Category:Locomotive Basic: Difference between revisions

'''Locomotive BASIC''' wasis a variant of BASIC that was built into the ROM of the [[wp:Amstrad CPC|Amstrad CPC]] series of 8-bit home computers introduced in 1984. CPCs were a popular, slightly more expensive alternative to the Commodore C64/C128 and were not just suited for games but also office work because of their high resolution displays and [[wp:CP/M|CP/M]] support. They came with a built-in cassette deck (CPC 464 and 664) or 3" disk drive (CPC 6128) as storage devices and a "green screen" or color monitor which also housed the power supply. Sales were particularly strong in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain. Today, Locomotive BASIC can be used via CPC emulators such as [http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacpc/ JavaCPC]—which are also perfectly legal because Amstrad has given their permission for distributing CPC ROM images with emulators.

Locomotive BASIC served as a sort of primitive operating system for the CPC and was also used (together with AMSDOS RSX commands<ref>http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/RSX</ref>) for disk and tape operations. As on many other 8-bit machines of the era, it was also common to extend BASIC programs by reading<tt>READ</tt>-ing Z80 machine code from "<tt>DATA"</tt> statements, "<tt>[[wp:PEEK and POKE|POKE"]]</tt>-ing them to RAM, and then "<tt>CALL"</tt>-ing the resulting code, an approach especially popular with type-in games from old CPC magazines.