ROM BASIC 64

Did you take your first steps in programming with a BASIC interpreter? Have you ever dreamed of a machine where the interpreter stayed exactly the same, but the speed and the memory grew by six orders of magnitude? Then keep an eye on this one. :-)

The interpreter is in full control of the x64 machine. No operating system fragmenting memory or running handlers in the background. I've only just started on the interpreter itself, so there isn't much to see yet. It grabs 16 MB for the BASIC program, then claims the largest single block of memory it can get for the data segment (variables, arrays, strings). On my 32 GB machine, booted bare metal without a VM, that comes to 27 GB in one contiguous block. The same way the old 64 KB segment held everything on interpreters like GW-BASIC, just six orders of magnitude larger. One day I'd like it to be compatible with GW-BASIC, so you could load your old programs unchanged.

Stay tuned.