How many of you have wanted to enter the Crap Games Compo but don’t want to struggle with an emulator (or worse, an actual Spectrum!) to get a game written? All that faffing around, saving .TAP files and trying to remember some keywords, and not being able to do all the things we take for granted these days, like cut’n’paste or use a mousewheel to scroll around. The Speccy’s great and all, but using its BASIC editor is a little bit of a chore.
Ladies and gentlemen, your suffering is over. Paul Dunn’s BASin solves every problem you ever had. (Well, all the ones related to coding in Speccy BASIC anyway.) I mean, look at this…
You get two windows to work with. One shows the Spectrum screen, so that you can test the game without running a separate emulator. The other window is the BASIC editor. It works spookily well, taking all the best elements of regular modern text editing and integrating them with the look and feel of the Speccy’s editor (including the beeps!). It’s a strange and welcome feeling to be able to use search and replace functions on a BASIC program.
It’s not all in the look and feel, either. There are a bunch of features here to help you program more efficiently. There’s a variable monitor, for example…
…which comes in very handy when trying to figure out how exactly you’re breaking things. And when you need to put some good old UDGs together, there’s even an editor for that to save you from the terror of squared paper and DATA statements. (It doesn’t just do UDGs, either – it can do larger graphics too, if you’re planning on doing something exceptionally clever.)
And if you don’t remember much (or any) BASIC, the fantastically thorough help file comes with the complete Spectrum BASIC manual. Basically (arf) this is the best utility I’ve seen since Realspec, and if you’ve even the slightest urge to try coding something up, I highly recommend it. In fact, you know what? I’m going to make up an award right now, just so I can give it to BASin. Just a second… There. Now, you’re going to have to wait until my scanner arrives before you can see it, but BASin’s just been awarded the YS3 Award For Excellence. Hurrah!
It is really rather wonderful. And best of all for tightwad spods, it works under WINE.
Although I haven’t actually tried to do anything useful with it yet, so I reserve the right to alter that conclusion at a later date, after it destroys two hours’ work on A “Hilarious” Attempt to Code a Game Completely Beyond the Capabilities of the Speccy in BASIC or something.
right, so where can i find this piece of software, without dunn telling me to ‘bugger off’?
The latest version mirrored on World of Spectrum is release 13a. (13b was on Dunny’s site, but I don’t know what he’s doing with it now – I’ll see if I can find out though…)