Thanks to Mark Arnold, who stripped down SCELBAL to the barest fundamental elements, I now have BASIC running on a 4K SCELBI 8H for the first time, ever. Mark, who created SCELBAL back in the mid 70’s calls his new stripped down version of BASIC, “tiny SCELBAL”. He removed all non-essential features, including support for floating point math in order to make it fit into 4K. There are only about 350 bytes for program space left in a 4K SCELBI 8H, but that is enough for some very simple games. I have ported a version of HILO from Ahl’s “BASIC COMPUTER GAMES” book, and made it fit. I’ll be making a video, posting source and object files very soon. I’ll also post the source of HILO and describe some space saving tricks.

Mark says SCELBI considered doing this back in the 70’s, but determined the result would be too limited to be useful for most practical purposes.