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New online projects gallery

Back in 2021, the distinguishing feature of the then-current EndBASIC 0.7 release was that it was “cloud-ready”: I created a file-sharing service and integrated it with EndBASIC so that you all had a mechanism to publish your creations with others.

It then took the arrival of EndBASIC 0.9, which wasn’t released until a year later, to have the ability to automatically launch shared projects via an specially-crafted URL. But even with that feature, projects written and shared from within EndBASIC were stuck in a pretty obscure garden. Nobody was able to discover them unless they signed up for an EndBASIC account and used the command line interface to inspect the cloud, or unless you explicitly shared those URLs somehow. A… very tall order.

The situation changes today as I have modified the Gallery section of the EndBASIC website to display a dynamic view of projects. Visit it now to have some fun or read on for more details on how this unfolded!

EndBASIC 0.11: Functions, LCDs, and bytecode

After a year-and-a-half long hiatus, I am pleased to announce that EndBASIC 0.11.0 is now available! 🥳

This release marks a significant milestone because it addresses the top feature request from you all, namely the ability to define custom functions and subroutines. But it also includes other goodies such as support for an LCD console, a shiny new disassembler, and a faster execution engine.

New blog and a call for beta-testing

Dear EndBASIC enthusiasts!

In preparation for the imminent 0.11 release, which needs some beta-testing right now, I have created a brand-new “blog” section in the EndBASIC website.

Porting the EndBASIC console to an LCD

Hello again Blog System/5 and sorry for the radio silence for the last couple of months. I had been writing too much in here and neglecting my side projects so I needed to get back to them. And now that I’ve made significant progress on cool new features for EndBASIC, it’s time to write about them a little!

One of the defining characteristics of EndBASIC is its hybrid console: what looks like a simple text terminal at first glance can actually render overlapping graphics and text at the same time. This is a feature that I believe is critical to simplify learning and it first appeared with the 0.8 release back in 2021.

BASIC parsing difficulties in EndBASIC

The original BASIC parser in EndBASIC 0.1 was very rudimentary and it stayed pretty much unmodified until the 0.10 release last month. This release brought major changes to the parser to support new features, but it wasn’t easy to implement them. In this post, I want to look into various difficulties that arose implementing certain BASIC constructs in EndBASIC. Overcoming these difficulties was difficult, but it was also fascinating because it gave me a glimpse of the design choices that the original BASIC designers must have faced. Capturing these ah-ha moments in a post is also tricky, but I’ll try anyway.