MS BASIC for the RC2014 6502 CPU Part 1

The RC2014 ships with Nascom's version of MS BASIC for the Z80.

I have ported Lee Davison's Enhanced BASIC to the 6502 CPU board. As described in my previous article, Enhanced BASIC is really quite fast. A 4MHz 6502 CPU running a prime number benchmark with Enhanced BASIC is almost as fast as a 14.7456MHz Z80 running MS BASIC.

There are several versions of MS BASIC for the 6502 dating from the original Apple 1.

Michael Steil wrote an excellent archeological analysis of MS BASIC in this article. The key point of the article is that you are now able to build an exact replica of MS BASIC for several ancient 6502-based microcomputers.

The complete source code is hosted on GitHub.

The challenge though is that you need to use the cc65 cross-compiler to build the binaries from source.

Apparently, the latest versions of cc65 don't work. Folks have recommended using version 2.13.3. This can be found in several places including this GitHub repository.

If you are a Windows user, Grant Searle has a prebuilt set of binaries here. However, if you are a Mac user, you will have to build cc65-2.13.3 yourself.

Here is how I did it:

• Decompress the cc65 source package to cc65-2.13.3 (you can use another name and substitute accordingly in the following steps)
• Build the cc65 cross-compiler
• cd cc65-2-13.3
• cp make/gcc.mak makefile
• make
• make install

In my next article, I'll talk about how to actually configure and build  MS BASIC.