I love this, but it's kinda the wrong direction as C64 BASIC had no instructions for gfx and sound.. it was all through pokes. I liked using Simon's Basic to get GFX on my C64 back in the day, but until I had it, I highly envied the Apple 2 and Atari BASIC commands!
This is basically why there are all these Commodore firmware ports - because the kernal doesn't provide all that much and the BASIC has no substantial hardware dependencies.
That's a great point, BASIC 2.0 has very few useful commands for graphics and sound, but these could be added, tailored to the particular platform of a given port. Add a means of "compiling", or exporting, and you get a nice tool for creating NES games easily.
it would be a coooool idea to make an in-line basic compiler... I've stepped through the parsing of BASIC and it takes soooooooo long. e.g. just finding the instruction for say, MID$ takes zillions of cycles. But the actual command is quite simple. So just keeping track of the parsing would make it sooo much better. There are lots of other things to do as well.... but overall I think TRSI has an even better appraoch... you ahve to write Pascal, but you can target C64 hardware quite effiently!
As a Franklin Ace 1000 owner (Apple Clone) I can say that there were no commands for sounds and the graphics were rudimentary, draw a point or draw a line or draw a pretty slow vector shape.
IIUC that's because Franklin cloned the hardware successfully, but couldn't clone the BASIC. But I think you could still run Apple's BASIC from a disk. Do you still have it?
