10 Facts About Beta BASIC

Beta BASIC is a BASIC interpreter for the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum microcomputer, written by Dr Andy Wright in 1983 and sold by his one-man software house BetaSoft.

Beta BASIC completely replaced Sinclair BASIC, which as common for the time was the OS providing a command line interface .

Beta BASIC was a standalone interpreter in its own right, bypassing the Spectrum ROM, which it used as a library.

Beta BASIC drove the Spectrum's 256x192 pixel display directly, eliminating the restrictions of the ROM's 32-column text display.

Beta BASIC offered scalable screen fonts, with a special soft font which was only 4 pixels wide but still legible.

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Beta BASIC named procedures did not need to be called with the PROC keyword like in BBC BASIC and thus became new language keywords, allowing the language to be extended in itself.

However, BBC Beta BASIC was considerably quicker - the fastest Beta BASIC interpreter of the time.

Beta BASIC was not especially fast, though it included faster replacements for particularly slow ROM routines, such as the circle and arc drawing code.

Beta BASIC provided a complete BASIC interpreter which drew extensively upon Beta BASIC but was differently structured, as this was a language in its own right and had no Sinclair ROM to call upon or work around.

SAM BASIC was largely compatible with Beta BASIC and operated in a very similar manner, except for areas where the SAM hardware was significantly different, such as the SAM's screen and extended memory.