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I'll be honest with you, I'm not going to be able to provide any first-hand experience with this one. I've programmed in BASIC in the past, but my programs weren't games. But, I've noticed many discussions of late crop up on Commodore forums relating to BASIC extension software, and I thought I should include one here.

Although BASIC 7.0 is vastly superior to BASIC 2.0, there are some things that could be improved upon to make it more appealing for game programmers (even though BASIC may not be the best platform for video games in the first place). But with GBASIC, Jon Mattson has attempted to address some of those shortcomings where sprite control is concerned.

GBASIC adds sixteen additional commands that you can use in your games. They are, BANG, DICE, ANIMATE, DEFAULT, FENCE, FILL, FRAME, HOME, LCLEAR, LINK, MCOPY, RECALL, SCORE, TRANS, QUIT, and MINE. You will need to add a line in your program to first BLOAD GBASIC into memory before you use it, but it will not interfere with your program stored in regular BASIC memory. Then, just SYS 4864 to activate it. But this is all outlined in the manual.

In the included manual, all of the new commands are explained in detail and have examples to help you along. On the disk I've included here, Jon has also provided three game demos he's created with GBASIC to help demonstrate it's abilities even further.

I've tried to teach myself Assembly a few times over the years, but I just can't seem to get my head around it. So, if I were to actually want to write my own game, BASIC would be the platform I'd try to do it in. Having these extra graphics control commands at my disposal seems like it would make the process easier. I suppose, it would also provide a few options in game design that might not be considered using standard BASIC 7.0.

If this is something of interest to you and you actually attempt to use GBASIC in a game, please let me know. I'd be thrilled to see GBASIC in action!

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