GoKawiilPublished on: July 4, 2026
Just a little over a month ago, I was announcing EndBASIC 0.13 with a brand new compiler and VM implementation. 0.13 was the result of six months of work and I had to “flush those out” to clear my mind. At the end of the day, however, 0.13 “just” improved performance. Yes, the wins were massive, but they didn’t do much to make EndBASIC any cooler for you.
Today’s 0.14 is a different beast. This shiny release is a collection of new features all over the place with the special addition of basic sound support. Specifically because of the latter, 0.14 marks a major milestone because it unlocks the last frontier towards a possible 1.0. There are many more things I wanted to include in this release—and one feature I had to eventually give up on due to its difficulty—but at some point one has to stop and get the code out. So here we are!
There is a lot to talk about, but before we get to that, here are the must-visit links:
Graphics, more graphics!
The primary thing I wanted to do after the large performance wins brought by 0.13 was to offer extra graphics primitives to let the extra performance shine. We now have commands to draw triangles ( GFX_TRI and GFX_TRIF ), polygons ( GFX_POLY and GFX_POLYF ), and to bucket-fill an area ( GFX_FILL ).
As part of this work, I “productionized” one of the very first demos I wrote for EndBASIC—a little program that renders a number of circles and makes them bounce within a container box—to demonstrate the new graphics primitives. This demo is now bundled within EndBASIC’s DEMOS drive and accessible via the gallery. You can witness it below, and beware that this is a real-time running program, not a video! You can interact with it right here, in the browser.
Retro VGA, anyone?
Back when I added support for LCD displays and the NetBSD-backed console for the EndBOX, I had to implement a bitmap font rendering “engine” for framebuffers. While this was cool, it also introduced inconsistencies with the web and SDL consoles, which relied on the IBM Plex Mono TTF font. This font looked nice and was inspired by old PC fonts, but it was still too… “modern”.
So, to unify the look and feel of all consoles, and to make EndBASIC look more “retro”, I yanked all TTF support and instead switched to using my own font rendering facilities. As part of this, I added the standard IBM VGA 8x16 font to the fonts collection and made it the default across all consoles.
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