10x Faster Than C64 BASIC? Hare Basic

Optimizing the level generator, lines 120-140: Use bit 7 of RND instead of bit 0 to remove the need for multiplication, and use variables instead of literals: 120 e=128:d=32:fori=1024to1823:rnd:a=aande:a=a+d:pokei,a:next 130 140 => 53 jiffies, 2.4x faster than original Or use bits 15 and 7 of RND, variables instead of literals, and finally do GO6 (16-bit poke) to poke two pieces of 'doom' at once: 120 e=32896:d=8224:forz=1024to1823step2:rnd:a=aande:a=a+d:go6:next 130 140 => 29 jiffies, 4.4x faster :) Thanks for the coverage, Robin! These shows are always great fun to watch :)

You made a fully functioning game just to "test out Hare BASIC". Gotta admire that as well. Can't wait to try it out at the first opportunity I get.

I love that Hare BASIC coexists so nicely with C64 basic, seems like it is almost being a library of sorts

Oh - that's cool - I keep banging on about how amazing the BBC Basic is because it has a built-in inline assembler. Never even considered you could have a BASIC interpreter with another hi-performance basic interpreter built-in. Very, very cool idea.

Nothing wrong with liking your own game. I think it's a testament to how fun it is that you do like it. Don't know how many times I would play Space Invaders back in the day and just spend a lot of time at the start just whittling away at those blocks near the bottom. Used to drive my brother crazy.. "Why are you doing that??!! Shoot the aliens!" Now I have a whole game dedicated to that!! Thanks.

So basically, it has the same limitations as one of those popular micro-compilers from back in the days but replaces the compilation with an interpreter. Interesting approach.

Hare Basic looks pretty interesting and definitely fast for basic. I was kind of hoping to see “10 Print” make an appearance. 😀 Your game prototype looks fun. I tend to like those “falling things create pressure” kind of games. At least up until they are way too fast to play.

I've been following an excellent 6502 tutorial on board-b's channel and it's given me some confidence to starting watching your wonderful channel again. I'm usually completely lost when I watch your videos but I have a morsel of confidence now so here I am again.

The documentation really captures the retro feel - it just needs to be photocopied a few times to really get that look heh.

They fact that you can mix Hare Basic and regular basic is awesome. The no white space thing is much less so.

"If you don't think it's fun, that's fine. Go do something else!" And here I was believing the answer to life the universe and everything was 42.

What a neat idea - the concept reminds me somewhat of "RISC" versus "CISC" - we now have a kind of "RISBAS", if you see what I mean. I especially like the way it "dovetails" with conventional C64 Basic. I'm definitely going to investigate ...

You should have called your game "DoomScrolling"

Really amazing project! It reignites my desire to tinker around in basic again. Thank you for the quick rundown of features and demos. Descending Doom seems like a really cool base to flesh out a wonderful addition to C64 shareware and a great example of Hare Basic's capabilities.

"It's Tetris - but with a military touch" - The New York Times

Nice to see that BASIC, and it's concept, isn't dead. I thought from the name, that you had actually found something useful from the Haresoft company of back in the day. Glad I didn't miss out on it then.

No white space is not a bad habit, it is efficient. Especially if you learned BASIC on something with around 4K of memory where every white space takes up precious space.

I'd really like to see a Hare Basic version of Centipede. If no sprites were used, your game makes it seem easier than I would have thought.

Whenever I see a new 8-Bit Show and Tell video appear it makes me feel happy!

Reminds me of "back in the day" when I hacked up "quick print" routines from the original basic ML routines, though this is obviously a full-features product rather than hacking. Even that made a massive improvement (mostly as I had no error checking at all and different calls for integer and string). Yet another opportunity to be famous wasted (lol). Well done to Aleski and thankyou for sharing this with us. I'll have to check it out.