The BASIC programming language and how it ended up on the Sega Saturn | MVG
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- Опубліковано 19 кві 2020
- In 1998, Bits Laboratory released Game BASIC for the Sega Saturn. An easy way for programmers to write games on the Saturn without an expensive development kit. In this episode we take a look at what BASIC is, its importance in game development and theorize why it was made available for the Saturn
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Credits and Thanks:
► Intro/Outro Music - Everyway by h0ffman - / hoffman-everyway
Sources:
► segaretro.org/Bits_Laboratory
► www.satakore.com/sega-saturn-...
► web.archive.org/web/200103030...
► web.archive.org/web/2005021216...
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#SegaSaturn #BASIC #Programming - Ігри
i wish machines still came with manuals, i loved reading through them
Well they still do!
"Plug the square plug into the square hole and the round plug in the round hole"
Learned basic when I was a kid with manuals in English and did not even spoke the language!
Still, I was able to type and see what it does.
@@redpheonix1000 don't forget the modern 1 liner troubleshooting guide: "shutdown and restart the machine"
They do but all they show is a Link to a website to read more
True, when I wasn't able to be on the computer I would read the manuals and be able to step through the code in my head. They seemed like sacred text back then and really gave the impression that anything was possible.
The PS2 had Yabasic in the Pal regions.
It was Sony's attempt to get a tax break in the PS2 by claiming it was a computer. The plan didn't work.
But it did have me coding at 7 years old.
Learning to code young is the best time to do it. I couldn't imagine actually having to learn the bottom basics at uni. I have trouble remembering my pin code.
@James wtf yabast*rd
Yeah, apparently Sony had no idea that the PS2 can have Linux on it, and they allowed it.
Whoops
@@ChaseMC215 I'm pretty sure that they knew, seeing as Sony was the one that released a Linux distro for the ps2.
@@cronchcrunch afterwards. first they tried to ban linux. ppl got upset. then they allowed it , but only their distro. as allways, everything game related sucks in the techworld
I learned to program on the old school TI-8x calculators in the mid 2000s. As janky as BASIC seems to me today, its role in introducing tons of people to programming is undeniable. Seriously transformational.
You say old school but they still use them in high schools... they have color screens now but I believe they still run off the same Z80 processor as they did 20 years ago, and they definitely still have BASIC
Same! TIBASIC and the game-making shell DarkBASIC were fun.
@r4rev2 He's talking about the calculators. The Texas Instruments programmable graphing calculators are coded in a very special kind of BASIC called TIBASIC. It's maths oriented, you don't need to learn it to get through school but it helps immensely. There aren't any calculators with Python.
Edit: I've been corrected, there is at least one calculator that runs python.
@@_winter7745 Regarding the "no calculators with Python"... well, actually... www.numworks.com/
It's not exactly cheap (99$), but then, not _that_ much more than the TI-8X's... And - hey, it's capable of running (micro)Python 😉... which should be enough, capabilitywise, for just about anything you can halfway sensibly run on a device like that...
@@CoPoint Thanks! I love this! Unfortunately I doubt they'll switch in high schools but these seem a treat for the college crowd and beyond.
My first "computer" was a zx spectrum as a hand me down. I never understood how basic worked but one of my first gaming Achievements was typing out hangman from the manual and actually made it play
@Red Dogg - Rebel4Truth were talking 30 yrs ago...
@Red Dogg - Rebel4Truth it was 89 for me and I was 9.
Ti99a and I was 4 years old.
what is the code?
My first computer here in the UK was an Acorn Electron my dad brought home from work for me, I was 5. This would have been 1989/1990. I had stacks of manuals and cassettes with it and would acquire more BASIC programming books from bargain bins and libraries. Some of my happiest memories are copying out lines and lines of code from an 'Input' book after choosing something to create, then when getting restless and hazy eyed asking my mother to help read out the code whilst I typed it in. Saving the whole thing to cassette tape, running the code and finding the inevitable typos and mistakes (some of which were from the books themselves, which meant learning how to recognise errors myself) then running the code and seeing what we'd spent ages typing come to life.
It was a place in history for me where time didn't matter, I could just lose myself in a computer and games and my imagination. I miss those times like crazy.
Thanks so much for this vid - I'm having an insanely nostalgic time in lockdown uncovering so much from my childhood (digitalising VHS tapes, going through boxes, you name it) and just yesterday I was in the attic and found my Acorn Electron and its cassette deck.
Nods to anyone who had similar memories in childhood!
I was a Net Yaroze owner at the time. We were given access to the official Sony developer forum on the internet where mainstream developers also frequented. We were able to submit our games to that forum and if Sony liked a game they would release it on the cover CD of the Playstation magazine for others without the Net Yaroze to play. That was our way of getting our games published if they were good enough. Many Net Yaroze owners went on to produce games for the upcoming PSP and PS2 machines. Not me though, for me it was only a bedroom hobby, I was already employed as a programmer in another sector of programming :)
Whats the difference between coding, developing and programming? Or all they more or less the same? Thank you and wow thats cool wish i would have gotten into computer tech back when i was kid who knows what that would have led to...
Cool story 🙄
Does anyone remember the demo disc that came with the PS2 in the UK with "Yabasic" on it? I loved that!
I remember it, but never used it. Could you save your code onto memory card (or back it up some other way)?
That just sounds like the setup for a joke akin to ligma.
"Yabasic bitch"
Fun Fact: It came with the PS2 because Sony wanted to pass it off as a computer to the UK Government and avoid tax!
@@sebastian19745 archive.org/details/ps2demodiscpbpx95205 oh cool! I think I've found it! Gotta try this!
So many obscure but extremely cool things in this channel, amazing.
When I heard the intro music of h0ffman
*Demoscene intensifies*
It's amazing what can be crammed into 64kb
@@TatsuZZmage Watch "Memories" by Desire. Released lately. It's a 256 BYTES intro. Just watch it and be amazed.
He recently released 'Way Too Rude' at Revision 2020.
Another 64k Amiga demo very much in the vein of Everyway. Well worth a watch, the man's a legend.
@@sepehrasadi5997 I was mostly thinking of the first time I saw .the.product
Nostalgia pur.
I'm 15 years old and I began programming when I was 9 yrs old. I hacked my wii (aka. installed homebrew into the wii) and was interested in making games or applications generally.
So I've used DOSBox (a DOS emulator) and searched for IDEs and possible languages - and Ive found one: QBasic. I can remember the times where I sat on the couch, my mouse and keyboard plugged into the wii, and read through the manuals integrated in the IDE. I quickly learned all the fundamentals of QBasic and bought a book about QBasic programming - I knew back then that QBasic was relatively slow, not to mention the graphical instructions (LINE, CIRCLE, etc.) or reading the keyboard inputs (when I made my first game I had to access a memory address so that i could use LShift and RShift, the only reliable inputs without making too hard work). In the first two years, Ive programmed a game where you drive a car on a road without colliding with the cars driving the opposite direction, then a 3D engine which worked quite well (ive calculated the positions intuitively with "pseudo-formula") and a maze game. I stopped then because I felt that the limits were too big and focused on Java, C++ and PHP afterwards.
These were wonderful times programming in QBasic and a great introduction into programming that I would recommend everyone.
(Btw sry for my bad english)
So why didn't you get a career programming
@@Keepskatin Wow, I wasn't expecting an answer to this forever forgotten comment at all 😅, but as of right now I am actually pursuing a career as a software developer!
As a "bedroom programmer" of the 80s, here are a few notes:
- The original BASIC developed by Kemeny / Kurtz had no line numbers. These were lately added probably as an easy way to refer to locations for GOTO / GOSUB and to facilitate for the lack of screen editors of the early home computers. The original developers later said that line numbers actually "destroyed" the language.
- It is true that most of the early home computer BASICs had no concept of a while loop. All of them however had a FOR-NEXT loop, so looping was not an a foreign idea to bedroom programmers. We would implement while loops using if - then - goto statements. Later revisions of BASIC introduced multiline subs / functions (with local variables) and while loop (For example Amstrad CPC had a "while - wend" loop)
- Home BASICs were largely incompatible as you said, unless you focused on a very minimal set of commands (and even there, there were differences). They would follow one of two schools: either give the user a very basic set of commands and force him to use direct register /memory address (peek, poke) to access hardware for graphics / sound (e.g. Commodore 64) or enrich the language with commands that would speak to the hardware and let the user easily program advanced graphics and sound. More advanced users would inevitably switch to assembly in the end.
- PS2 actually had version of BASIC shipped on the demo disc. It was YABASIC (Yet-Another-BASIC) and there were some sample programs with it (I recall an Amiga-like bouncing ball). I connected a USB keybaord and typed few lines in it, it was of course blazing fast compared to any home computer because of the hardware.
Great post thank you
I'm happy to believe that the original Dartmouth BASIC had no line numbers, if you can prove it. Please provide a reference to document this because I've never heard anyone make such a claim. If you're referring to True BASIC which came much later, this isn't the same thing at all.
The original Dartmouth Basic manual (October 1964) features line numbers: www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf
marinedalek Thank you.
They absolutely needed line numbers, because the only way to edit code was through a teletype (paper) terminal.
"gwbasic". I haven't uttered that in 24 years. Thanks man, great video.
I have a disk image containing GW-BASIC on my Windows 10 computer.
@@Chaos89P Nice
Thing are moving forward til the answer. Doom port for the Saturn, biggest question of all.
I don't own any old school computer nor do i desire to but i enjoy these for some reason!
These videos are beautiful to watch..
I don't even game and I find these videos fascinating.
the beautiful process of making complex things
Me too. (I was born too late to even have a computer like that. 2006, in fact.)
It's been a busy day, maybe I should go to sleep.
*sees MVG*
Sleep can wait.
There's a whole host of shooters written for Game Basic that can be enjoyed if you have a Pseudo Saturn Kai cart. Some of them are quite good!
Dark Basic is where I learned about programming for the first time, it was a language+IDE for windows in the early 2000s
my first programming language was Perl way back in the late 2000s. i eventually did learn c and everything else. python was just starting to get popular, and some people were severely worried of python, since not all version of python were gpl and some not available on linux.
also freebasic is still out there on pcs for windows to freebsd and linux.
Loved Dark BASIC! I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 originally in the early 90's.. and then moved onto whatever version of BASIC was on my family's Black & Green only DOS machine..Then finally to Dark Basic once we got a better computer in the late 90's haha
Basic/QBasic with Direc-X++ other stuff= DarkBasic and laiter DarkBasic Pro :D
for me, it's VB6 and Planet-source-code.com, it was like a github back in the day
This tradition continues on the 3DS and Switch with SmileBasic/PetitCom. When i still had my 3DS, I frequently was making games or little demos with it than actually playing any games.
Wow never knew this. Will have to investigate this. I used Basic a lot on the BBC computers at school in the 80s. thx! :-)
@@hazy33 If you're 'HARDCORE' there's a version of SmileBasic for Raspberri Pi called "Pi Starter" that's only available from one store in Japan and includes a custom keyboard that has the 'extended graphical characters' on it like the C64 and Speccy keyboards and such. It's fairly cheap too. A total package, including the Pi and Keyboard is about 100$ and it comes on an SD card that boots straight into BASIC. Also, for a short time (no longer available), there was a version of RiscOS that literally booted up into classic BBC BASIC, also for Pi. I've been hunting down anyone that has it still, but so far no luck. That said, RiscOS has BBC BASIC built into the OS for Pi, so if that's a BASIC you enjoy, I suggest it. RiscOS is free and a Pi that runs it is like 30 bucks. :) And cool thing, as usual, it runs all the old BBC BASIC code natively and looks like nature intended it. Good luck and have fun!
@@heavysystemsinc. Ooo do you have a link to the keyboard pack one?
@@hazy33 Yes, but keep in mind, you must have a friend in japan that can order it and send it. I fortunately have a friend (haven't gotten to order it just yet!) but I did contact them directly and they do not do international shipping. So hopefuly, in the internet age, you have some connections that can help out!
shop.tsukumo.co.jp/features/pistarter
And here's one of the demos for it:
ua-cam.com/video/fJAaK6qEjXk/v-deo.html
edit: And the keyboard specific link on their storefront. shop.tsukumo.co.jp/goods/4943508090240/
:)
@@heavysystemsinc. thx! in my haste i think my enthusiasm ran away with me. I think i'd be better sticking to a pc based basic or a bbc emulator :-)
What a legend. Please make more Saturn/Sega videos!
Hey man just wanna say your videos inspire me to keep studying computer science. I am almost done compelting my first yead of college but with math getting harder and harder it just gets more intimidating. But when I watch your videos every Monday it reminds me why I got into programming and have always loved it. Thank you
i had *no* idea something like this was out for the Saturn. I knew about Net Yaroze and the blue playstations, but not this.
Same here, I had no idea this existed and I'm quite up to speed with all things Sega.
Same here
Blue playstation?
There were a lot of interesting things that only surfaced in Japan for the Saturn.
Literal Saturn homebrew dev and every time I saw GAME Basic demos I had no idea it was _this_
Awwwww Basic. How I started programming at the age of 8 on an old Sinclair Spectrum. Memories.
Team 17 were based in my hometown (and have moved only a couple of miles away). I was always fascinated by the building as a kid. It was an unassuming office block but the logo was so cool and I knew they were making Worms in there.
Your vast knowledge of programming and gaming history never ceases to amaze me. Keep up the good work, and you have a lifetime subscriber here by the way!
This was a great primer on the basics of coding. I learned a lot that makes sense to me as a layperson about the reasons why certain code is used instead of others, and when. I'd like a series more like this, about the history of coding and choice of code.
I never knew this about the Sega Saturn. Pretty cool to learn, Thank you for making this.
This was a very well made video. I enjoyed watching this from start to finish. It’s a real crying shame that this was never released outside of Japan. I brought a Sega Saturn soon after it was launched here in the U.K. and at that time I was leaning how to use a programming language on a PDA device. If I had this now, I’d probably be working with a major studio now as being able to control a Saturns hardware using only BASIC would have fuelled my curiosity even more. But I can understand why it was never released in Europe or America ☹️
I wish they discover basic languages prior to its launch date. No doubt this language would have saved the system.
Wow thank you so much for the screen shots of QuickBASIC, GW-BASIC, Borland TurboC, etc. I used to live in those screens and I haven't seen them since that era. A flood of memories came rushing back. What a delight. Thanks!!
Love your videos! Please don't ever stop making them!
Love your vids! Gotta stop every thing I'm doing and watch when I see new uploads I really really wish you had a team so you could upload more often.
Love your videos. Please keep them coming
That gave me QBasic flashbacks! It would have been fun as a child to play with Basic on a C64. It was annoying as a teenager learning programming in QB on a PC because it was what the high school taught.
*The funny thing about some BASIC dialects like GWBASIC, Qbasic, and QuickBASIC is that it had a language subroutine called "Call Absolute" where you could execute machine code from a string. BASIC was so slow that it forced you to use ASM for critical functions. You also had Peek and Poke to provide some machine level assistance.*
I love your channel and everything you do on it, something's I don't understand what you're talking about but I feel I can still follow along. I don't know much about technology, but I love to learn! So thank you for the great content
I remember typing in THOUSANDS of lines of code in BASIC and machine code just to play a pac man style game on my commodore vic-20 and c-64. Good times!! I learned a lot of BASIC in those days. I used to write a quick program that would poke random memory locations with random values. It was three or four lines of simple code and I would put it on display models at stores at watch them crash. Great video!!
I spent 1 year programming paint apps on a Sega with a BASIC ROM pack. I didn't have a tape drive and mum would turn it off in the morning... I guess it was the realisation of versions and they improve. Trained for mini computers and spent the next 30 years founding and administering networks.. Awesome video on an Aussie's computing history.. well done!
Everything about this video (and your videos in general) just blows my mind.
Thank you for always bring good information and nice videos for us.
Wow this was a really interesting video. I was really watching this video as if I was going to take note in class. Great stuff... Thank you for sharing this unique insight to the basic programming program never available outside of Japan. Thanks brotha!
Many thanks to you Lantus for all your wonderful and informative videos. We have been spoiled by you for what feels like an eternity
Oh my, AMOS. I bring it up on each job interview to this day as my first programming experience.
Man, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about Sega Saturn history, but I'd never heard of this before... Shows what I know! Great video!
Chris Lord Saturn was technically superior to PS1.
@@plawson8577 heh, well... That's a tough argument. Regardless, it's my preferred console and I don't think we ever got to see its full potential exploited.
Fun fact: until 2018 I worked in a company that makes automatic x-ray inspection machines on food&beverage production lines. Half of the software was still written in VB6, the core of which was a direct porting from QBASIC.
Loved this episode. Keep the good stuff coming!
I wish that more console manufacturers would go back to installing a programming language like BASIC or C onto their consoles, so that I could make games directly on the machine. That would be cool!
They would never give up control.
Ummm . . . U already program those consoles in c/c++ though? C is not something u install . . . Its a language that compiles into the hardware machine code
Oh man, this brings back some great memories! I remember messing around on my grandpa’s machine in the early 90s, an old IBM. My first language was VB5 and I’m glad it was, as I don’t know if young me would have pushed through learning BASIC without the visual aspect haha.
Hey G. Awesome vid. I would love more Saturn vids in the future. Thanks.
nowadays it's Nintendo's turn with Smile Basic on 3DS and Switch, and FUZE4 also on Switch.
Whats better Fuze4 or smile basic ?
I’ll look into these, thanks for the share.
Fascinating. I am learning about so many home development kits for the old consoles. Just started playing around with Famicom's Family Basic and Fuze 4 on the Switch.
I love your PC Big Box collection!! I'd love to see a video going through your collection some time!
The most interesting BASIC dialect I ever came across was called “GRASS”, or a port of it to Z-80-based machines called “ZGRASS”. It had graphics, multithreading, functions/subroutines as first class objects (actually the function/subroutine bodies were held in strings that could be evaluated/executed) and no line numbers. And this was in the 1970s!
Bitsavers has copies of some docs here bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/datamax/ and here bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/nuttingAssoc/zGrass/ .
Fantastic video as usual, thanks MVG!
My introduction to BASIC was getting smileBASIC on the 3ds in 2016. Someone made Super Mario Maker on it before Nintendo officially released the game on that platform. It was awesome with a whole rabbit hole to go down!
Spectrum was a big driver for BASIC in the UK, starting in 1979 although it was a very cut down version initially.
Awesome video MVG!
Love your content. Great stuff! Thanks for your work.
I spent a long time trying to find one of these when i was younger. I've always wanted to program the sega saturn!
Am enjoying the more technical videos, cheers!
Back in high school during the 1980s, I got introduced to BASIC via a Wang 2200. Wang Basic could do all kinds of cool stuff. In no time, I was coding games... lots of them that were quite popular in my high school since kids were playing them after school. I have fond memories of coding games in Wang Basic. It kept me out of trouble in high school and it gave me a continual love for computers.
SUper interesting. Thanks for sharing this!
Wow shame I didn't know about this. Would of loved this at the time. Thank you as always for your knowledge and wonderful channel
Great video! Love the Commodore content 👍🏻
I would definitely have buy a saturn if this stuff had been released in europe
Damn. I legitimately didn't know about this MVG!
This channel has honestly given me a whole new appreciation for older hardware.
Woohoo, love your Monday uploads.
Amazing video as always
Wonderful as always! Thank you
I just got my hands on a Rhea yesterday and MVG drops this vid. The stars have aligned!!!
Oh man the nostalgia is REAL. QBasic and nibbles were all the rage at school (gorillas too). I was renowned for a simple horse racing game I put together, which the other kids ripped off with their own versions. And Worms 1 - I played that loads, at least until Worms 2 came out with its huge set of customizable game settings.
Extremely informative and well made video!
Another great upload, thanks MVG is the MVP!
I was so into basic those years. It would've been so cool to be able to get one of those... Damn SEGA... I love-hate you!
Dammit man! Excellent topic for a video. This is interesting and I had no idea the Saturn did this
Nice one MVG, a good look into the origins of BASIC :)
The mentioned Amos Pro from Europress software is what got me into coding. I was hooked and I never let go. SW development is my job to this day. Because I was not part of any community of bedroom coders, going straight for the assembly was not an option for me, so thanks for everything Basic!
Lol, this video took me back to grammar school. You're right, we had no idea what basic really was but we were learning it everyday in computer lab.
I just started my journey into learning C++ and seeing history like this is so cool! You don't realize how fun programming is until you're in it! Thanks for the vid.
@@gary6576 I started learning on a website called learncpp.com. Their walkthroughs and instruction is easy to read and understand.
When you mentioned Acid Software my ears perked up because I used to make quite a few Amiga games on Blitz Basic back in the day. When they moved to the PC and changed their name to Blitz Inc, they (well, Mark Sibly, its creator) they came out with Blitz Basic then Blitz 3D and then several others including Blitzmax, which eventually was released as open source. Mark's current project is called Monkey-X which uses the same code to compile to multiple targets such as Android, XBox, Windows, Mac and many more.
Blitter boy! Love that you had that running there. Shout out for Chris Chadwick/Big10p on here.
if that program was released outside of japan theyd have more sales of it and theyd have more people making games for it too
Loving the more technical videos!
Making a 1mb game in 2020, mind is blown, great video thank you!
I'll just add, Casio had release a scientific programmable calculator that I was selling in a photographic store. This was the first instance of BASIC I knew of while in Sydney. I was working out of George St, ( Nock & Kirby ) and a completely different demographic of Engineers were snapping them up like IPhones... It was a year or two later I began programming the SEGA and understood what the engineers were seeking... Also several years later, while PC's were under 1M of RAM, the space reserved for ROM BASIC was left unused unless you used a COMPAQ. A years worth of scratching my head until the "aaaaaah".. One had to include the reserved BASIC space using a memory manager. That 32K was essential for cramming in memory resident apps (TSRs) and services we all take for granted in modern multitasking/threading operating environments.
Awesome content 🤘🏻
That is awesome! You should do a follow up showing some more of the games people made and maybe where to find them.
7:06 I like how you used period correct peripherals and desktop.
Seeing his OSSC solidified my purchase from a year and a half ago
This was great 👍, I’d love to see a stream of someone making something with it
6:47 I played this game on keyboard NES game console
this brings back some memories. I started out on a vic-20 (this would be my first owned computer, back in 79 i used a university computer)Moved to a C-64 then ran my BBS on a 128D. I moved to a 386 then to a 486/66. Next came a Intel Pentium. Then i waited to buy again. I then moved to AMD. Had a Athlon 64 x2 6000. Now i have a Ryzen 2700x. I've enjoyed computers a long time and through it all basic was the language i learned on. Great memories.
I remember being 8 years old and typing programs into my Vic20, thinking that was how the device was used. You got a book of little games, and the only way to use those games was to type in this stuff. I clearly remember the day I realized that you could make things occur in perpetuity with a goto loop. Wrote a program that made a ball bounce around the screen. I suppose it's a bigger deal for an 8-year-old, and would have been less of a revelation had I been taught it or if the instruction manual had been written in a way as to teach such concepts.
Awesome Content as usual
My first experience with BASIC was on the Apple II in elementary school... when we weren't playing Oregon Trail.
Amazing how high tech that stuff was in the 90’s!!
Wtf. How and why. The Saturn is the absolute last console I ever imagined BASIC being ported to. Extremely impressive software.
Very cool video! I had no idea that this existed.
This is so awesome! In 1999 I visited Japan and picked up a used copy of this ... but I never did try to figure it out. Maybe I'll give it a go ... the boxed copy I have has all the stuff (the cable, both discs). I even have a couple PCs old enough for Windows 95 ...
Not all BASICs used line numbers. Later versions of QBasic also allowed you to compile basic code projects in to binary files.
The flipside of speed is that people assume that C programs are always much faster than BASIC. Not so. If you do not write your C program properly it can be surprisingly slow. C makes you do everything, and you have to do so correctly. BASIC does a lot for you, which is nice. Sometimes that means that it does everything for you... slowly. ;)
i own the saturn gamebasic, i didnt realize it was so powerful!
The performance fo that Game BASIC Apps is awesome