Atomis Development Blog

jdBasic on an Adafruit Fruit Jam, on video: the editor with the Commodore maze one-liner, a network clock with the weather, pinball, Control C, a shooter on a USB pad and a BBS browser, all from the RP2350B over DVI.

45 modules written in jdBasic: data frames, charts, web apps, PDF and Excel, exact money, IBAN checks, QR GiroCodes, curve fitting. 32,000 lines, 5357 assertions, green interpreted and compiled, checked against the Python packages they stand in for.

The jdBasic interpreter on an Adafruit Fruit Jam: a monitor on the DVI socket, a USB keyboard, an editor, a flash store, a network clock, pinball, a shooter and a BBS browser, all on the RP2350B. The same port runs on a PicoCalc and an ESP32-S3.

An operating system written in jdBasic, running with nothing underneath it. Screen driver, keyboard, a full-screen editor, a RAM disk, and a JIT that emits x86-64 into memory and calls it. Then a game you load off the disk, compile to 3006 bytes and play.

A minute of live-coding a game that never stops running. F6 parks the jdBasic VM mid-frame, Claude reaches into it over MCP, writes 100 into a global and swaps a function body in from disk. Score, wave and every enemy on screen stay exactly where they were.

The points sheet in the garden gets wet every summer, so this year it is 651 lines of jdBasic instead. Live standings straight out of one SQL query, points configurable per game so the finale can still turn everything around, and a certificate PDF written byte by byte without a PDF library.

Five days after jdVOID shipped it did not get more content, it got tools. A card designer in the browser, a bench where two cards duel under the real rules, a sweep of one card against all the others, and replays that measure a balance change against matches that were actually played.

My son and I wanted a game to play against each other, so we built one in a weekend. jdVOID is a two-player arena duel written entirely in jdBasic: one rules module shared by server and client, the client running as WebAssembly in a phone browser, and every sprite drawn by array math at startup.

jdBasic grew a native Windows forms toolbox: real Win32 controls, menus, toolbars, MDI windows and a visual form designer in VS Code. Every form compiles to a standalone .exe. Classic Visual Basic energy, 2026 runtime.

jdeRG is live: a German e-invoicing SaaS (XRechnung/ZUGFeRD viewer, validator and creator with Stripe billing) written entirely in jdBasic. The whole production process runs in about 19 MB of RAM, less than an empty Express hello world.

Tetris with a twist: overload one side and the whole deck capsizes 90 degrees, sliding your cargo onto the new floor. Built in jdBasic, compiled native, with free self-contained downloads for Mac and Windows.

Four local LLM-driven NPCs with persistent memory, affinity, story arcs and rumour-spread, all running on a single GPU. jdBasic + Qwen3-14B + Godot 4.6, with the whole storyline emerging from a few JSON files.

What happens when you combine a rainy Sunday, jdBasic, and Claude? You get a functional 6502 emulator and an Apple II skeleton - built from scratch in just four hours.

jdBasic just went "Pro." From APL-style vector mathematics and 3D tensors to native Win32 API hijacking and recursive background tasks.

I applied my developer mindset to the gamification of reading. Instead of optimizing code, I optimized my reading stats by publishing the first 3 satirical "Gap Books" on Amazon KDP (with 2 more arriving in April).

A productive start to 2026! I overhauled the SoundSystem with a "Strudel-like" sequencer, added Binary I/O, and implemented Hardware support (Joystick/Serial).

I just unlocked Fluent Interfaces in my custom interpreter. By implementing `RETURN THIS` and modifying the statement parser, jdBasic now supports elegant method chaining.

I stress-tested the jdBasic audio engine by coding Michael Jackson's Billie Jean from scratch. No samples (mostly), just C++ synthesis and code. Watch the video and see the code!

A fully functional spreadsheet application written in jdBasic using ImGui tables, formula evaluation, and file I/O. Click the title to read more...

From retro console to modern tools: jdBasic now supports windowing, widgets, and complex layouts with Dear ImGui integration. Click the title...