Home
Retro Rocket is an operating system powered by a custom dialect of BASIC. It supports many things that made old retro systems great, whilst also providing new facilities found on modern systems such as internet and networking, and access to modern hardware.
The Retro Rocket operating system is built of a collection of programs running a dialect of BASIC called Retro Rocket BASIC. This dialect is similar to BBC BASIC. At the top level, once the kernel has mounted the boot file system (usually a CD ROM or a SATA hard drive) it will spawn an instance of /programs/init which contains the statements needed to get any other file systems mounted, and to start rocketsh which accepts user input.
rocketsh allows running of arbitrary BASIC programs, and will search initially under the /programs directory for programs it can run directly.
All included programs are packaged with the operating system and can be found under the /programs directory
Programs in Retro Rocket are simialar in strucuture to a BBC BASIC program. Each line is optionally numbered, and each number must be greater than the line number before it. It is possible to have gaps in the numbering.
The program will execute moving from one line to the next, and each line must have at least one statement, and any parameters required for that statement (see the statements section in the sidebar).
Variables may be declared, of the four types listed. For each of these variables, they may remain local to the current program, function, or procedure, or be inherited by other programs ran by the current program.
For an example of programs in the operating system see the /os/programs directory.