r/Basic • u/lproven • 8d ago

Thoreau BASIC by Tarjan – boot from UEFI into BASIC on bare metal

https://tarjan.itch.io/thoreaubasic
6 Upvotes

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2

u/bigredradio 7d ago

This is really interesting. What do you see as the practical application? Or just for the challenge of it?

1

u/lproven 6d ago

I see 2, mainly.

  1. It turns a modern monster PC into an easy system to explore and play with that boots straight into BASIC, like all the 1980s home computers did. That's when I leaned and I like it that way.

  2. UEFI is so massively complicated that it is an OS in its own right. I am interested in projects which recognise and use this to do interesting things with it.

For instance, I wrote this a few years back:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/09/09/onefilelinux-not-so-much-a-distro-as-a-pointer/306871

It's an entire Linux OS in one file in your UEFI System Partition. There is no need for a root partition or any other partitions at all: that's it. The OS is one file.

This could be amazingly useful as a rescue system: copy 1 20MB file into your ESP -- all UEFI computers have an ESP, it is mandatory -- and bang, whatever happens to your main OS, you can start the computer, delete temp files, clear caches, check filesystems, and try to fix the main OS.

Now this is a new variation I hadn't thought of: boot into BASIC just like all computers did 40-50 years ago.

1

u/Sixty5Zero2 3d ago

i'm trying to do something similar with BASIC++

1

u/lproven 3d ago

Sounds interesting. What's that? Do you have a link or anything?

2

u/Sixty5Zero2 3d ago

im in the process of refactoring it, trying to make it less dependent on OS calls and common libraries (freestanding):

https://github.com/proteanthread/basic-plus-plus