BASIC-256 for Raspberry Pi

Tested on Raspberry Pi OS “Trixie” only

This build has been tested on Raspberry Pi OS “Trixie” (the Debian 13 based release) and nowhere else. Older Raspberry Pi OS releases, and other ARM64 distributions, may well work — nobody has tried, so we cannot promise it. If you run BASIC-256 on something else, tell us how it went; that is how this line gets shorter.

Speech needs one extra package

The SAY statement will not work out of the box. Trixie does not ship speech-dispatcher, which BASIC-256 speaks through, so it has to be installed once:

sudo apt install speech-dispatcher

Everything else — graphics, sound, files, the editor — works without any additional packages.

How to run each of them

The same two formats as on Linux. The AppImage needs only to be made executable:

chmod +x BASIC256-*.AppImage
./BASIC256-*.AppImage

and the tarball unpacks into a directory you can run from where it stands:

tar -xzf BASIC256-*.tar.gz
cd BASIC256-*/
./basic256

Why the download is so large

Both formats bundle every prerequisite — Qt 6 and everything under it — so that they run on any distribution without you installing anything first. That self-containment is the whole point of an AppImage, and it is also why the download is so much larger than BASIC-256 itself.

Debian has a package

A Debian package lists Qt and the other prerequisites as dependencies instead of carrying copies of them, so it downloads a small fraction of what the files above weigh, and apt handles updates and removal.

The project does not build one, but Debian does. 2.1.0-1 is in Debian testing and unstable now, and is in line to reach stable with the next Debian release. Debian 13 (trixie) still carries 2.0.99.10, from before the 2.1 line, and distributions built on Debian — Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS among them — take it from there on schedules of their own.

So apt install basic256 gives you whatever your own release carries, which is usually behind this page. The AppImage and the tarball remain the way to run the current version on any distribution.