Vintage BASIC and its source code are provided here free of charge via the BSD license. If you have any problems with or praise for Vintage BASIC, please let me know at lyle@vintage-basic.net. I could also use some help building binary packages for Linux and Mac.

For other great free programming tools and resources, visit thefreecountry.com.

User's Guide

Binary Versions

Microsoft Windows

The 32-bit version will work on 64-bit editions of Windows, so pick that one if you are not sure. The 64-bit version can be used to run programs that use more than 4GB of RAM. If you already have Vintage BASIC installed and are upgrading, uninstall the old version first.

Download and run the setup program, either 32- or 64-bit. It will install Vintage BASIC, give you a shortcut to open a command prompt, set up your PATH, and associate .bas files with Vintage BASIC. To work with Vintage BASIC, edit files with any text editor, such as Notepad, Atom, or VS Code. A good place to save them is in C:\Users\YourName. Then to run them, open up a Command Prompt, either by opening on the Vintage BASIC Prompt shortcut, or the Command Prompt shortcut. Then run your program either by typing vintbas yourprogram.bas, or just typing yourprogram.bas.

macOS (64-bit Intel)

Unzip it:

  unzip vintage-basic-1.0.3-macos-x64.zip
and add the vintage-basic-1.0.3/bin directory to your $PATH.

Generic Linux (Intel, 64-bit)

First untar it:

  tar xzf vintage-basic-1.0.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Then if you have root access, you can move the files to someplace global, e.g.:
  sudo cp -R vintage-basic-1.0.3-linux-x86_64/bin /usr/local/bin
  sudo cp -R vintage-basic-1.0.3-linux-x86_64/share /usr/local/share
or if you don't, install install them in your home directory:
  cp -R vintage-basic-1.0.3-linux-x86_64/bin ~/bin
  cp -R vintage-basic-1.0.3-linux-x86_64/share ~/share
If you install them in your home directory, make sure you put ~/bin in your $PATH. The binary is statically linked, and was compiled on Ubuntu 16.04.

Source Version

To compile the source requires the Haskell compiler GHC. It is recommended that you use the build tool Stack. If you use that, you will only need to install Stack - it will download and install the right version of the compiler for you.

You can download the source code tarball,  vintage-basic-1.0.3.tar.gz, from either vintage-basic.net or Hackage. Or, you can check the source out from Github with Git using the command:

  git clone https://github.com/lylek/vintage-basic

You should first unpack the tarball using a tool such as tar, 7-Zip or WinZip. Then open a shell/console in the vintage-basic-1.0.3 directory, and type:

  stack setup
  stack install