Online Retro Programming IDE: BBC CC65, C64 BASIC and Vic 20 Added!

Web based retro development environment news!

• BBC Micro fans can now code in C using an online CC65 compiler!
• Vic 20 lovers can code in C, also using CC65 right in your web browser!
• Edit and run C64 C and BASIC in a modern editor along with browser-based Vice64!

Yep, I finally got my retro programming online IDE working well enough to share it with you properly.

Online Retro IDE Development: a Bit of Background

There’s a lot here to take in if you haven’t already been following the rollercoaster ride of my web-based IDE. Perhaps I should have broken it up into separate announcements, but here we are!

For a while I have been working on a custom version of 8bitworkshop. That’s a programming tool for C and Assembly programmers, with emulators built right in to the web interface.

I love it, and after working with the code I have a huge respect for Steven Hugg who created it.

For my tutorials, however, a couple of things were missing or not ideal, plus as you might have heard me say before, I want to code a game or demo for every retro system I own, so I set about creating my own “fork” of it:

1. I really wanted Vic 20 in there as it was my first computer.
2. Next I very much wanted BBC Micro, it was a massive part of the UK micro computer experience.
3. Lastly, as I have an ongoing C64 BASIC series running, it made sense to have a BASIC tokenizer built in, and while I was at it why not do away with requiring line numbers and add the ability to use labels: instead!

Ambitious, sure, and it had a lot of hidden rakes waiting for me to step on.

Supported Platforms & Emulators So Far

• Commodore 64 (C64)
• Commodore VIC-20
• Atari 8-bit computers and consoles
• Apple II
• BBC Micro
• ZX Spectrum
• Amstrad CPC
• NES
• Sega Master System
• ColecoVision
• Z-Machine (Interactive fiction engine)

(And more!)

How it Works

As an online development environment, the text editor part is extremely important, and it uses CodeMirror which is a very mature and open source syntax-highlighting text editor found in many places on the web without us realising. I will be expanding on the editing UI more once all my beloved target platforms are in place and working well.

Next we need great emulators for the old computers and games consoles supported. Z80,6809, and 6502 hardware is in emulated in the browser via open source JavaScript projects such as Vice, the “Chips” project, and JSBeeb. Unlike the original 8bitworkshop, my C64 emulation uses the Kernal from Vice as I found his emulation not quite perfect for some of my demos.

The programming tools also run in your browser, which is for me the best part, and are compiled from C to WebAssembly via Emscripten. It would have been easier in some ways to use the original compilers running on my server and just serve up the resulting binaries but this way nothing private is transferred and I get to offload processing to your computer instead of mine!

Your Source Code

Tutorial code and demos are all available a click away in the menu system, plus you can access your own code right there too at the bottom of the menu.

Rather than store any of your files on my server, the IDE sets up a virtual file system in your local browser storage so it is completely private.

The downside of this of course is browsers often clear out local storage, or might not give long term permission, so make sure you keep a copy of your important work either by using the download options or by using copy and paste!

8bitworkshop does have a Github integration but the majority of the people I teach do not have Github accounts or if they do they do not trust Firebase which is what his integration relies upon. With that in mind I removed that feature.

I did consider having an optional “cloud” (server) storage option but I was discouraged by people who advised it might be seen as a barrier to use or an invasion of privacy, so let me know what you think about that.

Future Plans

It might sound weird but I would actually love as many of my improvements (which I know is subjective) to make it back into the original 8bitworkshop as Steven is much better at this kind of thing than I am.

That said, I am sure he has too much on his plate, and as my project diverges from his it would likely only serve as possible options for him to consider rather than something he can back-port.

So here are the things I would love to add, some soon, some much later:

• Commodore PET – an obvious addition as it is a system I am fond of and I have a working Commodore PET browser-based emulator already.
• Tandy CoCo and Dragon 32 – Not much is out there for the Dragon, but I figure if I can get Coco running that should be a step towards getting Dragon?
• CP/M – Not a hardware platform but an operating system that a couple of the existing platforms are capable of running, but still interesting as a target in its own right. Alternatively, perhaps IMSAI/Altair as hardware and OS platform. Or even RC2014!
• 16-bits – Browser and base computer capabilities are now good enough that Amiga and Atari ST are not out of the question. Of course, we have the issue of rights holders being more litigious in this space, but open firmware and OS replacements do exist …
• Atom and Electron – Having BBC Micro satisfies a lot of the Acorn itch, but for completeness it would be lovely to have the other siblings.
• Online TRSE compiler? – Wouldn’t it be cool if we could code and compile TRSE online?
• Lots of Editor UI quality of life improvements – Yes, the goal was to make it easy to follow my tutorials, but I want this to be a place people are happy to code in rather than code in another editor and paste text, so the more I can give a great editing experience the better.
• More tools – I am thinking disk managers/editors, sprite editor, character editor, that kind of thing.

FAQs

• Will your existing emulators be going away such as BBC, PET, and C64? No, too many tutorials and forum posts point to those, I don’t want to break anything that already is working for folks, and this is aimed at programming primarily so it does have a slightly different goal too.
• Where should I send bug reports or feature requests? This is tricky because the project has so many upstream dependencies that are not entirely integrated as-is, so probably me and then I will figure out if/when something is my fault.
• How can we support your efforts? First of all, I am building on the work of others like Steven Hugg, the compiler tool teams, and the developers of the emulators, I just brought it together in a package that works. Second, letting people know about it is always the best free and easy option. Beyond that, I don’t know but I am open to ideas. I have imposter syndrome so I rely on you for feedback, especially when there are so many things happening in the world!

What’s Next?

I am looking forward to folks kicking the tires on this as it stands, then I will set about adding more tutorials, features, and hopefully more platforms!

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