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Ladies and gentlemen, the retro computing gods have bestowed upon us another gem (and hence a second BASIC article) - Vision BASIC! This isn't your grandad's BASIC, no siree. This BASIC has been pumping iron, downing protein shakes and reading self-help books for over 20 years. If BASIC was a caterpillar, Vision BASIC is the butterfly on steroids it morphed into!

Born out of a two-decade-long journey through the wilderness of bits, bytes and nibbles, it is here to bring your programming dreams to life. Speed? You bet your high byte! Need more? Whip out your machine language skills and sprinkle them right in alongside your BASIC commands. This glorious piece of software doesn't flinch.

Sprites, sounds, and graphics? Check, check, and check! ☑️

This BASIC implementation from Dennis Osborn – known through his YT Channel – minimizes your need to poke around like a mad scientist in a haystack of registers. It even lets you create your own commands or functions, because why not? You can save these user defined commands and functions into separate files, and add them to your programs whenever you wish. Talk about flexibility!

But the cherry on top has to be the old-school C64 editor feel. We all know and love it, and Vision BASIC brings it back in style. Yes, you'll need to tweak your existing programs to get them working here, but that's a small price to pay for the speed and power at your fingertips.

The catch? You'll need at least 256K of extra RAM. But once you've crafted your program, you can run it on any stock C64 machine without an issue.

Got a vision? (There are special doctors for that!)