PC-BASIC - 15.08

PC-BASIC is a free, cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), PCjr Cartridge Basic and Tandy 1000 GWBASIC. It interprets these BASIC dialects with a high degree of accuracy, aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility. PC-BASIC emulates the most common video and audio hardware on which these BASICs used to run. PC-BASIC runs plain-text, tokenised and protected .BAS files. It implements floating-point arithmetic in the Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) and can therefore read and write binary data files created by GW-BASIC. The screenshot shows DONKEY.BAS (one of the BASICA samples distributed with early versions of IBM PC DOS) running on PC-BASIC.

This major new release brings many new features and fixes, among which: - emulation of the `CAS1:` cassette tape device through `.WAV` audio files and `.CAS` bitdumps - support for IBM PC and BASICODE tapes - improved support for serial connections, including support for DSR/DTR lines - threaded audio subsystem, allowing for more precise timings and cleaner code - refactored device subsystem with cleaner, more maintainable code - more tests, a more flexible testing framework and easier setup of new tests - standardised Python package organisation - much improved, more easily navigable online and offline documentation