of commands and how they were implemented on a number of home computers. The Commodore 64 often had to do with PRINTing some character string or POKEing a memory location.
Not everybody was happy with Simons' BASIC (I liked it), but it would have been a huge improvement over BASIC 2.0 and it made it easy to do graphics, sounds, sprites and redefined character sets. It also still left a lot of memory free for the program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons'_BASIC




Member since:
2005-11-14
You suffer from the delusion that smooth scrolling is the benchmark of all things. It's not. Smooth scrolling existed on the C64, a very slow computer with a very shitty OS by today's standards.