6502.org

Atari 2600 Flashback BASIC


Atari 2600 Flashback BASIC allows you to write video games in BASIC for the classic 1977 Atari 2600 console or the new Atari Flashback portable.

The new portable Atari console uses an emulated 6502 and TIA chip so modern game development kits and IDE's cannot be used to write games as they can for similar genre phone games and programming the legacy chipset in Assembly language is difficult because of the Atari 2600's unusual architecture of racing the beam to draw the display with no video RAM.

Flashback BASIC compiles a 6502 binary from your BASIC listing when you click Play, and the modern Flashback BASIC IDE is already installed on most Windows computers because it repurposes the Windows PowerShell ISE.

Flashback BASIC's 6502 runtime includes a soft blitter chip that surfaces a large virtual world and a camera object to BASIC, allowing for rapid creation of Nintendo style four way scrolling games with off-screen collision detection like KC Munchkin Monochrome Dreams.

There are a bunch of Flashback BASIC games to try out on the site, they will launch in Javatari the online Atari emulator when you click them or you can download the ROM's if you have a classic Atari 2600 console or the Atari Flashback Portable.

This looks suspiciously similar to Batari Basic.

This BASIC is more like Atari BASIC for the 400 and 800, it has display lists and a camera object that let you scroll the screen around at high frame rates.

It does have ASCII art graphics designers for drawing the virtual world and the sprites like Batari BASIC has, but it also has an old-school mode where you just write BASIC code that's more similar to Atari BASIC. Check out these three 10 line BASIC games:

http://relationalframework.com/Atari260 ... 9LINEBLITZ

There's also a code free programming mode using just the graphics designers and the built in sequencer tracker to create audio visual compositions, theres more information about it in the QuickStart Guide on the page.