BBC BASIC for the Raspberry Pi Pico

[Richard Russell]

Eric Olson and 'Memotech Bill' have developed a version of BBC BASIC (based on mine) for the Raspberry Pi Pico, it's a Work In Progress but is substantially working and can run all the example programs supplied with the Console Mode editions.  There's a GitHub repository here.

Despite the Pico being a $5 microcontroller with only 264K of RAM it suits this application very well, not least because of BBC BASIC's simple memory management (which was of course originally designed for a machine with only as little as 16K of RAM, the BBC Micro).  Something like 240K of memory is available for the BASIC program, variables, stack and libraries.

[John Spikowski]

That is amazing Richard. I gave up on the Pico as just being an embedded controller toy.

I may give this a try on my ESP32 which should triple the amount of user memory available. Micro Python runs great on it. It would be great to see if we can get BBC BASIC running on the ESP32-PICO. Any chance there is interest here making it work?