What is BasinC?

BasinC is a Sinclair Spectrum BASIC development environment. It was designed to aid in the creation of BASIC programs using methods that maintain the feel of programming a ZX Spectrum whilst taking advantage of today's powerful PC hardware.

BasinC's editor resembles that of the Spectrum 128K, with the addition of keyword help, on-the-fly syntax checking, and development tools such as a UDG editor, variable viewer/editor and Z80 assembler. BasinC also provides advanced debugging features: conditional breakpoints, watches, and full program flow control both at the CPU instruction level, and at the line/statement level.

BasinC is not a simple interpreter; it is built on an accurate Z80 emulation core, which the editor hooks into to override the behaviour of the emulated Spectrum's ROM. This means that BasinC supports the use of machine code routines, such as those found in magazines and on popular Spectrum forums, which can enhance your programs greatly. BasinC also emulates the original ZX Printer which can be sent to your PC Printer in order to generate hard copies of listings and screen dumps.

Program development in BasinC is easier and faster than it was on the original ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum BASIC manual - an excellent introduction not only to the language, but to programming in general - is included here for beginners, and has been modified where necessary to take account of BasinC's features.

The future

BasinC is in almost constant development. A system as complex as BasinC inevitably, when only one person is working on it, develops bugs which will be addressed as they are found. As there is no specific development plan, the feature list is pretty open-ended and new features are added as they are requested or dreamt up.