To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
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:
2007-03-26
To be honest, even in those days I found Microsoft Basic to be sub par compared to some of the BASIC interpreters being released in Europe.