General • Re: BBC BASIC on the Raspberry Pi Pico?

But under RISC OS, BBC Basic can do both from at least RISC OS 3.5 (and probably before).

It supports both paletted and RGB modes, yes, but (to the best of my knowledge) you have to set the colour in different ways, which is really silly. Specifically in paletted modes you set the graphics colour like this:
whereas in RGB modes you set the graphics colour like this:
Even worse, whilst the first (paletted) method uses the VDU stream, so for example you could put that entire program into a string, the second (RGB) method cannot - as far as I know - be represented as a VDU stream. RISC OS went off the rails here!

The key difference in BBC BASIC for Windows and BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 is that you always set the colour the same way, whether it's a hardware-paletted mode or an RGB mode, and it can always be represented as a VDU stream.

If BBC BASIC on the Pico or PicoCalc could ever support RGB colours, I would want it to use the BB4W/BBCSDL method, not the RISC OS method!

Statistics: Posted by RichardRussell — Fri May 22, 2026 9:11 pm

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