UEFI Basic

A simple BASIC language intepreter that runs on UEFI. Feel free to submit a pull request.

Requirements

The gcc compiler for x86_64 mingw platform (x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc, this can be found in the Debian package mingw-w64).

Compilation

Running make will produce an EFI file and a bootable ISO for the x86_64 architechture.

Running make qemu will run the QEMU emulator. It is required for bios64.bin to be in the same directory as the makefile, which can be downloaded here.

Screenshots

Usage

Programs need to be typed in with line numbers. To run use the run command, and to create a new program use the new command. list prints out the current program.

Credits

Credit to gnu-efi, TinyBasicPlus, and EDK2.

Licenses for each can be found in the LICENSE.* files.

Downloads

UEFI bootable ISO files can be found on the releases page.

Language info

The version of BASIC used in this project is a C version of TinyBASIC, a highly portable BASIC interpreter which only depends on a couple external functions for IO. A list of all the commands and functions can be located here. This version of BASIC included runs on desktop operating systems, UEFI, and Arduino. The BASIC interpreter is based on an interpreter for the Motorola 68000, but the code is messy with a lot of goto statements. I switched to the TinyBASIC interpreter from uBASIC because the TinyBASIC didn't require so many external library functions.

All variables are a single letter and are shorts (signed integers, and 16-bit on most implementations). Memory ddresses for the PEEK and POKE commands are also shorts. The addresses are indexes in a C array. Negative addresses can be used as they will simply be converted to their 2's complement, accessing higher memory than the positive addresses. POKE takes an argument of a 8-bit integer and PEEK returns an 8-bit integer. PEEK and POKE can both be used to access memory for purposes such as strings, arrays, etc, which are not natively supported in the BASIC implementation.

Roadmap

Done

• Create a working UEFI Basic
• Create initial release
• Add example screenshots
• New release (with new Basic version)

Not Done

• Add file saving
• Remove commented out lines
• Test out desktop mode
• Running the efi file sometimes gives a load error. I can run it and rerun it, but after resetting the VM, I get "Command Error Status: Load error". The md5sum seems to be different before starting the VM and after closing it. Creating a backup file seems to fix it. The error occurs only after a hard reset or shutdown.