6502 BBC BASIC license?

The thing is, I suspect Richard would be quite pleased with the idea of putting his developments of the original BBC BASIC onto another platform.

We also considered this (and also already wrote some mails back and forth before I asked here in the forum ;-)). The thing is, porting the 6502 version of BASIC2 or BASIC4 would have been – apart from debilitating legal questions – some considerably low hanging fruit.

A little bit of a problem is that right now I’m doing this stuff alone (and I’m not really a good 6502 coder). We have very bright and competent people in the m65 team, but there’s much work to do, and I’m having a hard time convincing people that we have to have something better than old crappy MS BASIC 1.0 (which is still at the base of Commodore BASIC10) if we really want to get people excited for experimenting with a new platform. So the 6502 code would have been the easiest path for me ;-)

But I’ll seriously consider it, Richard Russell’s version(s) of BBC BASIC look extremely tempting.

Again, many thanks for your help :)

and I’m having a hard time convincing people that we have to have something better than old crappy MS BASIC 1.0

Sounds like what you need isn’t an elegant BASIC, but an elegant BASIC program. Something that blows MS BASIC out of the water and leaves its smouldering carcass hanging from a tree.

Uh… It doesn’t have functions? Whoa, it can’t even hold a candle to Sinclair BASIC!

Have you tried asking this over on the StarDot forum? There’s lots of expert 6502 programmers there.

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/

Although I still wonder who would complain if you just went ahead and used it!

“most of the other rights, particularly all the rights to do with desktop computers, went to Castle/Pace.”

Being an ex Director of RISC OS Ltd I kept close tabs on Acorn’s IPR deals at the time. I recall being told by people very close to the deals that Pace only acquired 1. Rights to use, develop and sub licence and 2. It was limited to 32bit software/hardware.
Hopefully now ROD has acquired the IPR of Castle they will be able to see what rights/ownership Castle had. I know Andrew and Richard of ROD said they have a mountain of paperwork to read. Having read Acorn contracts myself it is almost impossible to understand. Unfortunately all the deals I’m aware of that Acorn did at the time where of reportedly Rights to use, develop and limited if any sub licencing. No ‘sale’ of ownership of rights was ever mentioned, hence my posting that they ended up being owned to MSDW Holdings

I recall being told by people very close to the deals that Pace only acquired

I have read various people venting on various forums, and I think the truth of the matter is that nobody really had much of a clue as to who actually owned what and could do what with what.
If you think about it, the “unfortunate era” (that I thankfully missed) would not have happened if the documentation was clear and concise and somebody could point to a legal piece of paper and say “you’re wrong” or “you’re right”. So I am not sure I’d put too much trust in what people “very close to the deals” said, because it seems to me that different people thought different things about the same set of agreements.

Let’s hope ROD can sort out the mess so this can be put to bed once and for all. (though, note, any such bed-putting probably won’t count for the legacy 6502 era stuff)

Having read Acorn contracts myself it is almost impossible to understand.

That’s what happens when lawyers get involved. Things that ought to be understandable to normal people (it is possible to make contracts that regular people can understand, you probably signed one with your employer…) become a verbose confusing pile of strange terms that nobody can understand.

hence my posting that they ended up being owned to MSDW Holdings

Hoisting the Jolly Roger and plonking a budgie on my shoulder for a moment… one could argue that it’ll be okay to port the 6502 code for a non-commercial use because… well… if nobody knows who owns all that stuff these days, who’s going to actually complain? Needs to be the legal rights holder (or somebody appointed by them to do it on their behalf). That’s probably why it’s been kicking around JGH’s site for years, and the real geniune sources have turned up on Github. No value in ancient code and no idea who it technically belongs to these days so… just treat it with respect.

Okay, IANAL and the budgie has flown away so back to the scheduled programming…

probably won’t count for the legacy 6502 era stuff

Depends whether you can consider 65Host (and its attendant legacy stuff) should be included in the passed-over RISC OS content!

is called KERNAL, not Kernel.

It was originally called “kernel” at Commodore. The guy that actually wrote the code misspelled it as “kernal” and, well, that spelling just stuck and we’re stuck with it now.

A bit like “Referer” in HTTP requests.

whether you can consider 65Host

I wonder if anybody has had a rummage in the sources to see if it is feasible to make a 32 bit version from it?

Just a shame it’s the RISC OS 2 era one (1.00) and not the RISC OS 3 era one (1.20) – there are quite a number of differences (8K larger in binary terms).

A 32 bit 65Host would be feasible, but it’s really just of historical interest. There are far, far, more accurate emulators out there.

On a tangent BBC BASIC Z80 is open source.
https://github.com/davidgiven/cpmish/tree/master/third_party/bbcbasic
That is an open blueprint for an 8bit version .. just for the wrong CPU.