{"id":242,"date":"2026-10-16T20:02:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T20:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/?p=242"},"modified":"2026-10-16T20:02:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T20:02:07","slug":"project-update-october-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/?p=242","title":{"rendered":"Project Update October 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The current points of focus in the project are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Coming up with a text editor you can type into a Tiny BASIC interpreter by hand. Something around 200 to 300 lines of code, and allows, say, a couple of pages of text of free RAM, for the user to do serious work within. Perhaps something in excess of 2K free RAM.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The current hardware that the project imagines it will target are:\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The <strong>Arduino mega<\/strong>, with its 8K total SRAM. This board loads <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/slviajero\/tinybasic\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/github.com\/slviajero\/tinybasic\">Stefan&#8217;s BASIC<\/a> with ~6.5K free RAM. With a rough yardstick of 80&#215;25 characters being ~ 2K, the text editor must come in at around ~ 4.5K. This configuration is &#8216;headless&#8217;, in the sense that you must communicate with the <strong>mega<\/strong> via serial monitor. Please see <a href=\"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/?p=93\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"93\">this post<\/a> for a text editor in BASIC that may serve as inspiration for a modern clone or recreation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The <a href=\"https:\/\/lilygo.cc\/products\/fabgl-vga32\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/lilygo.cc\/products\/fabgl-vga32\">LILYGO TTGO VGA32<\/a>, with configurations of Stefan&#8217;s BASIC ranging from 32K user program memory space to an upper limit of 64K. With VGA output capabilities, this is a good &#8220;all-in-one&#8221; solution to acquiring BASIC. PS2 keyboard required.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A hypothetical implementation of BASIC that the project calls &#8216;idiomatic BASIC&#8217;, which is designed to facilitate a maximum portability of the above mentioned text editor to other, perhaps unintended flavours of BASIC. This may largely look like the approach taken by David Ahl in <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/More_BASIC_Computer_Games\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/More_BASIC_Computer_Games\">BASIC Computer Games<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The current points of focus in the project are:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[20,17,27],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-housekeeping","tag-basic","tag-retrocomputing","tag-stefans-basic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/20210304_155422-1-730x548-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/permacomputer.solarpunk.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}