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ZX BASIC Documentation

External Resources

External Resources

Section titled “External Resources”

ZX BASIC is an open compiler toolkit. Other people contribute to it creating alternative IDEs, libraries, tools and utilities. Feel free to browse them, as you might find them useful for your work!

IDEs

Section titled “IDEs”

IDE are integrated source (or bigger projects) editor, sometimes with an integrated debugger and many other tools (e.g. Borland Delphi or Visual Studio are well known IDEs). Some people have developed IDEs usable for ZX BASIC.

Tommy Gun

Section titled “Tommy Gun”

A free IDE created by Tony Thompson. This powerful tool is designed to create generic 8-bit and 16-bit projects, and can be set up to be used with ZX Basic. Have a look at the TommyGun files page.

To integrate ZX Basic with Tommy Gun, please follow this tutorial.

SpectNet IDE

Section titled “SpectNet IDE”

A free and impressive IDE created by Istvan Novak. This is a very powerful IDE very advanced and fully documented. Proceed to the SpectNet IDE page to download the tool and get further information. The documentation of it is very well maintained.

Graphics editors

Section titled “Graphics editors”

  • SevenUP, a ZX Spectrum graphics editor for FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows.

  • Multipaint, a Java-based graphics editor that allows you to draw pictures with the color limitations of some typical screen formats from 8-bit computer platforms, like ZX Spectrum, C64 and Plus/4 high-resolution and multicolor, MSX 1 and Amstrad CPC0.

  • [ZX-Paintbrush] (https://zx-modules.de/), a Windows graphics editor specifically for ZX-Spectrum screen formats, including multicolor.

Utilities

Section titled “Utilities”

Other generic utilities not above are:

Sublime Text Syntax Highlighting

Section titled “Sublime Text Syntax Highlighting”

Sublime Text is a modern macOS/Linux/Windows code editor which now has ZX BASIC syntax highlighter support.

VIM Syntax Coloring

Section titled “VIM Syntax Coloring”

If you use VIM (I do) you can now tell vim to highlight your ZX BASIC .bas listings. Programandala has a nice Spectrum and retro programming site. He also created a VIM Syntax File for ZX BASIC. I find this very useful.

##Engines There are several external engines that can be used within compiler to achieve effects like multicolour display, or sprite handling.