A free, cross-platform emulator for the GW-BASIC family of interpreters.

PC-BASIC is a free, cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), PCjr Cartridge Basic and Tandy 1000 GW-BASIC. It interprets these BASIC dialects with a high degree of accuracy, aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility. PC-BASIC emulates the most common video and audio hardware on which these BASICs used to run. PC-BASIC runs ASCII, bytecode and protected .BAS files. It implements floating-point arithmetic in the Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) and can therefore read and write binary data files created by GW-BASIC.

PC-BASIC is free and open source software released under the GPL version 3.

See also the PC-BASIC home page.

This quick start guide covers installation and elementary use of PC-BASIC. For more information, please refer to the full PC-BASIC documentation which covers usage, command-line options and a full GW-BASIC language reference. This documentation is also included with the current PC-BASIC release.

If you find bugs, please report them on the SourceForge discussion page. It would be most helpful if you could include a short bit of BASIC code that triggers the bug.

Packaged distributions are currently available for Windows XP and above and Mac OSX 10.6 and above. For Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora Linux an install script is provided in the source distribution.

They can be downloaded from one of the following locations:

• PC-BASIC releases on GitHub
• PC-BASIC releases on SourceForge

On Windows:

• run the installer
• to start, click PC-BASIC in your Start menu

On OS X:

• mount the disk image
• move PC-BASIC.app to your Applications folder
• to start, double click the PC-BASIC app

On Linux:

• untar the archive
• run sudo ./install.sh
• to start, click PC-BASIC in your Applications menu or run pcbasic on the command line.

If the options above are not applicable or you prefer to install from source, please consult SOURCE.md for instructions.

Double-click on pcbasic or run pcbasic on the command line to start in interactive mode with no programs.
A few selected command-line options:
pcbasic PROGRAM.BAS runs PROGRAM.BAS directly.
pcbasic -h shows all available command line options.

If you're running PC-BASIC from a GUI, you can set the required options in the configuration file instead. The configuration file is a file named PCBASIC.INI, stored in the following location:

For example, you could include the following line in PCBASIC.INI to emulate IBM PCjr Cartridge Basic instead of GW-BASIC 3.23:

preset=pcjr  

For a full list of options, run pcbasic -h or consult the PC-BASIC usage documentation included with PC-BASIC and available online.

PC-BASIC starts in interactive mode, where you can execute BASIC statements directly. A few essential statements:
SYSTEM exits PC-BASIC.
LOAD "PROGRAM" loads PROGRAM.BAS but does not start it.
RUN starts the currently loaded program.
RUN "PROGRAM" loads and starts PROGRAM.BAS.

For more information, please consult the comprehensive PC-BASIC language reference included with PC-BASIC and available online.

BASIC program downloads and further links can be found on the following pages.

• KindlyRat's geocities page
• PeatSoft GW-BASIC documentation
• Neil C. Obremski's gw-basic.com
• Leon Peyre has a nice collection of GW-BASIC programs including the original IBM PC-DOS 1.1 samples and the (in)famous DONKEY.BAS
• Phillip Bigelow's scientific programs written in BASIC
• Gary Peek's BASIC source code archive
• S.A. Moore's Classic BASIC Games
• Joseph Sixpack's Last Book of GW-BASIC has lots of GW-BASIC office and utility programs, including the PC-CALC spreadsheet.
• cd.textfiles.com has tons of old shareware, among which some good GW-BASIC games. Click on the image to enter, like in the olden days. Have fun digging.
• Brooks deForest's collection of amazing Tandy BASIC games.
• TVDog's Archive has lots of Tandy 1000 information and BASIC programs.