which basic rom is needed?

It's the P2305 cartridge, originally sold as "Module microsoft basic interpreter" [1], [2]. It's jointly copyrighted by Microsoft and Philips.

I have discussed this with Philips [3] a few years ago, and they were open to sharing it, but I could not find a contact at Microsoft.

[1] https://archive.org/details/20230420_20230420_1351

[2] https://www.retrocomputing.nl/p2000-basic-cartridge/

[3] https://github.com/philips-software

Edit: for reference, the startup screen shows

  PHILIPS CASSETTE BASIC
  Versie 1.1 NL

  14966 bytes vrij

It's likely that is is mostly just the standard Microsoft Basic with some modified I/O routines. Since Microsoft Basic is now under the MIT license you are free to modify the code, it may be relatively easy to re-implement the I/O routines and have a legal 'recreation' of the P2305 cartridge.

This particular machine is Z80 based and not 6502, so it's not trivial to port.

I've looked into building my own BASIC implementation and got quite far with that. Unfortunately, most games that were written back then rely on timing that is near impossible to recreate at that level. Emulating cycle exact Z80 behavior and then having the original BASIC routines on top of that is a far easier route.

Jointly copyright would have to make it moore complicated ....

Thanks!

Scott, you should do this :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120440

sigh

thanks!

i believe the markdown docs weren't 48y ago though /pedantic-scarcasm

genius. I love it. I'll take 14 of these immediately!

False positives suck, and it hurts when it happens.

The publisher account for Material Theme and Material Theme Icons (Equinusocio) was mistakenly flagged and has now been restored. In the interest of safety, we moved fast and we messed up. We removed these themes because they fired off multiple malware detection indicators inside Microsoft, and our investigation came to the wrong conclusion. We care deeply about the security of the VS Code ecosystem, and acted quickly to protect our users.

I understand that the "Equinusocio" extensions author's frustration and intense reaction, and we hear you. It's bad but sometimes things like this happen. We do our best - we're humans, and we hope to move on from this We will clarify our policy on obfuscated code and we will update our scanners and investigation process to reduce the likelihood of another event like this. These extensions are safe and have been restored for the VS Code community to enjoy.

LINKS: Material Theme https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso... Material Theme Icons https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso...

Again, we apologize that the author got caught up in the blast radius and we look forward to their future themes and extensions. We've corresponded with him to make these amends and thanked him for his patience.

Scott Hanselman and the Visual Studio Code Marketplace Team - @shanselman

you're the best Zach

Trying but not succeeding

same. :(

That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.

This is fantastic work, thanks. Hmm, what else... let's see... Xenix also really, really wants to be free! What a magnificent piece of forgotten computer history it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

That actually would be pretty wild.

I appreciate your hard work on open sourcing this!

If you’re taking requests I’d love to see MS-DOS 5.0 or at least QBasic next.

Yep, I need to get 3.3 and then do 5, 6

Ironically those words capture how those of us who bought a computer with DOS 4.00 felt about it. :D

But this is really great.

Legend. Keep being the Bob Ross of IT. Love what you do. Thank you.

True, I don't know when Qbasic (and Edit?) went into dos (according to Wikipedia they were on 5.0)

DOS 5 was when I really got into computers. I spent hours pouring through the included manual learning all the shell commands and learning how to write .BAT files. Then I discovered QBasic and it changed everything.

It's fantastic work you've done. As someone who works at a older software company (founded early 80s), I'm sad that there isn't a push internally for us to make our old software source available, or even just the binaries available!

What sort of tactics did you use to convince them? Maybe I can apply them to where I work too...

Windows 95 OSR5 - Open Source Release. Someday soon?