Saturn gamebasic (compiler?)

[Daniel Eriksson]

I know gamebasic for Saturn has been mentioned before. However, there is little info about it. Anyone who knows if it had a compiler? Think about how easy it would be to create Saturn games that everyone can play if there was a saturn basic compiler. If the game was made in and compile with something like that, how fast would it run? Compiled basic programs on pc (which im very familiar with

) runs much faster. How would that be compared to C? The reason I ask this is that I found a basic-compiler for the GBA (http://www.simforth.com/default.htm) . Nice idea.

 

[AntiPasta]

well, basic compilers tend to produce really crappy code I'm afraid. I still recall getting like a 20x (no kidding) speedup when I just translated, without optimizing, just translating like a machine, my Qbasic spherical texture mapping program to ASM :smash

But still, a Basic compiler for the Saturn would encourage development, I guess.

 

[antime]

IIRC someone (TakaIsSilly?) said in the last thread on the subject that the programs are input into the Saturn in source form, which suggests that it is either interpreted or compiled into an intermediate form (the idea being that the intermediate language is faster to interpret). Either way, you won't get maximum performance out of the machine, but it needn't be terrible either - most of the stuff will be handled in the environment's libraries.

Generally speaking, the speed of Basic is entirely dependent on the environment used. QBasic is interpreted and thus pretty slow, QuickBasic is a real compiler and produces rather efficient code. Visual Basics up to version 5 compiled into an intermediate form, version 6 produced native code and VB.NET goes back to the intermediate form.

 

[AntiPasta]

Originally posted by antime@Jul 2, 2003 @ 05:51 PM

QBasic is interpreted and thus pretty slow, QuickBasic is a real compiler and produces rather efficient code. Visual Basics up to version 5 compiled into an intermediate form, version 6 produced native code and VB.NET goes back to the intermediate form.

well, in fact when I mentioned Qbasic I meant compiled Quickbasic 7.1... in my experience it produced quite crappy stuff, heck it didn't know of the 32 bit GPRs, made real mode programs only and IIRC didn't even use the FPU

 

[Daniel Eriksson]

I have been programming a lot in Quickbasic, and while not being fast, its perfect as a beginners language. You can get some of my old Qb programs if you want