MacOS Apple Silicon edition released

[Richard Russell]

I've created a native Apple Silicon (MacOS) build of BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0. It's fully functional, with the exception of assembly language code: although the assembler itself works correctly, Apple enforces the Hardened Runtime on this platform so the generated machine code cannot be run.

Unfortunately this impacts the Debugger and Profiler, both of which currently rely on assembly language code and therefore won't run in this build, sorry. I've also noticed that for some reason raytrace.bbc doesn't run correctly, which is a bit of a mystery that deserves investigation at some point.

Users should also bear in mind that since this is an ARM build the precision of floating-point numbers is poorer than it is with an x86 build (about 16 significant figures compared with 19) so if any of these issues matter you can use the x86 build under Rosetta 2 emulation (until Apple removes it).

This new edition can be downloaded from the usual place: https://www.bbcbasic.com/bbcsdl/