What started as a modest sound update has turned into something considerably more ambitious. RGC-BASIC, the retro-inspired BASIC language developed by Chris Garrett over at Retro Game Coders, has hit version 2.0, and the jump from 1.11 is substantial enough that calling it a point release would undersell it.
The catalyst, by Garrett’s own account, was stumbling across a website playing a 100 KB Amiga tracker module. That rabbit hole ended with a rewritten graphics pipeline and a new streaming music system. Version 2.0 now supports MOD, XM, S3M, IT, OGG, and MP3 formats through a dedicated set of BASIC commands, running concurrently with one-shot sound effects so you can have music and audio happening simultaneously without them stepping on each other. A set of query functions exposes enough metadata to build a scrolling “now playing” display, a VU meter, or a progress bar directly in BASIC with no external state management needed.
The graphics overhaul is also significant. Where version 1.x offered a text mode and a C64-style 16-colour bitmap mode, 2.0 adds three new screen modes: a 320×200 full RGBA mode, a 320×200 256-entry palette-indexed mode with support for classic palette-cycling effects like fire and water animations, and a 640×400 RGBA canvas for higher-resolution work. The palette system has been expanded from 16 entries to 256, with live rotation available via a single command so you can re-tint every drawn pixel on the next frame without any redraw cost.
Off-screen RGBA surfaces with alpha compositing round out the graphics work, along with per-zone and per-scanline scrolling that opens the door to parallax effects and the kind of sine-wave text scrollers that defined the Amiga demo scene. A reworked DRAWTEXT command now handles foreground and background colour in one call rather than requiring a two-pass approach.
The whole thing runs in the browser through the existing online IDE, no installation required. The source is open and available on GitHub, and Garrett is already asking the community what should land next.
Source: Retro Game Coders
