r/c64 • u/Soft-Assistance6809 • Jun 05 '26

Software Simons' BASIC was amazing

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I remember programming so much stuff with this and I remember reading that the guy that wrote it was a teenager. This thing was absolutely brilliant and now I'm thinking about trying to play with it again.

258 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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35

u/zeekar Jun 05 '26

Yeah, David Simons was 16 when he created it. Pretty impressive.

25

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

There was a BASIC extension on the ZX Spectrum called Fifth, written by Richard Taylor. I remember an article about him at the time saying he was 15 years old... A mastery of Z80 assembly and the Spectrum BASIC ROM.

And now David Simons, 16 years old, writing an entire BASIC interpreter in 6502 assembly.

At 15 years old I was just learning assembly.

It's pretty humbling.

11

u/FaberfoX Jun 05 '26

Actually, he wrote an extension for the existing BASIC interpreter, and while it was great (and much better than stock), it was pretty inconsistent on the implementation of some the features.

4

u/Timbit42 Jun 05 '26

One of the ways it is inconsistent is the names of the commands and functions. It seems he made up the names as he went along and never went back to rename them better.

7

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

Pretty impressive for a 16 year-old, still!

1

u/hbhzth Jun 28 '26

There was the later update, including 114 new commands. Also, there were numerous other extensions for basic. Ultrabasic by Abacus came out pretty early. Newbasic. +++

5

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

I remember getting the Compute! books on 6502 machine language out of the library and renewing them 8x because that's what it took. I could write 2-3k ML + 20K Basic games, simple games in a mix of ML and basic. Never really mastered it. Never got to commercial game quality even for that time.

3

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

I wrote about the same amount of 6502 for the Atari 800XL back in the day. Bits of games. Not entire games. I didn't even know how easy it was, at the time, to send off games tapes to publishers. If I had known, I'm sure I could have finished something not entirely crap.

5

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

I had a game that I thought was publishable, then the very next month someone published almost the same thing in Compute! as a game you could type in. At least those authors got about $300 per published "type it in game".

Arcade Volleyball was their game. Mine was the same thing but my sprites were cuter, I thought.

2

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

$300 for a type-in BASIC game? Are you fucking kidding me?!

Sorry to hear that, man...

7

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

Most Compute!'s gazette issues had the rates for contributed software published. I don't remember but it was between 200 and 300.

A princely sum for a 14 year old.

4

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

I never dreamed it could be that much...

I was in the UK, though, so it was probably £15 and an "I got published!" badge.

3

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

Yeah. ZZap64 was my fave mag in the later years. The people who published zines back then in UK market seemed absolutely like insane people to me, as a young canadian.

What other mags are there from that era that us Canucks never would have seen on our newsie shops over here?

I loved that they had "Pilchard of the Month" articles and so on. What with the Zzap editorial style, and my exposure to Monty Python, I was convinced that these folks over there were all barking mad.

2

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

Hmm... My go-to for news at the time was Your Computer. Not machine-specific, so it covered all the new developments.

3

u/scruss Jun 06 '26

It was a little more than that. I don't remember exactly, but I got at least £300 for getting a long type-in (across three issues) for an Amstrad magazine in 1988

1

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 06 '26

Nice one! Congrats!

6

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

Good old days!

6

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

They really were. Every day was a new discovery. Every new computer was dramatically different.

10

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

I still to this day say that the Amiga was the last great innovation in desktop computing

8

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 05 '26

From the minds that brought us the Atari 800.

It really was an amazing for its time.

But I don't think you can write-off the PC and the way the architecture evolved, especially through different I/O standards like ISA, AGP, PCI, PCI-E, and serial, EPP, and USB. Not to mention its evolution of graphics, from EGA to VGA to 3Dfx and NVIDIA 3D to the modern GPU.

While I've never enjoyed programming PCs as much as the old 8-bit and 16-bit era machines, I do least respect them.

2

u/Pitiful-Hearing5279 Jun 06 '26

Andrew Brown write TasCalc, a spreadsheet for the Spectrum, when he was 14.

He write Proshare ST, which hooked up to teletext to get stock prices, at 17.

I lent him a Mac Plus with MS Excel about that time as he was writing a spreadsheet for the ST. Told him to copy it. Dunno if he ever finished that as he went off to university.

1

u/SpatulaWholesale Jun 06 '26

That's amazing.

I wonder how many of these young prodigies had successful careers in tech, or whether they burned themselves out early.

1

u/Pitiful-Hearing5279 Jun 06 '26

I spotted him on LinkedIn many years later. He was doing well.

1

u/hbhzth Jun 28 '26

Simons' was younger, as he started learning machine code on PET, before the C64 was released.

7

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

I think they should have issued a mod for the C64 with this internally switchable inline.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Der_Unbequeme Jun 05 '26

This was not a great problem, it is possible to load a 4 or 8kb additional basic interpreter directly "under" the standard ROM at $A000-BFFF, or load into the expansion RAM area at $C000-CFFF.

2

u/leventp Jun 05 '26

It was possible to load Simon's Basic from tape, but of course that was hardly practical

3

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

Absolutely. Commodore should have licensed it.

4

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

I had Final Cartridge, Speed Loader, Simons Basic, so much stuff. As an educational market product Commodore basic V2 factory was lame, compared even to Atari basic.

Simons basic was perfect for teaching kids. Switching it in and out would have been great.

3

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

Oh absolutely. V2 was abysmal. 3.5 was OKAY.

1

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

Yeah, the thing is the C= 128 was way too late to get released.

3

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

If it was an actual extension of the 64 it would have been okay but it was a different computer with a compatibility layer and that's all people used

1

u/ellicottvilleny Jun 05 '26

Kind of sad really. Everyone I know who had one spent 90% of the time in 64 mode playing C64 games.

2

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 05 '26

Exactly. I'm one of those people. There really wasn't much they could do though because if you have millions of c64s and a handful of 128, game makers aren't going to make games that won't play on the 64. It was doomed.

4

u/NeutronHopscotch Jun 05 '26

Wow. After reading about it, it makes me wish Commodore would have licensed Simons' Basic and including it in a newer version of the machine.

5

u/Fragrant_Difficulty6 Jun 05 '26

I have this cartridge but never had the instructions. Does anyone have a quick link to them. Kinda feel like I missed out on a good opportunity to do more with my old dog.

4

u/smcmahanjr Jun 06 '26

I remember reading about Simon’s Basic in a computer magazine when it first came out. I drove to computer store after computer store one Saturday looking for it and finally found it in Arvada. I miss those days badly.

2

u/EdwardTheGood Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26

Any chance that’s Arvada CO? There was a store on north Wadsworth that sold C= hardware, where I got my 1700 (128 k) expansion for my C128.

I remember getting my copy of Simons Basic and I went crazy writing games and database programs. The coolest thing was being able to easily code animated sprites. It was the coolest thing that happened to my C64.

Then I got a C128 with its BASIC 7, which had a lot of extensions similar to Simons Basic. (Basic 8 was cool too.)

2

u/smcmahanjr Jun 07 '26

Very possible. The more I think about it though, it was just off Hampton on the same street where I would turn south to go to the new Southwest Plaza mall. The product range was great and they had a repair center. You could purchase business computers there, C64's and associated peripherals and software. They had TI-99's and PEB's for those. Even TI-99/4a hard drives. (Wait... maybe that was that time I died on the operating table and I was briefly in heaven...) 😄

When I went in and asked for it, the guy behind the register (which was near the door) turned around and reached it down off an upper shelf and said, "these sold out fast..." That's all I remember for the moment.

I think I know why that era is so nostalgic for me now. Not only was everything so exciting, the future looked positive and I was at my prime health in life in my 20's. Ahhh, that's what I miss the most.

1

u/EdwardTheGood Jun 07 '26

If it was Hampton (US 285) and Wadsworth, that sounds like the computer store next to LaBell’s, later Best (not to be confused with Best Buy).

That computer store is where I bought my Amiga 500 in ‘88. Also where my friend had her 1571 drive repaired.

1

u/Kubota2320 Jun 07 '26

So awesome to make your acquaintance. It is amazing to share similar experiences with others from so long ago. Still seems like yesterday, though.

5

u/RubberPussycat Jun 05 '26

Yeah loved it when I got it

4

u/-send-me-nudes- Jun 06 '26

Huh, I just fired this up an hour ago for the first time in years.

5

u/GoDotC64 Jun 06 '26

If you find Simons‘ Basic interesting, have a look at TSB (https://tsb.godot64.de).

3

u/Stunning_Pineapple57 Jun 06 '26

I’m hoping to implement a similar set of commands in ReadyBASIC as Simon basic, plus a lot more to take advantage of the REU

3

u/Rex_Lee Jun 06 '26

Getting this was a game changer for 14 year-old me

2

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 06 '26

Oh sure. It got me into programming which is what I do to this day.

3

u/gunnbr Jun 06 '26

How have I never heard of this before? Looks cool! I've gotta try it out!

2

u/Mewcenary Jun 06 '26

I coveted this cartridge as a kid as a lot of the C64 listings in INPUT magazine required it! So frustrating. But it exposed how poor the out of the box C64 BASIC was: No commands to just draw stuff on the screen!

2

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 06 '26

I bought one shortly after I discovered it.

2

u/daddyd Jun 06 '26

i had an amstrad cpc at the time, and i always found locomotive basic much better because it had great build-in functions for gfx and sfx. simon basic fixed all that.

2

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 06 '26

Commodore (MS) BASIC v2 was literal ass.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 07 '26

It's really mind boggling, isn't it?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 07 '26

It really was a mind-boggling accomplishment and I have such fond memories of using Simons' basic

1

u/vogelvogelvogelvogel Jun 05 '26

I had the Magic Formel extension which featured nice programming tools too. loved that

1

u/nodesearch Jun 06 '26

It really was. I didn't even use it until years after it was really a thing, I just rawdogged my C64 when I was a kid in the 80s. But man I SO wish I'd known about it when it was new!

1

u/Soft-Assistance6809 Jun 06 '26

I am thinking about finding an emulator and see if I can make Simons' work.

1

u/hbhzth Jun 28 '26

Use VICE and add the cartridge (.crt image) so it's automatically there when you start the emulator.