macOS — Apple Silicon
RecommendedFor every Mac with an M-series chip (M1 and later). Not sure which you have? Apple menu → About This Mac names the chip.
Download
BASIC256-MacOS-AppleSilicon.zip
39.6 MB
← All downloads
Download
BASIC-256 for macOS
Two downloads, one for each kind of Mac. These are separate single-architecture builds rather than one universal binary, so take the one that matches your machine.
Choose your download
macOS — Intel
For Intel Macs. It also runs on an Apple Silicon Mac through Rosetta 2, which is worth knowing if the Apple Silicon build will not start on your system.
Download
BASIC256-MacOS-Intel.zip
41.7 MB
You need: macOS 15 (Sequoia) or newer, for both downloads.
macOS will call the app unidentified — and may call it damaged
The project has no Apple developer licence, so these builds can only be ad-hoc signed. That should be enough for macOS to describe BASIC-256 as coming from an “unidentified developer”, which you can allow through in the usual way.
If instead you get “basic256.app is damaged and can’t be opened”, macOS has flagged the download rather than the app. Strip the quarantine attribute:
xattr -cr /Applications/basic256.appOr apply the ad-hoc signature yourself, which achieves the same thing:
codesign --force --deep -s - /path/to/app.appA real Developer ID can be added to the build script later, which would open the path to notarization and a completely ordinary install. That needs a paid Apple developer account.
On an older Mac
The macOS 15 floor is not a decision anyone made about BASIC-256; it comes from Qt 6 and from the Homebrew libraries built into the app, so it cannot be lowered with a build setting. The app is only as portable as the least portable library inside it, and those come from whichever macOS the build ran on. GitHub’s oldest Intel runner image is macOS 15, which fixes the floor for the Intel build too.
Qt 5 was the last version to support macOS 10.13 and 10.14, so on High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and similar there are two options: the original Qt5-based BASIC-256 2.0.0.11 from SourceForge, or building from source against Qt 5.15 yourself.
Somewhere else to run it?
BASIC-256 runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, the Raspberry Pi and in a browser tab — the same language on all of them.