Richard Russell’s BBC Basic…

Many years ago, I took a snapshot of Frak!’s BBC Micro source files onto my PC: this was back in the days when my PC had a 5.25″ floppy drive (or indeed any kind of floppy drive). However, loading these files into Notepad++ isn’t entirely helpful, let’s say:

This is because BBC Basic cunningly stores its keywords in a tokenized format, which Notepad++ doesn’t know about. And because I didn’t know of a clever Notepad++ (or indeed Eclipse) plugin that will expand these out into a readable form, I went to the horse’s mouth. Where the horse, of course, is Richard Russell. 🙂

So the next step was to download BBCSDL, which is a free cross-platform BBC Basic implementation (which even runs on Android and iOS). However, half an hour of head-scratching later, I still couldn’t see how to even load a file. So I gave up on that, and bought (for £29.99) Richard Russell’s ‘proper’ BBC Basic for Windows. (Note that I could have just got the trial version, but I don’t begrudge Richard his thirty quid.)

Installing it, running it, and using it to load the same source file into the BBC Basic GUI produces a nice colourized version…

…which can then be cut and pasted into Notepad++…

OK, so it turns out that my source code back in 1984 was a little more terse and uncommented than I remembered. But it is at least readable, and a starting point. 🙂