Locomotive BASIC - Contemporary Rivals

Contemporary Rivals

Locomotive BASIC compared to the Commodore 64's BASIC (Commodore BASIC), which had no dedicated commands for graphics or sound, allowed doing pretty much anything that was within the standard capabilities of the machine. This was not unimportant, as some other machines of the era using full graphics or sound was limited to assembler programmers. MSX, Spectrum and some others offered a similar, more or less complete command set for their sound and graphics capabilities. The only things going clearly beyond BASIC capabilities were the overscan modes used in games and demos, weird 27-color graphics modes, digital sound playback, and smooth scrolling.

Unlike Sinclair BASIC or Commodore 64 BASIC, which had various keyboard command shortcuts or specialized keys for choosing symbols or colors, Locomotive BASIC keywords were typed in full and the interpreter parsed, recognized and tokenised them. However, there were abbreviations like "?" for "PRINT" and a few shortcuts. Programs could be saved onto cassette tape or floppy disk and retrieved as binary or ASCII files.