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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.

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 Documents folder 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

See the collection of GW-BASIC programs and tutorials.